Techno cities revolve around the promise of new products and technologies that will change everyday life. Bubble cities rely on the potential of engineering for their very existence, assuming the possibility of scaling up construction technologies by orders of magnitude; but they also raise the specter of fragility. First settlements in tunnels and domes are as vulnerable as isolated Massachusetts towns in King Philip’s War or as tenuous as a mining town in avalanche country. Overgrown supercities depend on so many interacting systems that a single breakdown can trigger multiple failures and disaster.
BUBBLES IN THE SKY
“Pa had sent me out to get an extra pail of air.” In 1951, Fritz Leiber opened the classic short story “A Pail of Air” with an irresistible hook that inverts the bucolic image of Jack and Jill. Leiber imagines Earth adrift from the sun and so cold that the atmosphere has frozen out into a layered snow of carbon dioxide, nitrogen, and oxygen. A solitary family huddles in an empty city inside a nest built from rugs and blankets, thawing buckets of frozen air to survive. The planet, in effect, has become a great space station with the conservation of breathable air as the purpose of rudimentary engineering. The fact that the family turns out not to be sole survivors doesn’t undercut the impact of imagining air itself as a commodity that requires elaborate care.
Leiber’s story directs our attention away from pipes and wires to the most fundamental technological imperative of spaceships and space stations—the value of breathable air. In a throwaway line, Linda Nagata in “Nahiku West” (2012) touches on the essence of orbiting cities as machines for breathing. She posits a space station city that orbits the sun just inside the orbit of Venus and notes that “most of the celestial cities restrict the height and weight of residents to minimize the consumption of volatiles” (544). The prime engineering directive for cities in empty space, on airless moons, and on planets with unbreathable atmosphere is to encapsulate living space in a way that absolutely delimits in-here from out-there. No terrestrial walled city—not Rome or Constantinople, Toledo or Tallinn—has been as completely separated from its surroundings as Babylon 5 or Nahiku West.
Pell Station in C. J. Cherryh’s Hugo-winning novel Downbelow Station (1981) is a city comparable to Babylon 5. It is big, tightly packed, most definitely bounded, full of diverse races, social classes, and districts, and several generations old. Like other gigantic space stations, it is literally machine as city. It is also the major crossroads of the space lanes. It is the first station outward from Earth where major interstellar trading routes converge. Forty merchant ships are docked when the story opens. With access to in-system mines and to agriculture and mining on the planet that it orbits, Pell is also the key source of supply for a rogue fleet of warships that ostensibly are part of Earth forces but which operate as pirates. Here is Admiral Mazian speaking to his fleet captains: “Look at the map, old friends, look at it again. Here … here is a world. Pell. And does a power survive without it. What is Earth … but that? You have your choice here: follow what may be Company’s orders, or we hold here, gather resources, take action” (242).
Pell is city-size. Cherryh does not specify its population, but two other stations recently destroyed in the ongoing Union-Company war had twenty-five thousand to thirty thousand each. When Pell has to absorb six thousand refugees, it needs to relocate only a small portion of its population. When the refugees come in, there are one thousand units available in guest housing and two thousand more available by emergency conversion of space. Another five hundred units will be available in 180 days through further space conversion. At three persons per unit, Pell could likely absorb more than ten thousand newcomers with social disruption but no serious stress on its basic systems; indeed, it absorbs nine thousand more refugees during the few weeks of the story. At that same time, Mazian’s fleet is requiring new IDS for all the refugees. So far, says a fleet official, “we’ve identified and carded 14,947 individuals as of this morning” (423). The process will take two more weeks, implying that fifteen thousand is a minority. Seventy years later the population of Pell Station and its dependent planet has grown to roughly half a million, according to a follow-on novel, Regenesis, so we can assume a city-station population of one hundred thousand or more at the time of Downbelow Station.
As the population implies, Pell is physically extensive and complex enough that few residents know all its sections and corridors. They need street signs and color-coded corridors. Captain Signy Mallory, the fleet officer who has taken temporary control, orders all the signage removed. Station official Damon Konstantin complains,
“The station is too confusing—even residents could get lost … without our color keys …”
“So in my ship, Mr. Konstantin, we don’t mark corridors for intruders.”
“We have children on this station. Without the colors.”
“They can learn,” she said. “And the signs all come off.” (255–57)
Pell station has the multiple economic functions of a city. All its sectors have retailing: There are “a score of bars and entertainment concessions along green dock and the niner access which had once thrived in the traffic of merchanters … a line of sleepovers and vid theaters and lounges and restaurants and one anomalous chapel completing the row” (433). When levels 5–9 on orange and yellow sectors are displaced, the result is “dockside shops, homes, four thousand people crowded elsewhere” (30). Two distinct working classes maintain Pell City. One of the characters gets assigned work on a salvage line, along with other human workers, taking apart worn equipment by hand and sorting parts for reuse. A social notch below, filling the role of the noncitizen proletariat, are nonhuman hisa from “downbelow” on Pell planet. They live in the maintenance tunnels and do the essential scut work that keeps the station alive.
Pell has persisted for at least two centuries with increasing independence. Seven generations of the Konstantin family have served—dominated—Pell administration as something like hereditary bureaucrats: “The Konstantins had built Pell; were scientists and miners, builders and holders” (50), and they are a powerful voice in the elected governing council. The station is theoretically subject to the control of the Company from distant Earth but effectively operates independently, a status that is confirmed at the end of the wartime crisis that drives the narrative. Pell had been evolving its own way, neither Union nor Company, with its own political values that its leaders try desperately to preserve. At the end of the book, Pell has ridden out a crisis that has nearly cracked it open to space when “a whole dock breached, air rushing out the umbilicals, pressure dropped … troopers who had been on the deck, dead and drifting…. The dock was void” (401–2). As the stationcity avoids being ripped apart like earlier victims of the war, the newly formed Merchanters Alliance claims Pell as neutral territory, effectively making it an independent city state, and people begin to talk about “citizens of Pell.”1
WILL WORK FOR AIR
New Klondike, as its name implies, is a boom town on the Martian prospecting frontier. The treasure this time is alien fossils, not gold, but New Klondike shares many of the traits of instant towns on the North American or Australian mining frontier. Featured in Robert Sawyer’s Red Planet Blues (2013), New Klondike is jerry-built and already shabby: “The fused-regolith streets were cracked, buildings—and not just the ones in the old shantytown—were in disrepair, and the seedy bars and brothels were full of thugs and con artists, the destitute and the dejected” (9). Because the location is Mars rather than the Yukon, however, there is one major difference: it lies under a transparent dome that is four miles across and twenty meters high at its center. Public utilities include “air-processing facilities” as well as water and sewage treatment plants. And air is the most precious of the utilities. The private investigator who narrates the story offers a tongue-in-cheek take on noir fiction: “On the way to the place, I passed several panhandlers, one of whom had a sign that said, ‘Will work for air.’ The cops didn’t kick