Abstract
Through more than a century of history, from H. G. Wells, the dystopian classics like Fritz Lang’s 1927 film Metropolis and J. G. Ballard’s 1975 novel High Rise, to the iconic cyberpunk films of Blade Runner (1982) or The Matrix (1999), the image of the radically verticalized cityscape has so dominated science fiction as to be almost a cliché. In such a context, this essay reflects on how vertical imaginaries in urban science fiction intersect with the politics and contestations of the fast-verticalising cities around the world.
This essay is an adapted version of a longer essay that was first published in the journal City (2016), volume 20, issue 3, pp. 389–406. The author would like to thank Lucy Hewitt whose excellent research between 2010 and 2012 laid key foundations for this essay.
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Graham, S. (2021). Verticalities of the Imagination: Futurity and the Contemporary in Urban Science Fiction. In: Beattie, M., Kakalis, C., Ozga-Lawn, M. (eds) Mountains and Megastructures. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-7110-7_15
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-7110-7_15
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