Urban Monstrosities

The monstrous is no longer an isolated instance of rhetorical excess but the most apt term for the beasts that we imagine to populate our urban moment. Writers, visual artists, and filmmakers after the Victorian period, having already internalized the productive dissolution of monstrosity, have been influenced by the ubiquity and influence of the urban monstrous and have eagerly appropriated this metaphor to their own uses, many of them overtly political. Fantasy and speculative fiction in particular have always been where exploration and criticism of accepted sociocultural systems can be interrogated.

The monstrous can thus become the political alternative to fascistic societies of control. Within the monstrous city, authors and artists can create a heterogeneous bottom-up organization of a potentially non-hierarchical social order. This can be seen most clearly in the genres of contemporary fantasy, speculative fiction, and horror, where the monstrosity of the city holds the promise of its great generative potential, which can be at once sublime, horrific, and devastating. Even the rich tradition of utopian/dystopian science fiction concerns itself with what does not fit within the worlds it imagines.

By eschewing the artificial divides between nature and culture, and by abandoning the false dichotomy between utopia and dystopia, a third category that lies between extremes can be delineated. This is a category of openings rather than definitions, of perilous unknowing rather than strict control. This collection articulates just a few of the many forms this third category can take in the imaginations of contemporary urban fantasists.