Nation States 4 of 4 - Sunflower City
All right, before anything else, I think it's only fair that I address why I chose a sissy name like Sunflower City for a place that is supposed to be, by functional symbology, a stand-in for the City of God, or perhaps more as the Celestial City which is the ultimate goal of John Bunyan's pilgrim-character, Christian. In the hero cycle (it's a different link this time, by the way), following the Romantic tradition of storytelling, it is the place of return at journey's end, the end of a time of harsh and cruel trial. And everyone living on Earth up to that point, every human refugee, is indeed a survivor of a terrible trial, of life in the wasted lands. Many of the children who came with their families to Sunflower City were raised in the temporary encampments set up by Republic forces to provide safety while Sunflower City was being built with all possible speed, but for everyone else, Sunflower City seems like paradise for all its many little flaws.
While I'm sharing this musing on the city that acts as beginning and end of the story of The Man from Rock Bottom, a place made better by the actions of its protagonists descending below so as to rise above with power to change life for the better, not just out of monomania. More, I'm sharing it because I think it serves as a decent example of how you might similarly go about making a place into a living part of your story, of the degree of thought that goes on behind the scenes, the "under the hood" picture to let you have an opportunity to develop your own thoughts, your own design plans for your own creative worlds.
So let's start off with what Sunflower City is supposed to be, as well as its initial appearance. Here is how Scintillant Camor describes the place, as found in Chapter 1:
Right now, I’m looking out over the City through the clear, clear glass of this office’s massive window. It’s beautiful, beautiful enough that I have to put that mental capitalization on it, on the City, to mark the place as important.
We built this city, the City, Sunflower City, for humanity. Its wide, open avenues for foot traffic, dotted with trees and shrubbery and tempting grassy swards abloom with ambrosial, kaleidoscopic blossoms. It's an infinitely complex web of interconnected magnetocentric flight paths for gravitic aerocar travel. The clickways, made of fitted, textured diamond in myriad colors, glow to guide travelers to their destinations. The spires above shine with solar radiance as they collect and distribute the microwaves caught from energy beamed directly from the sun. Its planarian engines forever shifting the City’s many layers like a living thing (and it might as well be alive!), reacting to the needs of its inhabitants, bringing rain or shine to enhance or quell their moods even while joining with the natural rhythms of their planet itself. Its ample places of cultural diversity, of libraries and museums, of forums and plazas, coliseums and auditoriums, dance halls and concert halls, and theaters and more.
We, the builders of the Pan-Galactic Republic, built this for them. “Give me your tired, your poor” indeed!
(Ah, but apologies to Emma Lazarus. Her poem is beautiful, and I appreciate its nuances ever more deeply as I learn more about Earth’s languages and cultures and long, sad history.)
Of course, as Barika Das discovers in Chapter 0 of the book, The Man from Rock Bottom, there are troubles in this paradise: traitors and renegades, thieves and rogues, slave-takers and stealers of children. There is an area in Sunflower City, Rock Bottom and the undercity beneath it, where the benevolent entity, City Central, an artificial intelligence wholly dedicated to making the city serve its inhabitants, cannot - or rather, does not - reach.
Rock Bottom itself is the ground floor of the city. It's got places for people to live, alcoves and hidey-holes and even places where food and water can be acquired for those who don't have places of their own, because they haven't registered as citizens of the Republic for their own reasons. Usually these reasons are because the persons in question did unspeakable acts out in the wasted lands (as discussed in the first part of this short series) and are still too ashamed of themselves, or haven't quite left the feral mindset in which they'd lost themselves, but also don't want to stay lost in that terrible place. Or perhaps they're active criminals, like those which the Man describes meeting on several occasions, and starts off his day fighting when he first steps out his door (though that group was a little of both - lost in their own heads and hearts).
Rock Bottom is, symbolically, the "dirt" from which the rest of the city springs. It's founded on the principle of personal freedom that is a fundamental aspect of the Pan-Galactic Republic's way of doing business. Such freedom goes so far as to even allow people to choose to reject the Republic, to live on its fringes and scrounge from its leavings and subtle hand-outs. These people living in Rock Bottom aren't there because they've been forced there (though many humans living in Sunflower City think this to be the case - there are a lot of misconceptions about the Republic way of life flying around, actually, which is the root of a lot of later problems in this and future stories); they live in Rock Bottom because they've chosen not to live anywhere else, trapped by their own inner prisons. As the Man puts it: "Rock Bottom is the place you go when you've got nowhere else." Just like in the Niven & Pournelle book Inferno, as well as its sequel Escape from Hell (not to be confused with the game of the same name...though I rather enjoyed it as a kid), we make our own places of punishment, though greater powers might provide us with the real estate in which to build. But any time we want to leave Hell, we can: but to do so, we have to leave behind the Hell that is within us.
Easier said than done! As John Milton's character of Lucifer declared upon "escaping" Hell in the epic poem Paradise Lost: "Which way I fly is Hell; myself am Hell."
Satan Arousing the Rebel Angels by William Blake
So that's Rock Bottom. But what's the undercity of Sunflower City? The Man himself describes it pretty well at the start of Chapter 9:
I’d be lying if I said I didn’t look up, far up, at the little circle of blue sky high above me and think back on that scene from The Time Machine where Wells’ Time Traveler is looking up at his last sight of the world above before he lets the morlock tunnels take him. I waver just for a moment in my determination.
I really hope there’s no morlocks down here: I don’t have any good experiences with them.
Every time I go into the underworld, I hesitate. That’s because whenever I go into that place where all the bits and pieces that make a place like Sunflower City come together behind the scenes, I always end up leaving bits and pieces of me behind.
Incidentally, I’m being literal.
Natural creatures roam around in these dark places, so my job regularly takes me down to find them and bring them up to where they’re safe and can be prepared for relocation into the waiting world as it’s cleansed of the taint of humanity’s End.
But there are a lot of creatures down here whose natural status is … questionable, at best.
Like that Deinosuchus that dragged me into a sump pit and rolled me around for a while: for that big guy, I grabbed the stunner out of the wrist pocket of my chomped limb before I drowned and gave it a good, long jab until its primitive nervous system realized that it was supposed to go to sleep.
I’m pretty sure humans made him, probably part of the copious experiments with monster-making that took place around the End. But now, the Deinosuchus is safe, and we’ve more or less made up after our initial misunderstanding.
I mean, as much as anybody can make up with an archosaur, but at least now it gets food that isn’t me, it doesn’t have to live in a sewer, and I’m fairly sure it’s not planning to Captain Hook me at some point in the future. Fairly sure.
Or the smugglers who were dealing out “scrubbed” Republic weapons, guns, and stuff that had been deprogrammed, their biometric guards removed so anybody could use them.
Since this is a pretty difficult and very dangerous process, I can understand why those weapon dealers were so protective about their operation, and don’t really begrudge them the bullets they sent through my bicep and my hip, so long as they’re willing to forgive me the bolts I sent back their way and the peacekeepers I sicced on them as soon as I was sun-side again.
Or that pack of super-rats that tried to cut out my heart on a bloodstained altar right after I declined the honor of being a deity in their cannibalistic proto-religion. I did my best to explain that my present job keeps me way too busy to be a god, but it didn’t go over well.
Or the slurps.
Or the cordy-creeps.
Or…
Naturally, I titled that chapter "Death and Hell." If you read the book, you'll find out why, though I'm fairly sure that I've mentioned it somewhere else in these blog postings, mostly as an afterthought. I'll probably mention it again, too, knowing me as I do, and my wandering mind. But not right now.
The undercity of Sunflower City is like City Central's guts. Just like most people (at least I can't!) can't look directly at their guts without something being significantly not the way it's supposed to be, so too City Central can't look at Sunflower City's underground networks. Also like our guts, the place moves around, changing configuration and shape, new passages opening, old passages closing. Because of this ever-shifting quality, mapping out such a place is functionally impossible.
Even so, the Man regularly maps out the place (that's what he's clutching on the front cover of the book, and what he's got laid out before him on the back cover, by the way, assisted in his navigation in both cases by his thought-mice), and just as regularly updates these maps. For him, the act is one of meditation, preparing his will for the next stage of his journey. The maps he makes cease to be current within days, weeks, or months at most, but through preparing them before, after, and (when possible) during his journeys into the deeps, he deliberately fools his brain into thinking that he can survive down there, and come back up at the end.
So far, it's worked. Until this story, of course.
All of this leads back to the name, Sunflower City. The very first origin-point of the name comes from the behaviors of sunflowers, the actual plant. They get their name not just from their pretty yellow flowers with round shape and out-thrust petals like solar rays, though that's certainly a part of it, acting as a visual metaphor of something shining and glorious and beautiful.
In the language of flowers, sunflowers represent adoration, loyalty, and longevity, all of which certainly were included as a part of the ongoing metaphor. Scintillant Camor and Gret both admit that they rushed the work on Sunflower City, wanting to get it up and running as quickly as possible so as to save the people suffering and dying in the wasted lands of Earth. This is where a great many of the difficulties of the story told in The Man from Rock Bottom originate. All the same, the people of the Republic did indeed want the health and long life of humanity, and they were expressing what they hoped would eventually become mutual loyalty and adoration.
Well, Scintillant Camor did. Gret's much too cynical for such sappy idealism.
Naturally enough, sunflowers draw their strength from the sun. Similarly, as is shown in the very first scene of the book, the glow that surrounds the highest towers of Sunflower City comes from microwave receivers, catching solar energy beamed via a satellite network set up by Garfi Lett and his military forces before they moved on to further assignments elsewhere, handing the rest of the job of settling the place over from the Ministry of Defense into the arms of Scintillant Camor and the Ministry of Life.
Additionally, sunflowers move over the course of a day, all the better to keep catching the sun. That's what the planarian engines described above are all about, a series of massive engines that keep the city itself in motion, each of its layers set on a huge "petal" (they're actually not shaped like petals, each having a unique shape as designated by the needs of the populace living there, but the metaphor works), each of them adjusting placement to meet the needs for shade and sun, rain and shine, as required by those living there. The "planarian" part of them is in reference to flatworms, since the mechanisms themselves are based on a similar very simple system of reacting to the environment. I got that idea, incidentally, from the comic Mister X, though in that fictional world, the ever-changing city is an enhancement of the state of dreaming and somnambulism which plays such a critical part of its story-metaphors, while Sunflower City makes use of similar metaphor-mechanics to try and create a place of joyful waking.
Mister X's Radiant City, art by Dean Motter
Finally, sunflowers are sources of health. They can absorb toxicity in soil, even radiation toxicity, cleansing the land of what has been killing it - a quality that the YouTube creator Luke Humphris uses as part of his When Society Collapsed series of videos. At the same time, they produce healthful seeds, which can be crushed for oil or roasted for ease of eating. All of this gives them a place in metaphoric nature very similar to that of the olive tree - and that particular bit of symbolism is so immense, it gets its own separate Wikipedia page! And here I can bring all of that symbolism up with the metaphor of a healing plant, a giving plant, a plant of peace, but without having to refer to the olive symbolism directly. Double duty from just one set of image-ideas.
Old olive trees in the Garden of Gethsemane
Looking back over this blog posting, I think you can start to see a bit of the thought and attention that goes into making a place that is also a living part of a story. It all started with a simple idea based on the general shape and brightness that I wanted to convey and just went from there. A big part of the "just went from there" bit, incidentally, is not being afraid to put in the hard work necessary in order to really develop an idea. Don't just let them wither while still in bud: put in the effort to make your ideas bloom.
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