IMAGINATIVE CITIES

Different kinds of Art can raise the feeling of the sublime. One of them is the literature of fantasy, where one can find imaginative cities; frightening or monumental cities, cities in other planets, which look at other suns and other moons. Due to the surprise of its daedal and imaginative narrative, its driving rhythm or its otherworldly terror, it can cause an escape from reality. Often one has the chance to experience imaginatively, through this art of escapism, that he is a citizen in some other cities, with exceptionally extreme and strange characteristics. The cities of science fiction are not only metropoles, but also megapoles of the universe. They are imaginative and astral archetypes of the terrestrial cities.
Sometimes, these cities haven’t got a utopian but a dystopian form, and tend to obtain a not-at-all ideal character. Hence, they become the imaginative exorcism of the worst nightmares of their creators. Thus, e.g. The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath by Howard Philips Lovecraft is an adventure with labyrinthine plot; Lovecraft’s hero has an underlying mystical fate. Nevertheless, the rules that govern this imaginative world are not only cruel but also weird. While the peaceful and calm city of Celephais, - an early novel by the same author – is an escape, but in an ideal, imaginary and harmonious utopia, during his period of maturity, he carries us to the wild and terrifying Kadath. If, in his earlier novel, he had described a utopian city with positive characteristics, in the posterior novel, he developed the quest and the discovery of a deserted and frozen town, which is the residence of the Great Gods. The course towards the unreal city of Kadath is full of adventures and meetings with strange beings.
In another famous novel of fantastic creation, not only of a city but of a whole planet, is the work of Jorge Luis Borges, Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis, Tertius. It is about an imaginative formation of a world totally extraterrestrial. Its transparent tigers and towers of blood tend to provoke and to rouses imagination, but through the composition of a strange metaphysics that the inhabitants of that unreal planet are supposed to have; the author presented the feeling of a dream that he created only for the pleasure of himself and its recipients; at the same time, its purpose is the wonder and the surprise of the reader.
In imaginative literature, the cities don’t exist only as ideal archetypes for imitation; they are monuments of fantasy that aim to the bizarre and the strange. Their construction, even if it is subsequent to the lows of the universe, is specific and concrete, targeting to scientific originality or to a futuristic vision. Nevertheless, some of these imaginative cities include elements of real cities, which continue to the unreal; so they create the necessary link with the ideal cosmopolis, bringing in mind its images, unreal, of course, but they lead to the elaboration and intelligible experimentation regarding its possible structures and its characteristics. The bizarre character of these cities implies their exceptionally distant, probably impossible perspective; it also shows how abysmal these super-poles are imagined to be by the modern residents of cities.