Intercity armchair travel

Photo of Hong Kong harbour by Nitin Sharma on Pexels.com

At heart I’m an urban child: I was brought up in Hong Kong, only transferring to Bristol as I approached my teens, a city where I lived until a couple of decades ago.

Since then we’ve either lived in an isolated Welsh farmhouse or a small town in the Welsh Marches, but I still have a fascination with cities, either through physically spending time in them or doing so virtually, through books.

As part of my determination to tackle my personal Mount TBR three or four titles have worked their way to the surface, and it won’t surprise you to know that they each have the word “city” in the title.

‘Futurity.’ © C A Lovegrove. Image created using Wombo.Art app

The City We Became by M K Jemisin is joined by Daniel Polansky’s A City Dreaming which, like Jemisin’s fiction, is based on a version of New York City. Fictional metropolises appear in City of Last Chances (the first of The Tyrant Philosophers series) by Adrian Tchaikovsky, and in City of Stairs (the first in The Divine Cities series) by Robert Jackson Bennett. You’ll notice that all four novels can be classed as genre fiction: speculative certainly, fantasy generally, or urban fantasy more specifically.

This seems the case with many of the city-set titles I’ve read since I was in my teens. Two that spring to mind featured the so-called Lord of the Jungle – Tarzan and the Forbidden City and Tarzan and the City of Gold – both by Edgar Rice Burroughs and both part a series which I binged on as a schoolboy, managing to read all but three or four titles which eluded my trawl in secondhand bookshops. But what else have I read – and even reviewed – that may contain that key word in the title?

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There are the classics: A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens of course, featuring London and revolutionary Paris, and – more recently – Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino, which describes different aspects of Venice.  An alternative Venice existing in a parallel world was explored in City of Masks, the first in Mary Hoffman’s YA Stravaganza series, of which I managed only two and a bit titles. Catherine Fisher’s The Relic Master was subsequently repackaged and re-issued in North America as The Dark City, perhaps in response to the Welsh author’s growing popularity there.

Meanwhile City of Gold and Shadows by Ellis Peters is a 20th-century murder mystery centred on the ruins of the Roman town like Wroxeter in the Welsh Marches. From crime fiction to China Miéville’s weird fiction novel now: The City and the City returns us to urban fantasy by way of two conurbations seemingly occupying the same geographical space, each only accessible from the other via a No Man’s Land called Breach.

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Also hovering on permeable borders, this time between fantasy and science fiction, is A Tale of Time City by Diana Wynne Jones, a story which zaps between London during the Blitz to another future city in transition. City of Illusions, one of Ursula K Le Guin’s Ekumen novels, takes us to a planet many light years away in the future. And Phillip Reeve’s Traction City short story / YA novelette set in a dystopian future Earth is an adjunct of his Mortal Engines Quartet, published for World Book Day 2011.

We come now to titles which I have considered acquiring in the past but either haven’t got round to or am now unlikely to do so. The City of Gold and Lead by John Christopher, the second in his Tripods trilogy, fits snugly into the first category; Hollow City, the initial sequel in Ransom Roggs’s six-volume Miss Peregrine’s Peculiar Children series, and the first in Cassandra Clare’s The Mortal Instruments six-volume series, City of Bones, belong to the other category. (You might guess one of the reasons for my reluctance to embark on the titles in my second category: a commitment to a multi-volume set.)

Diocletian’s Palace, Split, Croatia

One of Ian Livingstone’s early titles (in the Fighting Fantasy series he and Steve Jackson created) was published as City of Thieves, a single-player role-playing gamebook which I may well have gone through with our son way back in the late eighties. In contrast, I’m curious about Armistead Maupin’s book series, or at least the first in the series entitled Tales Of The City, which as a reflection of US life in the 1970s has I gather a lot to recommend it.

I thought I had copies of The Image of the City (and Other Essays) by Charles Williams and City of God by E L Doctorow on my shelves but they probably went in a previous cull of my TBR titles. However I’m definitely not tempted to read St Augustine of Hippo’s The City of God (full title On the City of God Against the Pagans): I’m not at all attracted to the edifices constructed by theological arguments, even though this work is considered a crucial milestone in the development of Western philosophy.

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A series I am more likely to read is Paul Auster’s City of Glass, the first in the late author’s New York Trilogy – he died on the last day of April this year – simply because I have all three novellas in a single-volume edition. Curiously, I keep mixing up Arthur C Clarke’s curious classic Childhood’s End with The City and the Stars even though the latter is set much later, billions of years in Earth’s future in fact; still, the premise does sound intriguing and a reissue is still available.

I also intend to soon explore a couple of nonfiction titles from the shelves: Among the Cities, a collection of travel writings by Jan Morris, and City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi by William Dalrymple.

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Smoggy London

This of course is only a selection of City/Cities titles I’ve rustled up – Goodreads lists well over 300,000 such books. Naturally I hope to be imminently embarking on a grand tour of many of these, plus a few novels which include named cities like Paris or London in the title.

Have you read any of these I’ve referred to? Or perhaps you have some of your favourites you’d like to share here? Do let me know!