The City & the City: Mapping the Space of a City in the Contemporary Czech Fantastic Prose
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| Year of publication | 2016 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | Miéville, Aaronovitch, Gaiman, Lukyanenko, or Beukes. To name just a few. All of them are contemporary authors of the fantastic connected with the urban fantasy, with a depiction of the space of the city as an inseparable feature of some of their books. We simply cannot imagine Neverwhere or Rivers of London without London (and London Below), Zoo City without Johannesburg, Night Watch without Moscow – not to talk of New Crobuzon which, although completely thought up, plays one of the main roles in Perdido Street Station. The concept of city is fascinating not only for contemporary writers of the fantastic. It used to be a way to show an ideal society, as in Plato's The Republic, or later in utopias by Thomas More, Tommaso Campanella, or Francis Bacon. As Umberto Eco stated in The Book of Legendary Lands, they are all, intentionally or non-intentionally, derived from The Book of Revelation, at least partly. The situation today is different. Writers do not try to depict an ideal society, they use the space of the city as an option to search the magical area full of mysteries and connotations they can use. In the contemporary Czech literature, there are two larger groups of writers who use the city as one of the main features: the postmodernists and the authors of the fantastic. These groups are not separated as it may seem. Quite often, there is a pinch of fantastic even in “non-fantastic“ postmodern novels. The topic of my contribution is the change. And the question, whether there is any. The Czech society is a young one. After the Velvet revolution and the time of newly acquired freedom we are a society of indifferent, resigned people. Does this all appear in the literature of fantastic throughout last 26 years? This is why I choose The Other City by Michal Ajvaz (published in 1993), Sedmikostelí by Miloš Urban (1999) Megapolis by Miroslav Žamboch (2003), or City Wars by Pavel Renčín (2008, 2009 and 2011), among others. |
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