Strange zones: Science fiction, fantasy and the posthuman city

Debra Benita Shaw

City, 2013, vol. 17, issue 6, 778-791

Abstract: Science fiction has long been concerned with imagining cities of the future but contemporary 'posturban' cities are 'strange zones' where the future has already happened. How we live in these spaces is a challenge to accepted ideas about what it means to be human and, indeed, what it means to have a future. How then can critical urban theory engage with the new definitions of 'life' emerging from the biological sciences and their effects in urban space? Drawing on theories of posthumanism, this paper explores the contemporary city through a reading of China Miéville's fantasy novel Perdido Street Station, which exposes the imaginative potential of monsters and magic for developing new and resistant metropolitan mythologies.

Date: 2013
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DOI: 10.1080/13604813.2013.849132

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