Babel Clash

Following on…

Batman and Superman each have a city that they’re linked to, of course. It’s a traditional Superhero trope, to be a defender of such-and-such-opolis (1). Superman’s power scale makes him a defender of the earth, though - he can zip off into out space to fight the giant mind-controlling starfish at a moment’s notice, and the Metropolis connection is more to do with his secret identity, his civilian job and his girlfriend. Once in uniform he has a roving commute across the world and beyond.

Batman probably would be able to defeat the starfish, and might even be able to get there in the Batshuttle, but he’s unlikely to be the UN’s first choice, let’s face it. He is an urban crimefighter in a much more intimate way, and the landscapes of Gotham are grittier, gothier, but perhaps realler than gleaming Metropolis. When your hero is city-bound, in fact, an extra secret ingredient is added to any series (and superhero comics run to legendarily long stories, interrupted only by Crisis-style cosmic reboots or poor circulation). This is something that it took fantasy fiction a while to catch up on.

Traditional fantasy is rural. The base-stock, in fact, can be seen in Mallory, or romances such as Amadis of Gaul. The story is usually a journey from A to B, and if there is a “home base” it is frequently simply used as punctuation (return to Camelot for a slap up banquet before going out to smack another couple of dragons and a magician). The hero’s exploits take place as a series of mobile set pieces - castles of enchantment, knights guarding fords, monsters, maidens, the occasional tournament. Romances are episodic, with plenty of digression and relatively little thrusting plot. Later traditional fantasies have less digression and more plot, with the journey homing far more tightly towards Mount Doom, but the structure is still encounters like beads on a string (or several strings). Frequently it would not matter if the places and people the hero leaves behind simply popped out of existence the moment he turned his back - we will never see them again in any event. Conan (2) lives like this for most of his career, killing gods, beasties and evil high priests and going merrily on his way, Tolkien gives us travellogues (3), and most of the post-Tolkien fantasies follow in his footsteps but with less detail and less feeling. If there is a city, in these tales, it is one the hero visits, probably defends, and then leaves, and there is frequently precious little sense that the horde of barbarians/orcs/undead, despite burning half of it down and killing a third of the population, had any long term effect on the place whatsoever. The buildings were there to be burnt, the people to die tragically, to provide a backdrop to the hero’s deeds. It isn’t his city, after all.

The great secret here is no consequences. The reader never gets to see what happens next because we have a static camera on the hero while the landscape scrolls past as though we’re watching a coach in an old Western. When the hero has a grand fight with goblins, smashes up their temple and nicks their treasure, we see what happens to him, but not to them. If the surviving goblins go out and massacre every village of peasants within ten miles, the hero needn’t care. He’s done that bit, and wasn’t going back.

The city is different, for the heroes that call it home, because what you do there comes back to bite you. Every action, good or bad, has consequences that you have to live with, because, when the next day dawns, you’re still there. The world is less expendable, reckless heroics look less attractive, and quite possibly the bad guys know where you live. What this gives you is a story that has an advantage from the start in terms of depth, complexity and insight into human nature, because the hero’s humanity, or lack of it, is far more important, and intrinsic to his surroundings. The architecture of the setting becomes one of society, rather than geography.

This isn’t a new thing. Fritz Lieber’s dynamic duo always ended up back in Lankhmar, and Gormenghast is a marvellous example of a story where the setting is really more the hero (or villain?) than any of the actual characters.  However, the rural/urban balance has been massively dominated by the bucolic hack-and-slay gazeteer for quite a while. There has been a definite upsurge in urban fantasy recently, however, and I would argue (4) that the greater potential inherent in an urban setting, the ability to tell far more rounded, more human stories, is one major reason why. For a fistful of examples: anything you please written by China Mieville. Absolutely anything; ditto Jeff Vandermeer; Scott Lynch’s The Lies of Locke Lamora; Colours in the Steel, by KJ Parker; Pratchett’s Discworld series… and the list goes on. And urban settings are also (and here I begin steering the boat towards George’s neck of the woods particularly) a mainstay of the steampunk setting where the punk is at least as important as the steam, and where the plots frequently explicitly focus on a changing society, rather than a static one.

And here I’ll hand back to Mr M.

(1) And you wonder whether junior super heroes have to work their way up, starting off by being Defender of Sunnyspring (population 75), or keeping a solitary gas station safe from all harm.

(2) And don’t get me wrong, I have a great fondness for Howard’s Conan stories.

(3) superior ones, because of all the work he put into the world.

(4) I always do, as you’ll have twigged by now. Rhetoric for its own sake. Always a mistake to give a writer a soap box…

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