Floating cities and islands in fiction


In science fiction and fantasy, floating cities and islands are a common trope, ranging from cities and islands that float on water to ones that float in the atmosphere of a planet by purported scientific technologies or by magical means. While very large floating structures have been constructed or proposed in real life, aerial cities and islands remain in the realm of fiction.

Seaborne cities and islands

Seaborne floating islands have been found in literature since Homer's Odyssey, written near the end of the 8th century BCE, described the island of Aeolia. They reappear in Pliny the Elder's Natural History of the 1st century CE.
Richard Head's 1673 novel The Floating Island describes a fictional island named Scotia Moria. In The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle, the characters sail to a floating island, which later becomes fixed in place. In the DC comics story of Wonder Woman, Themyscira is a group of floating islands. In Jules Verne's Propeller Island, the characters are on an artificial floating island that is actually a huge ship. In Yann Martel's novel Life of Pi, there is a floating island.

Airborne cities and islands

Earth

In the treatise De Grandine et Tonitruis, Carolingian bishop Agobard of Lyon describes Magonia, a cloud realm populated by felonious aerial sailors.
In the novel Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift, the island city of Laputa is purported to float through the use of artificial magnetism. It was primarily a fictional device that was intended to satirize far-fetched pseudo-scientific proposals:
During the 1920s, science fiction author Hugo Gernsback speculated about floating cities of the future, suggesting that 10,000 years hence "the city the size of New York will float several miles above the surface of the earth, where the air is cleaner and purer and free from disease carrying bacteria." To stay in the air, "four gigantic generators will shoot earthward electric rays which by reaction with the earth produce the force to keep the city aloft."
In 1960, the architects Buckminster Fuller and Shoji Sadao proposed the construction of a thermal airship, which they called Cloud Nine. This megastructure would be a geodesic sphere that, once it was sufficiently heated by sunlight, would become airborne. Fuller and Sadao envisioned that Cloud Nine would float freely in the Earth's atmosphere, giving residents and passengers a migratory lifestyle. They believed that it might be a partial solution to the depletion of non-renewable resources.
A team including Buckminster Fuller and Shoji Sadao was commissioned by United States Department of Housing and Urban Development to design the Triton City, a floating city intended to provide housing near Tokyo or Baltimore. The proposal called for tetrahedron–shaped modules supporting large housing blocks of 5,000 inhabitants each, and which would be anchored to the ground. A large model of the habitat is on display in the lobby of the Johnson Presidential Library in Austin, Texas.
In Isaac Asimov's story "Shah Guido G.", the hereditary Secretary-General of the United Nations is a tyrant who rules the Earth from a flying island called Atlantis.

Venus

A design similar to Fuller's Cloud Nine may permit habitation in the upper atmosphere of Venus, with temperature and atmospheric pressure being incredibly high on the surface. As scientifically and fictionally described by Geoffrey A. Landis, the easiest planet to place floating cities at this point would appear to be Venus. Because the thick carbon dioxide atmosphere is 50% denser than Earth's atmosphere, breathable air with a composition similar to the latter is a lifting gas in the dense Venerean atmosphere, with over 60% of the lifting power that helium has on Earth. At an altitude of 50 km above the Venerean surface, the environment is the "most Earthlike in the solar system", according to Landis, with a pressure of approximately 1 bar and temperatures ranging between.

Other planets

In addition to Venus, floating cities have been proposed in science fiction on several other planets. For example, floating cities might also permit settlement of the outer three gas giants, as the gas giants lack solid surfaces. Jupiter is not promising for habitation due to its high gravity, escape velocity and radiation, but the Solar System's other gas giants may be more practical. In 1978, the British Interplanetary Society's Project Daedalus envisioned floating factories in the atmospheres of Jupiter refining helium-3 to produce fuel for an interstellar probe. Michael McCollum notes that the "surface" gravity of Saturn is very close to that of Earth, and in his novel The Clouds of Saturn, he envisioned cities floating in the Saturnian atmosphere, where the buoyancy is provided by envelopes of hydrogen heated by fusion reactors. Uranus and Neptune also have upper atmosphere gravities comparable to Earth's, and even lower escape velocities than Saturn. Cecelia Holland populated Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus with mutant humans, the Styth, in floating cities in her only SF novel, Floating Worlds. Donald Moffitt's novel Jovian features floating cities forever floating in the Jovian atmosphere, a worthwhile enterprise due to their ability to extract useful gases. The book concentrates on the cultural differences developing between "Jovian" humans and Earthbound ones.

Fictional examples

Literature

Sky Island is a 1912 book by L. Frank Baum with the titular area split between the Kingdom of the Blues and the Pinks.
  • "Cities in the Air" by Edmond Hamilton.
  • The Cities in Flight series by James Blish proposes a universe in which cities cast adrift from the Earth, powered by a fictional spindizzy drive.
  • The novel Well of the Worlds by Henry Kuttner features a parallel world full of islands floating in the air.
  • In the novel The Ringworld Engineers, Louis Wu seeks a way to save the Ringworld by bartering for information in the library of a floating city.
  • The novel Orion Shall Rise by Poul Anderson features an aerostat city called Skyholm, located above – and dominating – a post-apocalyptic France.
  • In the novel Maiden Flight, a post-apocalyptic civilization lives in floating cities named for some of the now-destroyed land-based cities, e.g. Calgary 5. These are highly-evolved spherical mile-wide aerostats that follow wind patterns across the face of nuclear-war-ravaged Earth. Travel between such cities is by zeppelin.
  • In the 1992 novel, Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson, a floating collection of refugee craft are attached surrounding the decommissioned nuclear aircraft carrier, the USS Enterprise, to form The Raft.
  • In the 2024 novel, Playground, by Richard Powers, a tech consortium seeks to convert the Polynesian island of Makatea to a base from which to manufacture and launch artificial floating islands.
  • Airhaven is a floating city in the Mortal Engines Quartet, that, through attaching gas bags, lifted itself into the air to avoid being devoured by the mobile Traction Cities looking for resources on an Earth devastated millennia ago by the Sixty Minute War.The Tangled Lands, a collection of short stories by Paolo Bacigalupi and Tobias S. Buckell, references a lost city called Jhandpara that was once powered by magical means but became consumed by magic-seeking brambles.
  • There are numerous floating habitats on the Venus-like planet Chilo in Tobias S. Buckell's novel Sly Mongoose. Buckell credits Geoffrey A. Landis with providing the background information on the floating cities.Saga of Seven Suns by Kevin J. Anderson has giant, occupied gas-mining platforms that mine the hydrogen necessary to, among other things, distill into ekti, a vital stardrive fuel.
  • Charles Stross's novel Saturn's Children begins in a floating city on Venus.
  • Geoffrey A. Landis's novel The Sultan of the Clouds features floating cities in the Venus atmosphere and orbital airships.
  • Similar to the famous 1990s Mars trilogy about colonization and terraforming of Mars, Pamela Sargent wrote from 1986 to 2001 starting with Venus of Dreams a trilogy set on Venus where from cloud settlements a terraformed Venus is created.
  • In Hannu Rajaniemi's novel The Quantum Thief, the Mars colony began as a slave-labor latifundium. After war developed, all entities began taking turns being the beings who kept the city rolling. The city kept rolling, with everyone's help.The War of Powers series by Robert E. Vardeman and Victor Milán features a Sky City ruled by a race of human overlords called the Sky born who conquered the city from its original reptilian inhabitants. The city is powered by dark magic and floats in a set pattern over 5 surface cities.
  • The mobile floating pirate city-state of Armada in China Miéville's novel The Scar has accreted in the seas of Bas-Lag from multiple ships and boats over centuries of development.
  • In Paul Stewart and Chris Riddell's The Edge Chronicles series, Sanctaphrax is a city-state built upon an enormous floating rock. It was the seat of knowledge and academia in The Edge. It was lost to Open Sky after its anchor-chain became un-tethered during a violent storm.
  • In the Japanese manga series One Piece, an island known as Skypiea, originally believed to be a myth, resides far within the skies above the seas of the Grandline.

Film

Television series

  • Stratos, on the planet Ardana, in Star Trek episode "The Cloud Minders".
  • In Firefly episode "Trash", the planet Bellerophon is the site of dozens of floating estates with "gracious living, ocean views and state-of-the-art security."
  • Atlantis from the Stargate universe is a "city-ship" which is capable of flight and intergalactic travel. Due to the amount of power required to keep it airborne, it is frequently shown floating on water, but it could theoretically float at a fixed location in space. The Nox of Stargate SG-1 have floating cities.
  • Airlandis in the animated television series Dragon Flyz.
  • Sky Realm in the animated television series Sky Dancers.
  • In the manga and anime series One Piece, there are Sky Islands, cities built on a specific type of cloud that has hard, land-like properties, allowing civilizations to have ground to traverse and build on using the same cloud material, along with an ocean-like cloud throughout, making it a close parallel to a normal earthbound island. The unique environment of the Grand Line, an equatorial ocean that circles the globe and possesses all matter of mythical weather patterns, islands and equally mythical sea-behemoths, allows for these Sky Islands to occur regularly – yet are so rarely witnessed even the denizens of the legendary Grand-Line perceive them as a myth.
  • Supertown is the floating city of the New Gods that appears in the Justice League episode "Twilight".
  • The main setting in the 2004–2007 2D animated TV series Dragon Hunters and its 3D film prequel.
  • The animated television show My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic depicts a city made entirely of clouds called Cloudsdale, which is home to the Pegasi and whose name is a pun on the Clydesdale horse breed.
  • In the 2011 animated TV series ThunderCats, a race of Birdmen live above the clouds in a technological floating city named Avista, powered and suspended in mid-air by the Tech Stone, one of Mumm-Ra's four Power Stones.
  • The anime television series Girls und Panzer features "school ships": massive ships that contain a school campus and a town on their surface.
  • In the animated web-series RWBY, the city of Atlas floats directly over the city of Mantle. The power to make it float comes from the Relic of Creation, housed in a vault underneath the city.
  • The animated series, She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, has the magical floating island, called Mystacor.
  • The LEGO science-fantasy series Legends of Chima features Cavora, a floating mountain responsible for distributing elemental chi falls to the population below. Cavora used to be the base of the Phoenix Castle and was later pushed up as a result of the first Great Illumination. It also has a protective force field that repels intruders and sanctuary for the Legend Beasts, but the Crawlers have been able to bypass this and artificially block the falls.
  • Cowboy Bebop in the episode Waltz for Venus features floating islands of plants to terraform Venus.

Video games

Other