Cities of Wonder

One of the best SF collections ever produced, with stories by many giants of the genre, including Brian Aldiss and Robert A Heinlein. The best-known story here is E M Forster’s The Machine Stops, with its Orwell and Huxley style Dystopian message of warning about over-dependence on our technologies. When the machine runs out of power, and just doesn’t work any more, could we survive at all? Robert Abernathy presents a living city, and a desperate man’s efforts to kill it, but which is the hero and which is the villain? Walter M Miller’s Dumb Waiter is an under-rated classic, with a post nuclear city run by robots that still wages its war as if inhabited. One man sets out to switch it into safe mode but can he get there before the luddite neighbours decide to smash it all up completely? The James Blish story Okie is the one cheat story here, given that it is a chapter extracted from his amazing big concept four novel story arc, Cities In Flight. In Okie, the city of New York lands on a hostile world in a desperate search for fuel, and its Machiavellian mayor bargains with the ruthless locals who want the city’s gravity defying secrets for themselves in exchange. Meanwhile the Earth police want to arrest the entire city for tangling with alien races in a breach of what Star Trek would call the Prime Directive. Heinlein’s It’s Great To Be Back has a married couple who left to live on a Moon base deciding to come back to down to Earth, only to really regret the decision once they get here and find it’s not like it used to be. A classic take on the old Grass Is Greener On The Other Side Of The Hill dilemma. A great look at the diversity of treatments the city has received by Golden Age SF authors.