On Arkady Martine’s first trip to Singapore, following the advice of an old professor, one of her first ports of call was the Singapore City Gallery. It’s a city planning museum that charts the country’s 60-year evolution into a modern metropolis whose skyline, mainly the Marina Bay Sands hotel with its distinctive “boat” on top, has become synonymous with the idea of a futuristic city steeped in polished, techno-corporate sci-fi aesthetics. As a trained city planner, Martine’s interest in Singapore’s urban planning history was obvious, but as a science fiction writer—there’s such a marvelous amount of infrastructural detail in A Memory Called Empire—there’s plenty to unpack about Singapore’s image as a “city of the future,” too.
“It’s part of the scale,” says Martine, who was here in November for the 2023 Singapore Writers’ Festival, along with her wife and fellow author Vivian Shaw. “I will fully admit that I got here and I was like ‘wow, that looks like someone landed on top of three buildings.’ That’s not a thing I see in my daily life, and I’ve lived in big cities with very cool architecture.” When we spoke, she hadn’t been over to Marina Bay Sands yet, but had observed it from a distance; if you’re staying in that part of town, it’s frankly hard not to see it. “There’s an echo for a westerner, of a kind of still-capture of a childhood film image. I’m thinking mostly about Star Wars, but not just Star Wars, it’s Blade Runner, it’s the whole thing.”
Martine enjoys wandering around, sticking to public transport, and the perks of getting lost (“you learn stuff and get better food that way”), which means ample opportunities for her to observe new environments as a wanderer. Her preferred methods of exploration inevitably involve drifting away from the most touristy spots that serve as visual fuel for fictional on-screen dystopias in Westworld and Equals. “[Singapore] does not feel slick like that except in specific, very designed places,” Martine says of the country’s tourist-facing public image. “But those are there.”
I’d spent most of my adult life in the US, holding my home country at arm’s length while trying to reconcile my interests in science fiction with “smart city” marketing and Singapore’s carefully-cultivated reputation as a sparkling-clean, forward-thinking metropolis, albeit one with high-strung, often draconian approaches to media transparency, citizen “management,” and freedom of expression. For many, it does well to live up to this image; for someone trying to integrate back into a home they never really knew, it’s a little bit like parsing an uncanny valley of tolerable, all-too-familiar dystopia.
In 2020, just after Singapore’s appearance on the third season of Westworld, researcher and academic Joanne Leow wrote:
“One of the central tropes in Westworld is to blur that classic binary between fantasy and reality, artifice and performance versus the real and the lived. Are the robots more human than human; are the humans much like subjects caught in simulated loops? Decades of a Master Plan for both inhabitants and urban planning in Singapore have produced a carefully calibrated social, political, and spatial order. A fiction and vision made material and camouflaged by imported greenery. Singapore’s relation to the unreal and artificial is no clearer than its now-ideal status for numerous photoshoots and luxe film sets. The state has always had this powerful need to be seen, to be recognized, to be part of a seamless, smooth, globalized cityscape and skyline.”
Like Leow, as a then-diaspora Singaporean who watched my home country as a Southeast Asian stand-in for the usual dystopian sprawl of Los Angeles, it was hard not to think of the difficult relationship between Singaporean political priorities and the city as an ongoing extension of said priorities: an orderly place of efficiency, stability, and conformity. Here, more so than other big cities, there is a place and time for everything, with infantilizing PSAs and reminders of the social contract and correct civic behavior on public housing notice boards and train platforms.
A Memory Called Empire is where Martine’s professional background shines in all its technicolor space-opera glory; it’s one of a handful of sci-fi books where the relationship between citizen and public space feels deeply, specifically personal to me. In Teixcalaan, I see familiar hints of top-down policymaking that grease the empire’s efficient wheels. Through Mahit’s eyes, I can see how meticulously Martine digs into the culture of infrastructure and the use of memory as a political, institutional weapon, manifesting in various ways in city architecture and historical buildings. And most of all, I see my long and exhausting relationship with the US, my even more exhausting relationship with Singapore, and how a life split between these two places has shaped my own perceptions of urban dystopias both real and fictional.
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A Memory Called Empire
Usually in a sci-fi setting, the city functions as a snapshot in time that helps to illustrate how characters engage with their environment; for Martine, this might involve how long it takes for a character to get to their job, or if they even have a job to get to at all. It is not so much concerned with planning, or what drives planning decisions. “Fiction in general, and science fiction specifically, is bad at thinking about city planning as a discipline,” she explains. “Mostly because it feels absolutely dull, it’s worse than economics. I say this as someone who’s trained as a city planner and who loves it very much and actually finds it deeply fascinating and exciting and horrifically political.” More often than not, she finds that the idea of a constructed, planned city in science fiction—with some exceptions—is simply a given.
“In the US they go on and on…that planning is some kind of neutral process, and that the point of a planner is to be a facilitator,” says Martine. “This is why I ended up in politics and policy and not in planning, because to be perfectly honest, it’s bullshit.” She cites the origins of Victorian infrastructure as a starting point for the western view that the constructed environment determines behavior, “which is that there are too many people and too little space and it’s not sanitary, which is all true.” The solution is not actually ‘everyone has to live in a perfect little garden house,’ but that’s the ideal that is constructed.” Martine hints at this topic (albeit using the smaller scale of a single building) in her recent novel Rose/House. But the city is a different creature. “I don’t know a ton about the experience of life in Singapore, not really at all,” says Martine. “And the way it is written about in planning textbooks, articles, examples, there’s an almost…to condemn my countrymen a bit, a gleeful sense that ‘oh, if we could only trap everybody on an island, we could do it too’.”
Cities are complicated; smart cities, where constant data harvesting and surveillance is almost unavoidable, much more so. A lot of discussion has unfolded over the years of the idea of authenticity in Singapore (aided by the insufferable “Disneyland with the Death Penalty” essay by William Gibson over twenty years ago), which prompts me to ask Martine about the role of authoritarianism and “authenticity” in a city of the future. One of her areas of focus is climate resiliency planning, which necessitates a fluid, responsive approach to drastic environmental changes; I ask her if this requires an inherently authoritarian streak, as helping people survive difficult conditions within a state framework is inevitably going to require hard compromises, or violence. “Yes,” she says carefully, “but only in the sense that I find that all forms of complex social arrangements have an element of authoritarianism to them, especially all state forms. And I want that to be a neutral statement that is neither positive nor negative. It’s just true, for me at least.”
I ask if she’s heard about the exorbitant NEOM megacity project in Saudi Arabia, which includes a wall-like smart city called “The Line” that will supposedly house 9 million people and run on 100% renewable energy; if there ever was a truly fantastical science fiction-driven dystopia project going on, that would surely be it. “[Those projects] are art. They’re not real yet,” Martine says matter-of-factly. “You show me one that has 9 million people living in it and I’ll tell you what I think.” She remains perplexed by the design; since The Line is also displacing and imprisoning local desert tribes to make way for its existence, I suggest that maybe it’s supposed to literally function as a wall. “But why do you want to make [The Line] so linear?” muses Martine aloud. “What’s the driving thing behind that? Why that choice? And that one I continuously have trouble wrapping my head around. Aside from ‘that’s how a shopping mall works’ which feels like it’s too simple an answer.”
The shopping mall vibe is one I know well—Singapore’s prevalence of malls, stitched together by basements and walkable underground passages, is well-known. A shopping mall as a structure is a pure uncut vein of hypercapitalism—designed to orient you in a space dictated by advertising and spending, easily readable and pleasantly generic enough to avoid any friction. The wealth of sanitized shopping malls is one of the most common criticisms of Singapore, and one that often comes up against discussions about the concept of cultural authenticity, especially given that land is at a premium, the neophilic culture, and the government’s love of shiny new “hubs” and tightly controlled real estate developments. But the shopping mall is also an easy distraction from bigger discussions about how parts of even the most “futurisitc” cities—even smart cities—can diverge from their intended design.
“I don’t feel like you can sanitize a city, that it’s possible to do so,” she says. “Cities inevitably complicate… they’re full of a lot of people very close together; it’s the best thing about them and the worst thing about them at the same time.” And so in this dense mess of humanity, spontaneity and practicality tend to arise in unexpected ways – the use and reuse of space by its actual inhabitants rather than its designers. “So can a writer write a city of the future that isn’t authentic? Of course. If you’re thinking about designing an actual one, as soon as you’ve got it, it’s going to be used by people in it and it will develop forms of authenticity anyway.”
Martine, who has spent years living in multiple cities around the world, is still impressed by Singapore’s futuristic architecture, especially in the way greenery and nature are functionally incorporated into buildings to improve ventilation, air circulation, and heat management. “I’d only read about it in theory, I hadn’t seen it, and I’m really glad I got to,” she adds. “It’s an interesting place, it’s different than others I’ve been in.” She doesn’t feel like Singapore is a definitive city of the future or a “science fictional” place in the way that it is sometimes discussed, in games of online broken telephone about the payoff between the will of a one-party state and having omnipresent “smart” future-forward infrastructure. I agree with her that being here is easy; it is easy to be told what to do on the train or how to take the bus, where to stand or buy a ticket, but yet, Martine also finds it more complicated than the cities of her childhood.
“It has a particular kind of – and again, I’ve been here for a week so what do I know—willingness to do the kind of self-surgery and projection into the future that very few other places I’ve been to have expressed so clearly,” she says thoughtfully. “Like not an excisement of the past, but a ‘here’s how we changed ourselves.’ It’s almost like transhumanism. Everywhere does this, but most places don’t make it a point of telling you. And here I have a sense of being told all the time.”
Perhaps this is what being a “city of the future” is all about—Martine’s description of self-surgery is frighteningly precise and feels right to me. The overlap between science fiction is far less about glass-wrapped skyscrapers and driverless cars, but a self-consciousness, or self-awareness, of how cities are made and remade, and the relationship between a place and its people. But in my fixation on all the ways one can dissect the reality of my own city, I’m turning into my own worst enemy, and Martine is quick to snap me out of it. “The future’s right here, we’re in it,” she says with a smile. “There’s no future. There’s only now.”
