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Tagged: Theme.<div class="browsingBtns"> <input class="button PNI previous" type="button" onclick="window.location.href='/next.php?id=p&entry=california'" value="Prev" /> <input class="button PNI next" type="button" onclick="window.location.href='/next.php?&entry=california'" value="Next" /> <input class="button PNI incoming" type="button" onclick="window.location.href='/incoming.php?entry=california'" value="About This Entry" title="What links to the entry; contributor initials explained; how to cite; other information" /> <img alt="Icon made by Freepik from www.flaticon.com" style="margin: 0; position: relative; top:-2px;" src="/images/icon-gal.gif"></img> </div> <a href='/gallery.php?id=California-Davis.jpg' target='_blank'> <img src='https://x.sf-encyclopedia.com/gal/thumbs/California-Davis.jpg' alt='pic'></a> It is easy to concur with the adage that California was not so much discovered as invented: that California is, therefore, pure sf. A rhetorically and pragmatically attractive underlying premise of this sort arguably infuses central anatomies of the state like Mike <a href="/entry/davis_mike">Davis</a>'s City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (1990) and elsewhere. Certainly, with the possible exception of the legend of El Dorado, there is little before 1800 that provides grist for the imagination, or adumbrates the state to come; the City of Gold itself was usually located deep in Latin America, as numerous <a href="/entry/lost_worlds">Lost World</a> novels continued to attest for a century or more. The first significant fantastic use of California may be Edgar Allan <a href="/entry/poe_edgar_allan">Poe</a>'s late poem "Eldorado" (21 April 1849 Flag of our Union) which locates somewhere "Over the Mountains / Of the Moon, / Down the Valley of the / Shadow" the "city of Gold": a clear reference to the California Gold Rush that had begun only a few months earlier, and was already firing the dreams of Americans. The first sf novel to be written about California – Cantell A <a href="/entry/bigly_cantell_a">Bigly</a>'s Aurifodina; Or, Adventures in the Gold Region (1849; vt Aurifodina; Or, Adventures in the Gold Region: A Fantastical '49er Novel 1974) – is also clearly inspired by the Gold Rush; it locates its version of El Dorado deep in the mountains, where a hidden <a href="/entry/utopias">Utopia</a> is discovered. This first California novel, fittingly, introduces two abiding topoi: California as the promised land, where the streets are paved with gold, which awaits us; and California as a wilderness out of which one may construct an advocated world. This era and these topoi are hallucinatedly interwoven in Blaise <a href="/entry/cendrars_blaise">Cendrars</a>'s L'Or: La merveilleuse historie du général Johann August Sutter (1925; trans Henry Longan Stuart as Sutter's Gold 1926; new trans Nina Rootes, vt Gold: Being the Marvelous History of General John Augustus Sutter 1982). As with many tales set in California, Sutter's Gold channels motifs out of the <a href="/entry/westerns">Western</a>, but without the centripetal focus of that form on the seemingly limitless inside of the continent. After 1850, when it became an American State in fact, the dream of California bifurcates into two states of mind, two approaches divided by geography. The north was from the first dominated by San Francisco, an unstoried hamlet before the Gold Rush, a booming Shangri-La within half a decade, and the site within half a century of the first American apocalyptic <a href="/entry/disaster">Disaster</a>, the hugely destructive Great Earthquake and Fire of 1906: "San Francisco is gone", as Jack <a href="/entry/london_jack">London</a> put it in "The Story of an Eye Witness" (5 May 1906 Colliers): "All the cunning adjustments of a twentieth century city had been smashed ..." The catastrophe manifestly inspired an extremely early non-American take on California, Charles <a href="/entry/foley_charles">Foleÿ</a>'s Kowa la Mystérieuse (1908; trans William Frederick Harvey as Kowa the Mysterious 1909), where caverns deep <a href="/entry/underground">Underground</a> full of Chinese (see below) cause the quake. Joseph <a href="/entry/delmont_joseph">Delmont</a>'s <a href="/entry/time_travel">Time Travel</a> tale Earthquake (1931) climaxes during and after the disaster. The south on the other hand was dominated by Los Angeles, a small Mexican city before its annexation by forced purchase in 1848, and seen in Edenic terms (see <a href="/entry/pastoral">Pastoral</a>) in booster nonfiction tracts, the most famous being Semi-Tropical California [for subtitle see further reading below] (1874) by Benjamin Cummings Truman (1835-1916); but this region seems not to have become a focus for the literary imagination until the <a href="/entry/cinema">Cinema</a> industry began to move to Hollywood around 1910. What may seem so obvious that it risks being unmentioned is a sense, almost from the beginning, that California is a region inherently and as a whole under threat. Tales of <a href="/entry/disaster">Disaster</a>, natural or anthropogenic or both, are common from before the end of the nineteenth century. What may be surprising in so many of these tales is the sense of surprise that tends to greet each newly conceived calamity. Partly this derives from the narrative demands of fiction, a form particularly well designed to convey unexpected bad news, running from casually inserted references to severely bad weather down to tales dramatizing the geological instability of the region. Partly it derives from a persistent denial that the Los Angeles basin, which often stands in as a metonymy for California as a whole, is essentially different from the four-season temperate zones most white Californians migrated from. The denial that California is a catastrophe zone, where convulsive events are entirely natural, is of course partially governed by commercial motives: just as Florida was around the same time, a century or so ago, misrepresented by real-estate developers as a land of sunshine. In more recent years, California has become almost subliminally identified as a place expected to be vulnerable not only to "normal" catastrophes in general but to the whiplash effects of global warming (see <a href="/entry/climate_change">Climate Change</a>) in particular. From tornadoes to wildfires, from earthquakes to tsunamis, from droughts to floods to water wars, it is a region of the world where weather fluctuations seem more visibly linked to longer-term changes than elsewhere. This underlying fragility permeates, without necessarily taking the foreground, much California fiction, an exceedingly ominous recent example being Fire in the Canyon (2023) by Daniel Gumbiner, a nonfantastic tale irradiated by apprehensions about the <a href="/entry/near_future">Near Future</a>, whose threats seem "bottomless"; films set in California [see below] are likely to exploit potential extremities, often climaxing in the violent demise of the state. The overall presence of climate change does not, as noted, necessarily determine the shape of fiction set here. More conspicuously, each of the two main California regions, the north and the south, has variously been perceived as a promised land, a land of joy, a Land of Fable where Answered Prayers betray the pilgrims who followed the American Dream down to the salt sea; but always a place – a thesis – built out of dreams, hence perhaps the number of hoax stories and other forms of the Tall Tale generated by writers, initially in northern California, from the earliest days [for Answered Prayers, Land of Fable and Tall Tales see The <a href="/entry/encyclopedia_of_fantasy_the">Encyclopedia of Fantasy</a> under links below]. The most famous of these is certainly Mark <a href="/entry/twain_mark">Twain</a>, whose years in San Francisco generated The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, and Other Sketches (coll 1867); others include Bret <a href="/entry/harte_bret">Harte</a>, whose The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Sketches (coll 1870) contains California tales and legends; Robert Duncan <a href="/entry/milne_robert_duncan">Milne</a>, author of Into the Sun and Other Stories: Science Fiction in Old San Francisco, Vol 2 (coll 1980); and W H <a href="/entry/rhodes_w_h">Rhodes</a>, several of the tales assembled as Caxton's Book: A Collection of Essays, Poems, Tales and Sketches (coll 1876) being set in California. In Science Fiction in Old San Francisco: Vol. 1, History of the Movement from 1854 to 1890 (1980), Sam <a href="/entry/moskowitz_sam">Moskowitz</a> discusses several more authors who normally focused on the northern half of the state. The most interesting contemporary re-enactment of this world may be Ysabeau S Wilce's fantasy version of San Francisco and region circa 1850 in Flora Segunda (2007) and Prophecies, Libels and Dreams: Stories of Califa (coll of linked stories 2014). None of these authors pay much attention to the fact that the Californian paradise had literally to be built; and that the huge amount of construction needed to lay down the boomtowns, and to connect the Promised Land to the rest of America by rail (see <a href="/entry/transportation">Transportation</a>), entailed a widespread use of forced (ie slave) labour, mostly from China; certainly the Paul Bunyan-like exploits of the eponymous <a href="/entry/superman">Superman</a> in Luther <a href="/entry/marshall_luther">Marshall</a>'s Thomas Boobig (1895) are accomplished without oppressing anyone. But Chinese workers were in fact essential, non-white, numerous and oppressed, it was necessary to demonize them. The first <a href="/entry/yellow_peril">Yellow Peril</a> sf novel, Pierton W <a href="/entry/dooner_pierton_w">Dooner</a>'s Last Days of the Republic (1880), duly appeared soon after the use of coolies as slaves in all but name became widespread (see <a href="/entry/race_in_sf">Race in SF</a>). Other tales focusing on <a href="/entry/invasion">Invasions</a> and other threats to California include <a href="/entry/lorelle">Lorelle</a>'s "The Battle of the Wabash: A Letter from the Invisible Police" (October 1880 The Californian), Robert <a href="/entry/woltor_robert">Woltor</a>'s A Short and Truthful History of the Taking of California and Oregon by the Chinese in the Year AD 1899 (1882), Homer <a href="/entry/lea_homer">Lea</a>'s The Valor of Ignorance (1909), Charles <a href="/entry/downing_charles">Downing</a>'s The Reckoning (1927), W D <a href="/entry/gann_ernest_k">Gann</a>'s The Tunnel Thru' the Air; Or, Looking Back from 1940 (1927), The Head and the Yellow Peril (1938) by Max <a href="/entry/brand_max">Brand</a> and Walter B <a href="/entry/gibson_walter_b">Gibson</a> writing together as by Grant Faust, and Whitman <a href="/entry/chambers_whitman">Chambers</a>'s Invasion! (1943) which is set in <a href="/entry/world_war_two">World War Two</a>. Still, even if it cannot be denied that Yellow Peril authors dramatized widespread prejudice and fears, the sf they wrote (most of it execrable) did not dominate Californian sf; though race <a href="/entry/paranoia">Paranoia</a> is easily decipherable throughout the twentieth century, certainly when <a href="/entry/aliens">Aliens</a> stand in for nonwhite humans, as in John <a href="/entry/carpenter_john">Carpenter</a>'s film <a href="/entry/they_live">They Live</a> (1988) or the <a href="/entry/television">Television</a> series <a href="/entry/alien_nation">Alien Nation</a> (1989-1990). Scapegoated nonwhite alien slaves were all the same a side-issue, though a humanly vital one; and alien migrants, as distinguished from entitled settlers, were rarely protagonists in any novel set in the state, nor were their native-born descendants. Octavia E <a href="/entry/butler_octavia">Butler</a>'s work as a whole, from the 1970s on, is the first significant demonstration of a counter-story; Cynthia <a href="/entry/kadohata_cynthia">Kadohata</a>'s In the Heart of the Valley of Love (1992) also features nonwhite humans. But for sf writers the true – or ostensible – California story was from the first the dramatic quarrel between Homo sapiens and the natural world, a quarrel in which all human civilizations participate, and of which all regions on Earth show the scars, but perhaps nowhere more consequentially than here (except perhaps for <a href="/entry/australia">Australia</a> or <a href="/entry/japan">Japan</a>). No other regions of this planet evoke in sf writers so vigorous a response to the human presumption that we rule the Earth. In sf literature (as in reality), the two states of California are threatened almost constantly by <a href="/entry/disaster">Disasters</a> both natural and anthropogenic. Tales set in or dealing with the north do however seem generally more affectionate, more grieving, more persuasively elegiac, than those set in the killing grounds to the south. Even after centuries of drama, San Francisco, one foot in Eden still, remains a sea-girt mountain-enclosed visually-coherent imaginable <a href="/entry/keep">Keep</a>-like domain, able to evoke the scherzo-swift melancholy of Jack <a href="/entry/london_jack">London</a>'s The Scarlet Plague (June 1912 London Magazine; 1914) or the elegiac intensity of George R <a href="/entry/stewart_george_r">Stewart</a>'s Earth Abides (1949), each of which places its protagonist in a world that mirrors the world the Native Americans of California lost in the swift <a href="/entry/pandemic">Pandemic</a>-ridden <a href="/entry/disaster">Disaster</a> of white civilization; or to command a deep defensive loyalty on the part of a resident sf author like Pat <a href="/entry/murphy_pat">Murphy</a>, whose The City, Not Long After (1989), comfortingly posits the <a href="/entry/near_future">Near Future</a> creation of something like <a href="/entry/utopias">Utopia</a> after yet another devastating plague. Even an essentially desolate tale like Jonathan <a href="/entry/lethem_jonathan">Lethem</a>'s Gun, With Occasional Music (1994) almost embraces the claustrophobia of its venue, as do William <a href="/entry/gibson_william">Gibson</a>'s All Tomorrow's Parties (1999) or Bruce <a href="/entry/sterling_bruce">Sterling</a>'s Holy Fire (1996); elegies to the end of San Francisco like Crawford <a href="/entry/kilian_crawford">Kilian</a>'s Tsunami (1983) or Elizabeth <a href="/entry/hand_elizabeth">Hand</a>'s "The Saffron Gatherers" (in Saffron and Brimstone: Strange Stories, coll 2006) are hard to imagine being composed about Los Angeles; and the relative intimacy of the cityscape makes it clearly easier for Rudy <a href="/entry/rucker_rudy">Rucker</a> to focus his large cast in Postsingular (2007) rather than in the inchoate megalopolis to the south, or for Chris <a href="/entry/adrian_chris">Adrian</a> to locate the clement Urban Fantasy [see The <a href="/entry/encyclopedia_of_fantasy_the">Encyclopedia of Fantasy</a> under links below] at the heart of The Great Night (2011) beneath Buena Vista Park, or for Tim <a href="/entry/powers_tim">Powers</a> to create a deliberately modest <a href="/entry/time_travel">Time Travel</a> tale of love and loss in Salvage and Demolition (2013). Similarly, it is hard to think of Cory <a href="/entry/doctorow_cory">Doctorow</a>'s Little Brother (2008) as being set in the south: the fertile indignation of his <a href="/entry/young_adult">Young Adult</a> cast flourishes in a city it is possible to save. Various takes on salvation and other issues are assembled in an <a href="/entry/original_anthologies">Original Anthology</a> edited by Denise Hamilton, Speculative Los Angeles (anth 2021), which is dedicated to Octavia E <a href="/entry/butler_octavia">Butler</a>. This sense that this city is or had at one time been a humane enclave is almost certainly intensified by the fact that – unlike coastal California as a whole, which serves as an <a href="/entry/icons">Icon</a> of terminus for the American Dream – San Francisco can be perceived as a port, as a place to recuperate in during the course of a journey. Characters can arrive here from abroad, like Phineas Fogg in Jules <a href="/entry/verne_jules">Verne</a>'s Around the World in Eighty Days (1873), and afterwards they can leave. The city is also sufficiently coherent to be contemplated from a distance (see <a href="/entry/ruins_and_futurity">Ruins and Futurity</a>), as in Nevil <a href="/entry/shute_nevil">Shute</a>'s On the Beach (1957), where its visible depopulation can stand as a metonymy for the <a href="/entry/end_of_the_world">End of the World</a>; any sight of the Golden Gate Bridge in ruins, as in <a href="/entry/it_came_from_beneath_the_sea">It Came from Beneath the Sea</a> (1955), can supply the same message, for the loss of San Francisco will always affect the rest of the world (while the loss of Los Angeles may well be seen as a localized punishment). San Francisco is tellable, as are the mountains and valleys and coastal lands it frequently represents: a territory extremely easy to cherish and to evoke, as in novels like Ernest <a href="/entry/callenbach_ernest">Callenbach</a>'s Ecotopia (1975) or Ursula K <a href="/entry/le_guin_ursula_k">Le Guin</a>'s Always Coming Home (1985) or Jean <a href="/entry/hegland_jean">Hegland</a>'s Into the Forest (1996); and the <a href="/entry/near_future">Near Future</a> loss of whose urban civility can be mourned without special pleading, as in John <a href="/entry/shirley_john">Shirley</a>'s Everything Is Broken (2012), set in a coastal enclave north of the city. It is less common for San Francisco to be contrasted directly with the megalopolis to the south; an exception would be <a href="/entry/starhawk">Starhawk</a>'s The Fifth Sacred Thing (1993), where by 2048 San Francisco is a <a href="/entry/ecology">Ecologically</a>-sound <a href="/entry/keep">Keep</a> and Los Angeles a drought-shattered <a href="/entry/dystopias">Dystopia</a> governed by a fundamentalist tyranny. The south is another matter, engaging the reader in a journey from something like civil life into a fragmenting maelstrom, like the hegira undergone by Oedipa Maas from north to south in Thomas <a href="/entry/pynchon_thomas">Pynchon</a>'s The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), a paradigm novel deeply invested in the geography of the giant state. It is a bifurcation that can seem arbitrary when it is understood that California writers like James P <a href="/entry/blaylock_james_p">Blaylock</a> in The Digging Leviathan (1984) and Tim <a href="/entry/powers_tim">Powers</a> in Dinner at Deviant's Palace (1985) have used the Los Angeles region as a venue for tales that – a decade and a half before the twenty-first century began – impart a warmth and intimacy, even (in the latter) after the city has long been destroyed. In tales of this sort – along with their colleague K W <a href="/entry/jeter_k_w">Jeter</a>, much of whose <a href="/entry/cyberpunk">Cyberpunk</a> Dr Adder sequence is set in Los Angeles – they brought <a href="/entry/steampunk">Steampunk</a> to maturity, a genre conspicuously used by authors of every sort to make the world storyable; only perhaps in this context should <a href="/entry/london">London</a>, which embodies a different kind of <a href="/entry/entropy">Entropic</a> chaos, be compared with Los Angeles: two vast sprawls that the comforting tactility of Steampunk bring into some kind of order, in London's case with some success. But Steampunk – which asserts that the urban world can be made legible – never flourished in Los Angeles, where the engines of threatened change, and the science-fictional metastasis of the original city into ontologically vacant suburbs (like <a href="/entry/thought_experiment">Thought Experiments</a> running on fumes after the budget cut), make nonsense of this assertion. Blaylock no longer sets his Steampunk tales there, and Powers's ambitious Fault Lines sequence is set in a crippled Los Angeles only magic can, very tentatively, hope to heal; or, perhaps, <a href="/entry/nanotechnology">Nanotechnologies</a> complex enough to infuse the megalopolis with commensal life, as in Greg <a href="/entry/bear_greg">Bear</a>'s Queen of Angels (1990) and its predecessors and successors in his Quantum Logic sequence. Only one category of <a href="/entry/fantastika">Fantastika</a> set in Los Angeles treats its venue with anything like the complex mix of affection and regret typical of so many San Francisco tales, whether or not fantastic: sf or fantasy tales set in or focused on Hollywood. The more interesting of them frequently involve either <a href="/entry/time_travel">Time Travel</a> or ghosts or both; and typically engage with (and sometimes redeem) the fug of lost promise that so saddens the city as a whole. Examples include Elmer <a href="/entry/rice_elmer">Rice</a>'s A Voyage to Purilia (1930), set on another planet whose behaviour apes the mores found in Hollywood films; Manuel <a href="/entry/komroff_manuel">Komroff</a>'s I, the Tiger (1933); P G <a href="/entry/wodehouse_p_g">Wodehouse</a>'s <a href="/entry/identity_exchange">Identity-Exchange</a> comedy Laughing Gas (1936); Nathanael <a href="/entry/west_nathanael">West</a>'s The Day of the Locust (1939), where figures duped by Hollywood, and California in general, caper through their paces like grotesques in a Weimar-like commedia dell'arte; Gore <a href="/entry/vidal_gore">Vidal</a>'s Myron (1970); Robert <a href="/entry/bloch_robert">Bloch</a>'s Sneak Preview (1971), set in a domed "Holywood" (see <a href="/entry/keep">Keep</a>); Jack <a href="/entry/finney_jack">Finney</a>'s Marion's Wall (1973); John <a href="/entry/mella_john">Mella</a>'s Transformations (1975); Steve <a href="/entry/shagan_steve">Shagan</a>'s The Formula (1979), based on his screenplay for The Formula (1980); Robert <a href="/entry/coover_robert">Coover</a>'s Charlie in the House of Rue (1980 chap) – assembled with other work as A Night at the Movies; Or, You Must Remember This (coll of linked stories 1987); MacDonald <a href="/entry/harris_macdonald">Harris</a>'s Screenplay (1982); Michael <a href="/entry/moorcock_michael">Moorcock</a>'s The Laughter of Carthage (1984); David <a href="/entry/thomson_david">Thomson</a>'s Suspects (1985), whose protagonists (wherever they may be) are in a sense <a href="/entry/avatars">Avatars</a> of their Hollywood originals; Steve <a href="/entry/erickson_steve">Erickson</a>'s Rubicon Beach (1986); <a href="/entry/miracle_mile">Miracle Mile</a> (1988), a film which depicts in real-time the last seventy minutes before missiles destroy the city; Robert <a href="/entry/zemeckis_robert">Zemeckis</a>'s film <a href="/entry/who_framed_roger_rabbit">Who Framed Roger Rabbit</a> (1988), a fantasy [for Toons see The <a href="/entry/encyclopedia_of_fantasy_the">Encyclopedia of Fantasy</a> under links below] in which the counterfactual saving of Los Angeles from the construction of the suffocating noose of freeways from around 1950 can be understood in terms of exceedingly sharp <a href="/entry/satire">Satire</a>; Terry Pratchett's comic fantasy Moving Pictures (1990), relocating the rise and fall of the movie industry to "Holy Wood" on Discworld; Theodore <a href="/entry/roszak_theodore">Roszak</a>'s Flicker (1991); Ben <a href="/entry/elton_ben">Elton</a>'s Popcorn (1993); Connie <a href="/entry/willis_connie">Willis</a>'s Remake (1995); Peter <a href="/entry/delacorte_peter">Delacorte</a>'s Time on My Hands (1997); Joshua <a href="/entry/dann_joshua">Dann</a>'s Timeshare: Second Time Around (1998); Kage <a href="/entry/baker_kage">Baker</a>'s Mendoza in Hollywood: A Novel of the Company (2000), which although set in the nineteenth century adumbrates the future; Andrew <a href="/entry/niccol_andrew">Niccol</a>'s film <a href="/entry/s1m0ne">S1m0ne</a> (2002); Jack <a href="/entry/dann_jack">Dann</a>'s The Rebel: An Imagined Life of James Dean (2004); John <a href="/entry/scalzi_john">Scalzi</a>'s Agent to the Stars (2005); Michael <a href="/entry/shea_michael_2">Shea</a>'s Live Death sequence beginning with The Extra (May 1987 <a href="/entry/fsf">F&SF</a>; exp 2010); Will <a href="/entry/self_will">Self</a>'s Walking to Hollywood: Memories of Before the Fall (2010); and Ned <a href="/entry/beauman_ned">Beauman</a>'s The Teleportation Accident (2012), where film irradiates reality. Hollywood Unreel: Fantasies about Hollywood and the Movies (anth 1982) edited by Martin Harry <a href="/entry/greenberg_martin_h">Greenberg</a> and Charles <a href="/entry/waugh_charles_g">Waugh</a> includes stories by some of the above authors, plus work by Thomas M <a href="/entry/disch_thomas_m">Disch</a>, Ben <a href="/entry/hecht_ben">Hecht</a>, Robert <a href="/entry/sheckley_robert">Sheckley</a>, Robert <a href="/entry/silverberg_robert">Silverberg</a> and others; Hollywood Ghosts: Haunting, Spine-Chilling Tales from America's Film Capital (anth 1991) edited by Greenberg and Waugh plus Frank D <a href="/entry/mcsherry_frank_d_jr">McSherry</a> is of less sf interest. It may be noted that in almost all of these examples the death-throes of Hollywood – which gave birth to <a href="/entry/icons">Icons</a> unceasingly until 1950 or so, and which has been mourned ever since – are usually dramatized within the frame of a relatively stable platform. For this reason alone, the Hollywood tale can be thought of as distinct from the Los Angeles tale, where the vast <a href="/entry/cities">City</a> is usually seen as itself under threat, most often through the operations of nature, or through nuclear <a href="/entry/holocaust">Holocaust</a>; (<a href="/entry/mutants">Mutants</a> are common, and <a href="/entry/world_war_three">World War Three</a> often starts, or concludes, here). The world itself seems to be the elephant in the Los Angeles kitchen. It was not until the 1980s that geologists fully recognized, by applying the theory of plate tectonics, that the extraordinary concentration of earthquake and volcano zones along the Pacific Rim was a consequence of Continental Drift, and that further tectonic convulsions were inevitable: more quakes, volcanic eruptions, hurricanes, tornadoes, savage droughts, deadly heat waves, flash floods, flash wildfires, sudden changes of all sorts. The history of California as a whole, and southern California in particular, could now properly be understood as inherently catastrophic. The violent natural events of the past two centuries had not punctuated the "normal" course of nature: they were the natural course of nature. There is at the same time growing evidence that southern California is just now emerging from two centuries of relative quiet, geologically speaking; in particular, a two-century-long spell of wet weather may be ending: the droughts that are already threatening water wars between California and the interior of the continent – as dramatized in stories like Paolo <a href="/entry/bacigalupi_paolo">Bacigalupi</a>'s "The Tamarisk Hunter" (May 2007 <a href="/entry/fsf">F&SF</a>) – may become the norm; and a dramatic environment like Death Valley can fittingly serve as sounding board for a <a href="/entry/last_man">Last Man</a> tale like Timothy <a href="/entry/brown_timothy">Brown</a>'s Polaris (2014). It is not therefore surprising that stories about Los Angeles itself are typically infused with a sensation of nightmarish impermanence and anxiety, a condition exhaustively anatomized in a film like Magnolia (1999) directed by Paul Thomas Anderson (1970-    ), where it has begun to rain frogs (see Charles <a href="/entry/fort_charles">Fort</a>). Nor is the seismically unstable desert eastwards of the city itself seen in fiction as a safe place to locate a residential tracts ravenous for energy, as Scott <a href="/entry/bradfield_scott">Bradfield</a>'s tales of deep estrangement assembled in The Secret Life of Houses (coll 1988) and elsewhere demonstrate [for <a href="/entry/mars">Mars</a> see below]; Robert <a href="/entry/silverberg_robert">Silverberg</a>'s "Hot Times in Magma City" (May 1995 <a href="/entry/omni_online">Omni Online</a>) shows the region transformed by geological <a href="/entry/disaster">Disasters</a>. Los Angeles itself is, of course, often, perhaps usually, given short shrift. Tales in which isolated California locales are threatened, like Jack <a href="/entry/finney_jack">Finney</a>'s The Body Snatchers (1955) or T Coraghessan <a href="/entry/boyle_t_coraghessan">Boyle</a>'s A Friend of the Earth (2000), are comparatively uncommon. Far more commonly found are tales in which the megalopolis itself is at risk or doomed through <a href="/entry/disaster">Disaster</a> or <a href="/entry/holocaust">Holocaust</a> or <a href="/entry/war">War</a> or calamitous culture decay, a rare exception being Greg <a href="/entry/bear_greg">Bear</a>'s Queen of Angels (1990) and its predecessors and successors in his Quantum Logic sequence. Such narratives of threat and/or decline include J U <a href="/entry/giesy_j_u">Giesy</a>'s All for His Country (1915), Marie <a href="/entry/corelli_marie">Corelli</a>'s The Secret Power: A Romance of the Time (1921), Myron <a href="/entry/brinig_myron">Brinig</a>'s Flutter of an Eyelid (1933), Philip <a href="/entry/wylie_philip">Wylie</a>'s "The Paradise Crater" (October 1945 <a href="/entry/blue_book_magazine_the">Blue Book</a>) and his much later Los Angeles: A D 2017 (1971), Ward <a href="/entry/moore_ward">Moore</a>'s Greener Than You Think (1947), Aldous <a href="/entry/huxley_aldous">Huxley</a>'s Ape and Essence (1948), set in a <a href="/entry/ruined_earth">Ruined Earth</a> version of the city two centuries hence; "The Year of the Jackpot" (March 1952 <a href="/entry/galaxy">Galaxy</a>) by Robert A <a href="/entry/heinlein_robert_a">Heinlein</a> [see below], Richard <a href="/entry/matheson_richard">Matheson</a>'s I Am Legend (1954), in which an infestation of <a href="/entry/vampires">Vampires</a> forms an analogue of physical destruction (see <a href="/entry/horror_in_sf">Horror in SF</a>), and "A Touch of Grapefruit" in Star Science Fiction Stories No 5 (anth 1959) edited by Frederik <a href="/entry/pohl_frederik">Pohl</a>, Robert Moore <a href="/entry/williams_robert_moore">Williams</a>'s The Day They H-Bombed Los Angeles (1961), Curt <a href="/entry/gentry_curt">Gentry</a>'s Last Days of the Late, Great State of California (1968); Tremor Violet (1975) by David <a href="/entry/lippincott_david">Lippincott</a>; The Turner Diaries (1976) by William Luther <a href="/entry/pierce_william_luther">Pierce</a> writing as by Andrew MacDonald, what Mike <a href="/entry/davis_mike">Davis</a> describes in Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster (1998) as a "instruction manual" for the destruction of the city; Alistair <a href="/entry/maclean_alistair">MacLean</a>'s Goodbye California (1977); Lucifer's Hammer (1977) by Larry <a href="/entry/niven_larry">Niven</a> and Jerry <a href="/entry/pournelle_jerry">Pournelle</a>, in which white survivors of a vast tsunami establish an inland <a href="/entry/keep">Keep</a>, from which they make sorties to enslave coloured outsiders; The Tujunga Canyon Contacts (1980) by Ann Drufell and D Scott Rogo; J G <a href="/entry/ballard_j_g">Ballard</a>'s Hello America (1981), in which the city has been transmogrified into a rain forest; Steve <a href="/entry/erickson_steve">Erickson</a>'s several novels set in dismembered or transfigured versions of the city, including Days Between Stations (1985), Rubicon Beach (1986), Leap Year (1989), Amnesiascope (1996), Our Ecstatic Days (2005) and Zeroville (2007); Nature's End (1986) by James <a href="/entry/kunetka_james">Kunetka</a> and Whitley <a href="/entry/strieber_whitley">Strieber</a>, where (as in the Niven and Pournelle tract) non-whites are the villains; Carolyn <a href="/entry/see_carolyn">See</a>'s Golden Days (1986) and There Will Never Be Another You (2006), both of which express some pleasure in the cleansing effects of almost total devastation; Richard <a href="/entry/kadrey_richard">Kadrey</a>'s two Los Angeles <a href="/entry/drugs">Drug</a> stories, Metrophage (A Romance of the Future) (1988) and Accelerate (graph 2007), along with his <a href="/entry/horror_in_sf">Horror in SF</a> supernatural Sandman Slim sequence; J Michael <a href="/entry/straczynski_j_michael">Straczynski</a>'s OtherSyde (1989); Octavia E <a href="/entry/butler_octavia">Butler</a>'s Parable series comprising Parable of the Sower (1993) and Parable of the Talents (1998) and Edan <a href="/entry/lepucki_edan">Lepucki</a>'s California (2014), which traverses Los Angeles, deathly suburbs, and the desert beyond. A <a href="/entry/television">Television</a> series like 24 (2001-2010) seems to drink a sickened <a href="/entry/paranoia">Paranoia</a> from the very bones of the city as various <a href="/entry/holocaust">Holocausts</a> are narrowly averted. Films set in Los Angeles, even more often than novels, focus on its destruction. See Checklist below for films set somewhere in the megalopolis; several of these are linked to individual entries. California has clearly attracted a wide range of authors, some of them negligible, others significant. Four of the latter are central to sf; interestingly, at some point or other in the career of each, analogies between the colonization (and in a sense <a href="/entry/terraforming">Terraforming</a>) of California and the colonization of the <a href="/entry/moon">Moon</a> or more usually <a href="/entry/mars">Mars</a> are drawn, explicitly or by implication, as in Robert A <a href="/entry/heinlein_robert_a">Heinlein</a>'s The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (1966). Though much of it is set in an indeterminate future location, his first novel For Us, the Living: A Comedy of Customs (written late 1930s; 2004) deeply and intimately responds to and anatomizes the utopian 1930s California he himself actively inhabited and attempted to influence; the novel clearly draws on this material to create a <a href="/entry/thought_experiment">Thought Experiment</a> in the making of <a href="/entry/utopias">Utopia</a>. Heinlein's love-hate entanglement with California as venue and template can be traced throughout his long career, and his Future History can be read, like its predecessor, as a Californian Thought Experiment. The depth of his knowledge of California as a tympanum for sf cognition and effects is perhaps most conspicuous in his 1952 novella "The Year of the Jackpot" [cited above], a dead-serious spoof about the self-destruction of the state. The use of the idea of California as an engine to create a future world seems clearly to have shape Ray <a href="/entry/bradbury_ray">Bradbury</a>'s The Martian Chronicles (coll of linked stories 1950), where the human attempts to impose a recognizable template upon ineluctably alien <a href="/entry/mars">Mars</a> echoes both the imperial attempts of white settlers from the north of Europe to treat southern California as a Promised Land in the image of their dreams, and the twentieth century attempt to transform the fragile ecosystem of the Los Angeles basin into vast ecologically unsound suburbs. Much of Bradbury's short fiction – in which what reads as nostalgia for a lost California can in fact be understood as desiderium for a deeply desirable California that did not and could not exist – plays on his personal memories of the state during the years when it most resembled the dream that drove so many of us to go there. These years, the 1920s and 1930s, were also the years of Chinatown (1972) directed by Roman Polanski, which embeds within a literally nonfantastic narrative a vision of the State so proleptic that the film has occasionally been taken for sf. But whether the pre-War years were more dream than reality, or the other way round, they could only be seen by their greatest sf memorialist as irrecoverable, here or on Mars. The entire life work of Philip K <a href="/entry/dick_philip_k">Dick</a>'s, the greatest and most prescient California writer of the twentieth century, relates in one way or another to the state where he lived from childhood. His early realist novels, only published after his death, are mostly set in the state, but the magical estrangement of the sf magazine stories, written about the same time, is missing. Novels placed literally in California include Eye in the Sky (1957), whose various illusory <a href="/entry/alternate_worlds">Alternate Worlds</a> all represent versions of the <a href="/entry/paranoia">Paranoia</a>-inducing realities the state generates; The Man in the High Castle (1962), which is set in San Francisco; Dr Bloodmoney; Or, How We Got Along After the Bomb (1965), which is set after <a href="/entry/world_war_three">World War Three</a> in both San Francisco and the Los Angeles; Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), filmed as <a href="/entry/blade_runner">Blade Runner</a> (1982), Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said (1974) and VALIS (1980), which are set in or near Los Angeles. Several other novels, whose locations are not tied to specific venues, are clearly located in all but name in his familiar territory. Dick's used his extraordinarily intense understanding of contemporary California to give hallucinated but inescapable concreteness to his tormented apprehension that reality was a construct (see <a href="/entry/perception">Perception</a>; <a href="/entry/zoo">Zoo</a>); that any <a href="/entry/conceptual_breakthrough">Conceptual Breakthrough</a> served not as an escape from prison but as a deepening of our awareness of immurement; and that the entities or "gods" responsible for building these traps – these <a href="/entry/virtual_reality">Virtual Reality</a> Californias even more deadly than the Promised Land of earlier dreams – were not the friends of Homo sapiens. Other novels radically intensify the ironies of The Martian Chronicles; the Martian settlements depicted in Martian Time-Slip (1964) or The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965) are savage <a href="/entry/parody">Parodies</a> of the suburbs east of Los Angeles, and similarly doomed. The fourth major sf writer to make transformative use of California is Kim Stanley <a href="/entry/robinson_kim_stanley">Robinson</a>, whose early Three Californias sequence, comprising The Wild Shore (1984), The Gold Coast (1988) and Pacific Edge (1990) – assembled as Three Californias (omni 2020) – uses the complex reality of the Los Angeles region from which to extrapolate three models of society it might be possible to envision: an enclave whose inhabitants live in deliberate ignorance of the defeat of America; a car-choked, <a href="/entry/ecology">Ecologically</a>-disastrous <a href="/entry/dystopias">Dystopia</a> centred on Orange Country; and a quasi-pastoral <a href="/entry/utopias">Utopia</a> overlooking the Ocean. Each California is recognizable. Unlike the case with the other two sf-friendly regions given individual entries in this encyclopedia – <a href="/entry/london">London</a> and <a href="/entry/new_york">New York</a> – there is a tendency for writers embedded in the matter of California to engage in a kind of geographical and conceptual game of shuttlecock with the vast territory in their view. Both London and New York evoke a love-hate response from writers, which can generate richly-felt fictions; but love-hate seem to bifurcate in California, with San Francisco being treated with a poignance that can seem unbalanced, and Los Angeles focused upon with what certainly seems to be unbalanced loathing. With the clear exception of the work of the four major authors mentioned immediately above, too much California fiction seems almost dementedly one-sided. Within the frame of any remit to provide a unifying conspectus, the two worlds of California seem to shake each other apart; but this failure to adhere to any centre may explain to some degree the allure of sf set here. There is a sense that California sf, so disruptively bipolar and so profoundly discontent, gives readers a recognizable portrait of the world we live in. If the centre does not hold in Californian sf, if indeed the ground caves beneath us, we recognize the feeling. [JC] films (selected) films set in or around San Francisco <ul class="x"> <li><a href="/entry/it_came_from_beneath_the_sea">It Came from Beneath the Sea</a> (1955)</li> <li>The <a href="/entry/birds_the">Birds</a> (1963)</li> <li><a href="/entry/invasion_of_the_body_snatchers">Invasion of the Body Snatchers</a> (1978)</li> <li><a href="/entry/time_after_time">Time After Time</a> (1979)</li> <li><a href="/entry/back_to_the_future">Back to the Future</a> (1985); also see this entry for sequels</li> <li><a href="/entry/village_of_the_damned">Village of the Damned</a> (1995)</li> <li>Dr Dolittle (1998) directed by Betty Thomas </li> <li><a href="/entry/bicentennial_man">Bicentennial Man</a> (1999)</li> <li><a href="/entry/hulk">Hulk</a> (2003)</li> <li>X-Men: The Last Stand (2006) (see <a href="/entry/x-men_films">X-Men Films</a>)</li> <li><a href="/entry/monsters_vs_aliens">Monsters vs. Aliens</a> (2009) directed by Rob Letterman and Conrad Vernon</li> <li><a href="/entry/star_trek_film">Star Trek</a> (2009)</li> <li>Meteor Storm (2010) directed by Tibor Takács</li> <li><a href="/entry/rise_of_the_planet_of_the_apes">Rise of the Planet of the Apes</a> (2011) and its sequel <a href="/entry/dawn_of_the_planet_of_the_apes">Dawn of the Planet of the Apes</a> (2014),</li> <li><a href="/entry/cloud_atlas">Cloud Atlas</a> (2012)</li> <li><a href="/entry/cloudy_with_a_chance_of_meatballs_2">Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2</a> (2013)</li> </ul> films set in or around Los Angeles <ul class="x"> <li>The <a href="/entry/war_of_the_worlds">War of the Worlds</a> (1953)</li> <li><a href="/entry/them">Them!</a> (1954)</li> <li><a href="/entry/kiss_me_deadly">Kiss Me Deadly</a> (1955)</li> <li>Indestructible Man (1956) directed by Jack Pollexfen</li> <li>The <a href="/entry/three_stooges_in_orbit_the">Three Stooges in Orbit</a> (1962) directed by Edward Bernds</li> <li><a href="/entry/earthquake">Earthquake</a> (1974)</li> <li><a href="/entry/its_alive">It's Alive</a> (1974)</li> <li><a href="/entry/alligator">Alligator</a> (1980)</li> <li>The Formula (1980) directed by John G Avildsen</li> <li><a href="/entry/blade_runner">Blade Runner</a> (1982)</li> <li>The Entity (1982) directed by Sidney J Furie</li> <li><a href="/entry/night_of_the_comet">Night of the Comet</a> (1984)</li> <li>The <a href="/entry/terminator_the">Terminator</a> (1984)</li> <li><a href="/entry/prince_of_darkness">Prince of Darkness</a> (1987)</li> <li>Dead Heat (1988) directed by Mark Goldblatt</li> <li><a href="/entry/earth_girls_are_easy">Earth Girls Are Easy</a> (1988)</li> <li><a href="/entry/they_live">They Live</a> (1988)</li> <li>The <a href="/entry/hidden_the">Hidden</a> (1988)</li> <li>Miracle Mile (1988) directed by Steve De Jarnatt</li> <li><a href="/entry/miracle_mile">Miracle Mile</a> (1988)</li> <li><a href="/entry/who_framed_roger_rabbit">Who Framed Roger Rabbit</a> (1988) directed by Robert <a href="/entry/zemeckis_robert">Zemeckis</a></li> <li><a href="/entry/bill_and_teds_excellent_adventure">Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure</a> (1989)</li> <li>Warlock (1989) directed by Steve Milner</li> <li><a href="/entry/predator_2">Predator 2</a> (1990)</li> <li>Peacemaker (1990) directed by Kevin Tenney</li> <li>The Great Los Angeles Earthquake (1990) directed by Larry Elikann</li> <li><a href="/entry/terminator_2_judgment_day">Terminator 2: Judgment Day</a> (1991)</li> <li>The <a href="/entry/rocketeer_the">Rocketeer</a> (1991),</li> <li><a href="/entry/nemesis">Nemesis</a> (1992)</li> <li>Last Action Hero (1993) directed by John McTiernan</li> <li><a href="/entry/demolition_man">Demolition Man</a> (1993)</li> <li>Double Dragon (1994) directed by James Yukich</li> <li><a href="/entry/strange_days">Strange Days</a> (1995)</li> <li>Escape from L A (1996) directed by John <a href="/entry/carpenter_john">Carpenter</a></li> <li><a href="/entry/independence_day">Independence Day</a> (1996)</li> <li><a href="/entry/gattaca">Gattaca</a> (1997)</li> <li>Volcano (1997) directed by Mick Jackson (see Richard <a href="/entry/woodley_richard">Woodley</a>)</li> <li>Magnolia (1999) directed by Paul Thomas Anderson</li> <li><a href="/sfeshop.php?field-keywords=The+Thirteenth+Floor&field-author=" class="link-amazon" target="_blank">The Thirteenth Floor</a> (1999) directed by Josef Rusnak; based on Counterfeit World (1964; vt Simulacron-3 1964) by Daniel F <a href="/entry/galouye_daniel_f">Galouye</a></li> <li>Tycus (1999) directed by John Putch</li> <li><a href="/entry/s1m0ne">S1m0ne</a> (2002)</li> <li>The <a href="/entry/day_after_tomorrow_the">Day After Tomorrow</a> (2004)</li> <li>10.5: Apocalypse (2006) directed by John Lafia; <a href="/entry/television">Television</a> release</li> <li>Southland Tales (2006) directed by Richard Kelly</li> <li>The Apocalypse (2007) directed by Justin Jones</li> <li>Dragon Wars (2007) directed by Shim Hyung-rae</li> <li><a href="/entry/2012">2012</a> (2009)</li> <li>Land of the Lost (2009) directed by Brad Silberling</li> <li>Zombieland (2009) directed by Ruben Fleischer</li> <li><a href="/entry/resident_evil_afterlife">Resident Evil: Afterlife</a> (2010)</li> <li><a href="/entry/inception">Inception</a> (2010)</li> <li><a href="/entry/skyline">Skyline</a> (2010)</li> <li>Mega Shark Versus Crocosaurus (2010) directed by Christopher Douglas-Olen Ray</li> <li><a href="/entry/battle_los_angeles">Battle: Los Angeles</a> (2011)</li> <li>The <a href="/entry/green_hornet_the">Green Hornet</a> (2011) directed by Michel Gondry</li> <li><a href="/entry/green_lantern">Green Lantern</a> (2011)</li> <li><a href="/entry/in_time">In Time</a> (2011)</li> <li>This Is The End (2013) directed by Evan Goldberg and Seth Rogen</li> <li><a href="/entry/her">Her</a> (2013) directed by Spike Jonze</li> <li><a href="/entry/godzilla">Godzilla</a> (2014)</li> </ul> further reading <ul class="x"> <li>Benjamin Cummings Truman. <a href="/sfeshop.php?field-keywords=Semi-Tropical+California+Its+Climate&field-author=Benjamin+Cummings+Truman" class="link-amazon" target="_blank">Semi-Tropical California: Its Climate, Healthfulness, Productiveness, and Scenery; its Magnificent Stretches of Vineyards, and Groves of Semi-Tropical Fruits, Etc, Etc, Etc</a> (San Francisco, California: A L Bancroft and Company, 1874) [nonfiction: hb/]</li> <li>Blaise <a href="/entry/cendrars_blaise">Cendrars</a>. <a href="/sfeshop.php?field-keywords=Hollywood+le+mecque+du+cinema+avec+29+dessins&field-author=Cendrars+Blaise" class="link-amazon" target="_blank">Hollywood, le mecque du cinéma; avec 29 dessins pris sul le vif par Jean Guérin</a> (Paris: B Grasset, 1936) [nonfiction: coll: binding unknown/] <ul class="x"> <li>Blaise <a href="/entry/cendrars_blaise">Cendrars</a>. <a href="/sfeshop.php?field-keywords=Hollywood+Mecca+of+the+Movies&field-author=Cendrars+Blaise" class="link-amazon" target="_blank">Hollywood: Mecca of the Movies</a> (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1995) [nonfiction: coll: trans by Garrett White of the above: hb/Jacqueline Gallagher-Lange]</li> </ul></li> <li>William F <a href="/entry/wu_william_f">Wu</a>. <a href="/sfeshop.php?field-keywords=The+Yellow+Peril+Chinese+Americans+in+American&field-author=Wu+William+F" class="link-amazon" target="_blank">The Yellow Peril: Chinese Americans in American Fiction, 1850-1940</a> (Hamden, Connecticut: Archon Books, 1982) [nonfiction: <a href="/entry/yellow_peril">Yellow Peril</a>: hb/unidentified film still]</li> <li>Jean Baudrillard. <a href="/sfeshop.php?field-keywords=Amerique&field-author=Jean+Baudrillard" class="link-amazon" target="_blank">Amérique</a> (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1986) [nonfiction: binding unknown/] <ul class="x"> <li><a href="/sfeshop.php?field-keywords=America&field-author=" class="link-amazon" target="_blank">America</a> (London: Verso, 1988) [nonfiction: trans by Chris Turner of the above: hb/Richard Misrach]</li> </ul></li> <li>Editor anonymous. <a href="/sfeshop.php?field-keywords=Literary+Exiles+and+Refugees+in+Los+Angeles&field-author=Editor+anonymous" class="link-amazon" target="_blank">Literary Exiles & Refugees in Los Angeles</a> (Los Angeles, California: University of California, 1988) [nonfiction: anth: chap: essays by Ehrhard Bahr and Carolyn <a href="/entry/see_carolyn">See</a>: pb/nonpictorial]</li> <li>Jerome <a href="/entry/charyn_jerome">Charyn</a>. <a href="/sfeshop.php?field-keywords=Movieland+Hollywood+and+the+Great+American+Dream&field-author=Charyn+Jerome" class="link-amazon" target="_blank">Movieland: Hollywood and the Great American Dream Culture</a> (New York: G P Putnam's Sons, 1989) [nonfiction: hb/]</li> <li>Mike <a href="/entry/davis_mike">Davis</a>. <a href="/sfeshop.php?field-keywords=City+of+Quartz+Excavating+the+Future+in+Los&field-author=Davis+Mike" class="link-amazon" target="_blank">City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles</a> (London: Verso, 1990) [nonfiction: hb/]</li> <li>Mike <a href="/entry/davis_mike">Davis</a>. <a href="/sfeshop.php?field-keywords=Ecology+of+Fear+Los+Angeles+and+the+Imagination&field-author=Davis+Mike" class="link-amazon" target="_blank">Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster</a> (New York: Henry Holt and Company/Metropolitan Books, 1998) [nonfiction: hb/James Doolan]</li> <li>Alexandra Chappell, editor. <a href="/sfeshop.php?field-keywords=San+Francisco+in+Art+and+Literature&field-author=Alexandra+Chappell" class="link-amazon" target="_blank">San Francisco in Art and Literature</a> (San Francisco, California: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 2002) [anth: graph: illus/various: hb/from Gabriel Moulin]</li> </ul> links <ul class="x"> <li><a target="_blank" href="https://sf-encyclopedia.com/fe/">The Encyclopedia of Fantasy</a>: <a target="_blank" href="https://sf-encyclopedia.com/fe/answered_prayers">Answered Prayers</a>; 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