[+] A City Made of Towers, Thoughts On Worldbuilding

[doctorbadwolf]

I have in my home setting a city called Nea Thera, which is constructed on a small chain of islands in the Mediterranean Sea, in the near future if a version of our world where the 2020s - 2030’s see the revelation of The Hidden Folk, those people who are not human and whose existence is considered mythical, and of real magic.

This city is built around the turn of the 22nd Century, after the formation of the Commonwealth of Terran Peoples, by a collaboration of Southern European, South West Asian, and North African, nations. Nea Thera is a architectural wonder, which inspires a flurry of Great Projects around the world, and serves as one of the great “sky Ports” of a world that is slowly expanding outside its home planet and into the larger solar system and galaxy as science takes into account the properties of the elemental powers once known as magic, and great wonders are invented very quickly by a world that has violently thrown off the yoke of oligarchs in most nations and come together in a Commonwealth of nations and peoples. A lot can happen in a century.

But this world both is and isn’t a utopia, and this is reflected in Nea Thera. While the 9 great spires (each named for a god or hero or ideal) and many lesser towers may glitter brightly in the sun with their white walls and deep blue roofs and the red and brown streets, and the many green and blue gardens and artificial streams and waterfalls, of this 15,000 meter tall and many kilometers wide city, at the very bottom is a place with no official name, which locals call Bridge Town.

As people from all over the world come and go above, shooting into the sky along the central spire named Olympia whose octagonal sides are 8 mile long mass drivers (acting in replacement for rockets in sending ships into orbit), the people of Bridge Town work and live in darkness, under and among the roots and arches and steel and stoneworks of the great City of Spires.

The work for Bridgers, as they are often called, is mostly in the docks in the shadow of the city proper, or in the subaquatic mines deep under the surface of the islands upon which the city stands. Dangerous mines where occasionally lava or lethal gasses take a score of lives in a few moments, without warning.
Many Bridgers work in the city above, but many others cannot, as they cannot afford the documents needed to procure legal work, and the privately owned police force known as the Spartan Watch are as brutal toward criminals as one might expect from their name. Officially the city does not have police, as such, but the powerful of the city pay The Watch to act as their “security” force, and pay large sums to smooth over any legal trouble caused by the fascist-leaning paramilitary security contractors.

So, Bridge Town is largely ruled by gangs, who keep the Watch out of their territory on threat of death, and the Watch pretends they simply have no interest in the neighborhoods underneath the “bridges” of the city.

One of the few legitimate jobs Bridgers often procure is as Steeple Skimmers, messengers and couriers who use a combination of powered gliding suit, aeronautic magic, and athleticism, to carry messages and small packages up and down and across the immense labyrinthine metropolis. They might dive hundreds of meters down the side of a spire, or clamp onto a shutting zooming spiftly up the side of another, or dash at sprinting speed over and through the complex web of supports and structures and streets.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Those streets are, if you don’t look too much past your close environs, much like the streets of any other city, with whole neighborhoods, market districts, entertainment districts, and large city parks, nestled atop platforms that never take up more than 1/8 of the circle of the city, and are layered and aligned like an intersecting web of organic spirals, ensuring that each platform has at least some part of the day where direct sunlight reaches it.

Sections of spires and lesser towers have great ringed wind turbines wrapping around them, each at least 20 yards tall, and some stretching for over 100 yards up the length of a spire, spiraling rings spinning on exceptionally well crafted tracks as the strong winds of the heights buffet the towers, helping to power the water system that keeps water moving up and down the structures, as geothermal power and solar power largely power the rest of the city’s electrical needs.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Private spacecraft in a magitech future.

Many people own orbital craft, as technology has made great advancements in aeronautics and propulsion in general. Less common but growing in number are private merchant vessels moving goods under contract between Earth and her orbital cities and slowing expanding colonies.

There vessels come in many shapes and sizes, often looking like something from an aetherpunk dream of a Semi-Vernian future, while others look more like the vessels of more modern science fiction, that is more like the aeronautic vessels of the previous century.

The more “airship” style ships are usually orbital, but some experimental craft use advanced magitech to combine solar sails and sleek maritime aesthetics, creating a clash of vibes where Treasure Planet meets Cowboy Bebop, with a healthy dose of Fullmetal Alchemist and Final Fantasy.

Propulsion is primarily ion impulse, with more mundane fuel burned while within the atmosphere and gravity well of the planet.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

I guess I didn’t actually explain the thoughts on worldbuilding underpinning the setting I describe lol

 

[doctorbadwolf]

When I thought of Nea Thera it was initially in the context of imagining Bridge Town, as a place shrouded in humid darkness roofed by the infrastructural roots of a grand glittering jewel of a city above. A place home to forgotten people slowly being changed by the thaumotalogical waste energy of magitech industry and a harsh life of darkness. A place ruled by pragmatic criminals claiming territory and defending it with blood.
In short, Nea Thera exists to be the grand Federation utopian city, whose existence makes the cyberpunk dystopia of Bridge Town all the more horrifyingly unjust. A place that is both a jewel most precious and an object of quite justified rage.

I think it’s no coincidence that I first wrote of it when I was essentially homeless, sleeping on couches and panhandling for a couple meals a day in the wealthiest nation on the planet. I almost died that summer, once by violence I barely escaped and twice from being very sick, and my love of my home turned sour, and so my heart imagined Bridge Town.

These days I want badly to believe in Nea Thera, but the memory of Bridge Town will never leave me.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

In terms of worldbuilding principles and goals, It serves some additional practical purposes, as well.

First, “The City” as it is often called serves as the trade capital and crown jewel of the Commonwealth, though not its actual political capital, which is absurdly placed in my home town of Bakersfield, CA (and the why of that is a tale in itself). The City is home to every kind of person imaginable, from all of the 9 Realms except dark Ginnungagap, which is home only to hungry abyssal terror. And even then, in secret, abyssal tainted folk dwell in the great jewel of Earth, working corruption and decay, and so there is plenty of work for the heroic Rangers in that place even in peaceful days.

The second practical purpose is to have a place where the brightest light casts the darkest shadow, and to thus have a place for the all the varied stories and characters that can be born from that.

Lastly, less practical, is the simple purpose that I love parkour, aerialist stunts, and personal flying machines from both fantasy and science fiction, and I love having a city that is entirely a single superstructure, miles wide and tall, with a central structure from which ships launch into orbit.

The second great mass driver of the future era of the setting is in Kenya, up the side of a mountain, and is a gentler launching system since it is much longer and thus can accelerate at a lower rate to reach the same escape velocity, and I’m still working on The City of Gardens that has formed around it.

The third sky port of note is outside Bakersfield, which leaders try every decade or so to rename but which people can never get to a large enough majority vote for a single name, so the bland old name remains. That city has been turned into a terraced city covered in a mix of trees and hanging gardens and solar shading, amidst the relatively modest towers built since the city became the Capital. It has three skyports, two of which goes all the way from one side of the Central Valley to the other before climbing the mountainside, and the third is more traditional and relies of rockets burning a biofuel harvested from the forest which has been grown throughout the hot, Previously dry, city. Water recycling and collection has allowed California’s Central Valley to be a place of rivers and lakes again, as it was before dams were built and industry began draining its natural resources.


One thing that runs through all of this that I haven’t mentioned, and is something I’m curious for other views on, is messiness. When I build worlds, nothing is satisfyingly symmetrical except the esoteric beliefs of some groups, academic types mostly. Magitech is scientific but spirit magic is very much not, for instance, and magic changes what superstitions people form but people are more superstitious, not less.