Fantasy and Reality

After reading from The Space of Flows, I was thinking about what our imagined spaces—the cities and societies of science fiction and fantasy—might tell us about our beliefs (and our fantasies and fears) about the networked civilization we live in. The new high-speed train station in Madrid was an interesting and direct juxtaposition between our attachment (nostalgia?) for an old style of cultural and personal specificity and, on the other hand, our modern urge for a different kind of connection, with and within a wider, boundary-less world. But there was already a train station on that site before it was renovated, the high-speed train really did connect two, very-real cities, and the issue of whether they ought to have connected these cities at all had specific and real consequences, all because these are the constraints of existing in a 'real' lived-in reality. A city created in a science fiction novel or a fantasy film, however, is not beholden to these constraints.

But while thinking about the implicit meaning behind, say, the archaic Hogwarts castle in Harry Potter or the automated high-speed highways in Minority Report, I kept also going back to the real world. What is it that makes something "real" anyway? When you talk about fictional spaces, what are the characteristics that make them feel real, even when they're not? The specific evidence of authenticity we expect from our fictions reveals something about our truths. But what is that evidence? And has that required evidence—what we need from these stories to convince us they could/should be believed—changed over time? Does dystopic fiction, from 1984 to The Hunger Games, seem plausible (in their exaggerated way) because these kinds of stories foreground the separation of flow and place—the separation of the power of elites (represented by streamlined and sanitary spaces) and the (messy, chaotic) history invisible to them? Do we want to be reminded of, in Castells' words, the "structural schizophrenia" of contemporary society—of what we're losing when we gain? What do we 'get' out of creating these fantastic, unreal spaces?