6 Urban Fantasy Cities Destroyed by Their Authors

Destruction is a powerful tool. It can create a release of energy. It can reveal how rotten the infrastructure of a place really is. It can take something familiar and warp it utterly, causing us to view it in a new light. It can even be a fun kind of stress relief.
In Aliette de Bodard’s upcoming urban fantasy novel The House of Shattered Wings, Paris has been ravaged by fallen angels, causing most major landmarks to be destroyed and the Seine to run permanently black with ash. The imaginative descriptions of devastation got me thinking: what other fantasy novels laid waste to their city settings? Here are six of my favorites.

London (The Mime Order by Samantha Shannon)
Shannon’s Bone Season series isn’t a bad readalike for The House of Shattered Wings. There are a lot of similarities between Aliette de Bodard’s shattered, broken Paris and Shannon’s London, crushed under the heel of martial law—especially when it comes to the complex system of castes, gangs, and houses Shannon weaves throughout the city. Both locales are mutated beyond repair and ruled by a terrifying cadre of underground factions with astonishing powers. In Shannon’s case, a band of criminal clairvoyants keep their own twisted form of order and fight for territory and influence across London, while the vampiric Rephaim enforce their own brand of order from the shadows. Shannon’s style is a little more frenetic and fast-paced than de Bodard’s methodical one, but her world-building is every bit as fantastic.

Ambergris (The Ambergris Trilogy (City of Saints and Madmen, Shriek: An Afterword, and Finch), by Jeff VanderMeer)
Ambergris is almost normal compared to some of the cities on this list, with the worst dangers being the constant political upheaval, rioting, alternate reality bleed-through, and the river-dwelling giant squid. However, over the course of the trilogy, the indigenous sentient fungus people known as the “Grey Caps” wrest the city back from the invasive humans who settled it, transforming it into a creepy fungal hellscape ruled over by martial law. [Editor’s note: You have an interesting definition of “almost normal.”] They also kill the giant squid, which just seems like an unnecessary atrocity on top of all the rest of it. Throughout Finch, VanderMeer recounts exactly how the city wound up a fungal dystopia via flashbacks, mutating familiar locations and characters throughout into twisted, barely recognizable forms, and majorly upping the dark and gloomy atmosphere.

Deepgate (The Deepgate Codex (Scar Night, Iron Angel, and God of Clocks), by Alan Campbell)
A city full of angels and mysterious assassins suspended over an abyss by massive chains, Deepgate is home to dark secrets and bizarre magic. Add warring theocratic factions and the fact that the abyss might actually lead to the Underworld (or someplace worse), and you have a city on the brink of collapse—literally, since the chains connecting the city are a big weak point. As the series continues, Campbell adds a war between gods and gargantuan monsters that feast on souls, and even worse dangers, finally breaking those chains and creating an apocalyptic war that spills over the boundaries between life and death. What really makes Deepgate come alive, though, is Campbell’s command of action scenes, melding his grotesque, original visuals with imaginative set pieces to create a city you can get lost in, but would never want to be in.

Galveston (Galveston, by Sean Stewart)
In this tragic fantasy, after the cataclysmic Flood of 2004 that swept everything modern away, Galveston remains divided into Galveston Island, a place where technology is stuck at Dust Bowl levels and existence is hardscrabble at best, and Mardi Gras, a never-ending carnival where it’s always the Year of the Flood and a masquerade marches endlessly through streets ruled by magic. The two cities have an uneasy truce until the mayor of Galveston falls ill, causing a chain of events that threatens to upset that delicate balance and wreak even more havoc. As the heroes try to keep things from getting any worse, it becomes clear that the most they may be able to do is simply minimize the damage.

New Crobuzon (Perdido Street Station, by China Miéville)
The first third or so of Perdido Street Station sets up its decaying city and its crumbling infrastructure, building familiar, sympathetic characters out of its bizarre inhabitants. Then, Miéville goes to work tearing the city apart via both soul-rending horrors and the disproportionate responses from the government trying to put a stop to them. While it’s true there’s still architecture standing at the end of the novel, the destruction of New Crobuzon is similar to any of the other entries on the list— the difference is that where the buildings and structures are mostly unharmed, there are significantly fewer inhabitants. The final toll of the novel’s numerous disasters is as clear as any other cataclysm, and just as devastating.

Toronto (Brown Girl in the Ring, by Nalo Hopkinson)
The debut novel by genre powerhouse Nalo Hopkinson, Brown Girl in the Ring is the story of a young mother named Ti-Jeanne, who lives in a future Toronto turned into a “donut-hole city” due to urban decay. In the center, known as “The Burn,” a ruthless gangster named Rudy preys on those who couldn’t escape to the suburbs. The roadblocked section of city has adapted to its new situation by bringing back barter and agriculture as methods of subsistence. Of course, once the upper class looks to Rudy to supply them with freshly-harvested organs from The Burn, things only get crazier, and soon, various old-magics, criminals, and spirit-possessed individuals get involved in the intrigues.
What’s your favorite scarred SF/F cityscape?