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hawkwing_lbYesterday I had one of those sleepy epiphanies that seem obvious in retrospect, riding the train to town. Well, not so much an epiphany as a dawning of the obvious. The city, in fantasy, is symbol as much as setting. It stands for something, or several somethings - civilisation, decadence, predation, community, separation/alienation - it can be a concretised metaphor. Its geography and architecture is particularly amenable to this sort of concretisation.
But it can also be a locus of the fantastic. The modern city is interpenetrated with the wild, in parks and dead ground and farmland/greenbelt in its suburban accretions, in its foxes foraging from dustbins and bats in cathedral steeples. It's also interpenetrated with history, the new and the ancient co-existing in the same space, the old repurposed for the modern. Its nature makes it a focus for liminalities, and an attractor of stories which grow in the telling.
A city is a thing of edges, and also connections: bridges, transitions, communities.
But it can also be a locus of the fantastic. The modern city is interpenetrated with the wild, in parks and dead ground and farmland/greenbelt in its suburban accretions, in its foxes foraging from dustbins and bats in cathedral steeples. It's also interpenetrated with history, the new and the ancient co-existing in the same space, the old repurposed for the modern. Its nature makes it a focus for liminalities, and an attractor of stories which grow in the telling.
A city is a thing of edges, and also connections: bridges, transitions, communities.
