The best dystopian books where cities pulsate with life and death

This book inspired me to morph my real-world research into a fictionalized account of an urban future. Mieville heads the “new weird” movement based on a type of urban, alternative-world fiction. A murder mystery wrapped inside a fantastical, dyadic city. A city divided physically, but also psychically as residents of the overlapping cities learn to “unsee” each other in their day-to-day affairs. Takes the two worlds of real-life unequal cities to its extreme and absurd level, where the “other” physically exists but is not acknowledged in the eyes of the non-other. Brilliant, illuminating fiction.

What could be more fun than Gods getting involved in city planning? Spy story wrapped inside a grand and mysterious history of once-supreme Gods now dormant (or not). Memorable characters. Don’t mess with the giant grunt Sigrud. Divine power with 6 Gods (light bearer, judge, warrior, seed-sower, trickster, and builder). Imagine holding a committee meeting with this group. Magical portals that enable back-and-forth between current gritty and past majestic city. A thought-provoking conclusion that speaks to worldwide conflict in real life today. 

The latter part of book has urban destruction on a massive scale done over and over. New York, just like a cat, has nine lives. But most of the book does not have an urban focus and it is somewhat of a misfit in this urban collection of best reads. Nonetheless, it is a sensational mind-spinning exposition on the precariousness of memory. It is the most mesmerizing and best page-turner on my list. What if your memory right now is not genuine but manufactured to feel very real? Now, suppose society at large absorbed these fabricated memories akin to a viral epidemic? You got it, multiple timelines and chaos. 

I am a big fan of the author’s nuanced and powerful writing style. The best-written book on my list. Collection of short stories that interweave personal details and idiosyncrasies with broader themes and omens. In “Scenic Route” (‘they have me up hard against the hood of the Cadillac Escalade, which is covered in the dust and dead insects of a thousand back roads’) and “Fairground” (‘school buses lined up like ducks at the crosswalk, waiting for the light to turn green, the faces of the secured population looking through the windows with indifference and resignation’), individuals dealing with internal tumult confront in matter-of-fact ways the stark presence of territories and people divided by check-point partitions. Sectoral partitions, segregated populations. Stark divisions in urban life normalized and routinized.

I’ll never look at a highway median strip the same way again. The oldest entry on my list, a classic that describes in tortuous detail the epitome of urban alienation. The urban prison within which the Robinson Crusoe-ish protagonist finds himself is an external setting created by our impersonal, uncaring urban life, but it is also an inner state of mind of semi-comforting psychological detachment. Could we city-dwellers all be urban castaways, no matter our physical location? Ballard’s theme of cars perpetuating dehumanization in Concrete Island followed his urban-focused novel Crash published the previous year.