The Chicago skyline may as well be threaded into the double helix of my DNA. I’ve got the city’s iconic flag tattooed on my forearm. I still call its tallest skyscraper “the Sears Tower” because it feels right. On the first days of summer-esque weather, I bike along the Lake Shore Path and bask in the high spirits of the city surrounding me. I guess you could say I’m one of those Chicagoans—the type that loves my city beyond measure. When I travel, I compare every location to my home, and the conclusion is typically: “It’s nice, but it’s no Chicago.”
Why do I tell you all this? Well, first, I want you to understand the article you’re about to read is laced with bias. I love my city, and I won’t be shy about it. Second, I tell you in case this feeling resonates, regardless of where you’re from. If you adore the city you call home, I think the idea I’m about to explore will resonate with you as it does for me.
And what idea is that, exactly?
The utter joy and crushing despair of seeing your city in an SFF novel.
I’m sure there are countless New Yorkers and Londoners who know this mixed bag of emotions all too well. Fantasy and sci-fi books set in the real world seem drawn to the magnetic metropolitan forces of NYC or London. My city, Chicago, isn’t quite so common in the SFF realm—as is the case with many other places, big and small. So when it does show up, my initial reaction is almost always a big smile, possibly some goosebumps if the author mentions a favorite neighborhood or proffers a great description of an iconic landmark. Then comes the sense of despair.
Maybe “despair” is too strong a word for what I feel—I don’t discover a book is set in Chicago and immediately find myself torn between undulating extremes of happiness and sorrow. Instead, the despair is kind of a preemptive reaction; it comes from the heavy weight of expectation. I know, from the second I recognize a Chicago landmark or see the city’s name on the page, that I will measure the book against my knowledge and understanding of my hometown, and it may be found wanting…
Buy the Book
One for My Enemy
Or at least, that’s how I used to feel. Lately, thanks to the help of some excellent SFF books set in Chicago, I’ve started to shed my preconceptions and enjoy the spirit of my city, whether or not the book in question gets every detail painstakingly correct.
Take Dark Matter by Blake Crouch (soon to be an Apple TV series adapted by the author). The book’s primary setting is Chicago, and Crouch immediately takes some liberties. He places the Village Tap—a very real bar in Roscoe Village—and places it closer to Logan Square, where protagonist Jason Dessen lives with his family.
At first, I balked. Sacré Bleu! How could a bar that exists in Spot A be fictionalized into Spot B? I was exasperated by the narrative choice when I first read the book, but soon came to question my knee-jerk reaction. What was I thinking—did it really matter, in the grand scheme of things? Village Tap is a fine establishment, and frankly, it would fit just fine in Logan Square as it does in Roscoe Village. It served the story and let Crouch blend the atmosphere of a few Chicago bars into a single location.
I suppose the primary reason for my initial ire (which, again, didn’t last very long— gotta give myself some credit) is that Dark Matter exists in a hard sci-fi space. The Chicago (and broader world) of the novel is remarkably similar to our reality, with one big sci-fi twist (which I don’t care to spoil here). The more realistic a book is, the more my alarm bells go off when something doesn’t fit or feel quite right. Crouch soon reminded me, both figuratively with the book and literally in his Goodreads response linked in the paragraph above, that a setting can be inspired by a city. It can embody the spirit of a place without being a one-to-one recreation of its real-world counterpart. Thanks to Dark Matter, the joy I felt at Chicago’s starring role in a book outweighed the nit-picking I might have previously given so much attention to.
From there, my world opened up! I revisited The Dresden Files after a years-long hiatus. Jim Butcher’s wizard detective series makes it a lot easier to suspend disbelief. His iteration of the Windy City contains Fae, vampires, demons, and a menagerie of supernatural beings. To be fair, I’ve only read five Dresden Files books so far, but I’ve really come to enjoy Butcher’s creative use of the Windy City. Now, it’s a treat when I encounter in real life one of the locations he uses for Harry Dresden’s exploits and investigations. One savvy reader has even compiled a map of locations (or approximate locations) of many key moments from the series.
The Dresden Files leans heavily on its fantasy roots, and that makes the Chicago of the series uniquely eerie and supernatural. Beneath the tracks of the L or in the shadows of the city skyline, who knows what horrific or wondrous things you’ll find? A ghost haunting a local graveyard? Vampires lurking in abandoned buildings? Butcher packs Chicago full of new sights and always gives his fantasy version of the metropolis a fun twist.
And finally, we have Ling Ma’s Severance, a book I’ve written about at length, praising its depiction of corporate work. One of the main storylines carries the novel’s protagonist on a journey through the Chicago suburbs, offering a different take on Chicagoland through a post-apocalyptic lens. After disease renders most of the global population dead or zombified (a death sentence itself), Candace Chen joins a band of survivors seeking the promised shelter of a mega-mall in the Midwestern suburbs.
Severance puts Chicago on the other side of a deadly outbreak. The book doesn’t attempt to capture a modern-day version of the city. Instead, it uses Chicago as a canvas onto which it can paint a catastrophic future. When Ma describes the shopping complex, it’s easy for me to plaster Woodfield Mall over the vision she creates. Instead of the smell of Auntie Anne’s and the colorful storefronts, we get a stark and repurposed mall where survivors eke out a meager living. Separating the city I know from my lived experience by pushing it through a fictional (though admittedly prescient) pandemic is a smart and effective way to utilize a location for narrative purposes while providing recognizable landmarks for readers who know the place well.
I owe a debt of gratitude to these three books. They took the apprehension I used to experience whenever I encountered fictionalized versions of Chicago—a swirling mess of elation and trepidation—and transformed it into eager anticipation. Rather than worrying about the potential for missed opportunities or lackluster details, I now feel excitement: How will the next SFF author that sets a book in Chicago adapt the city and its familiar spaces to align with their vision? I have no idea, but I can’t wait to find out…
Now, when I see Chicgao or one of its many famous landmarks in a fantasy or sci-fi novel, I’ll devour the book in the hopes that the author can whisk me away with their unique take on the city I adore. And on that note, I turn it over to you: Where is your favorite place in the world, and how does it fare in SFF books? And do you have any Chicago-based fiction to recommend? Let me know in the comments!
Cole Rush writes words. A lot of them. For the most part, you can find those words at The Quill To Live or on Twitter @ColeRush1. He voraciously reads epic fantasy and science-fiction, seeking out stories of gargantuan proportions and devouring them with a bookwormish fervor. His favorite books are: The Divine Cities Series by Robert Jackson Bennett, The Long Way To A Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers, and The House in the Cerulean Sea by TJ Klune.
Right at the tail end of 2019 I read Infinite Detail by Tim Maughan, which is set in Bristol, and not just that, most of it is set in Stokes Croft, which is the area I live in. It was really odd being able to look out of the window and see locations and buildings from the book. It also rang pretty true, if someone left a tank parked round here, it would be covered in graffiti by the next morning.
Given that the book deals with a global catastrophe, it wasn’t always the most pleasant reading, but I was glad I read it in 2019, because I’m not sure I could have coped reading it during 2020 and lockdown.
The Keepers is a MG fantasy series that stats out in Chicago. The author even calls it the Sears Tower despite the books being released well after the name change.
Ilona Andrews’ iteration of Atlanta, post magical apocalypse, was such fun I had to share it with a family member who lived there.
N.K. Jemisin’s The City We Became features a wonderful magical version of modern NYC, outer boroughs as well as The City. I even recognized aspects of what she put in for my own hometown of Staten Island — but in that case at least I felt the exaggerated version she portrayed veered a little too far toward mean-spirited caricature, esp toward the end. Although I loved the book as a whole, it ended on a very sour note for me and I haven’t yet been able to bring myself to read the sequel.
I grew up in the Chicago burbs and that image of Chicago brought a tear. The most perfect city against the Midwest sky.
@@.-@ – the sequel will probably pleasantly surprise you if you’re from SI.
Isn’t Chicago and its environs the setting for the Divergent series?
I very rarely encounter this being from a smaller town in central IL, but Dan Simmons, who grew up in an even smaller adjacent town fictionalized both his hometown and mine of Peoria IL pretty well in Summer of Night and to a lesser extent in Winter Haunting. The latter is incidentally the point in his career where I’m pretty sure the combination of 9/11 and his own divorce drove him into the willing arms of the right-wing extremism that many people of his generation were and are susceptible to.
Speaking of Dan Simmons and small towns, he also uses Crawfordsville, IN and our mutual Alma Mater, Wabash College, to significant effect in Hyperion. Any alumni of the college from that era will recognize names, places, and people.
The other most notable personal example is found in Red Prophet by Orson Scott Card. Much of the story is set in a thinly fictionalized version of my hometown, Battle Ground, IN. I can remember the rather disconcerting feeling of reading the book and knowing that exactly where he was describing was within a 5 minute walk of my house. The house in which my father now resides overlooks Prophet’s Rock and big chunks of the battlefield of the real Battle of Tippecanoe that Card adapted for story purposes.
Generally Kitchener only shows up in the fiction of people who’ve lived here or driven through or had some reason to know it exists. Harry Turtledove is an exception, using American Occupied Kitchener as one of many settings in his South Wins alternate timeline. It highlights a hazard of using places like Kitchener, which may have histories well known to locals but not to foreigners. In Kitchener’s case, the city was renamed from Berlin to Kitchener in a [understatement] contentious [/understatement] referendum that Turtledove’s history would have butterflied away. Someone must have mentioned this to him, as it becomes American Occupied Berlin, Ontario partway through the series.
The joy of seeing my home of Pittsburgh is also equally countered with despair by the fact that people like to blow it up, as seen in the RPG Gamma World in the adventure Rites of Passage, and in Marvel’s New Universe Starbrand, and the follow-up The Pitt. And if you squint, it’s in the Sterling Lanier novel Hiero’s Journey as the Realm of the House.
There is an SF novel set in my home city, but I’ve never read Queen City Jazz.
My hometown is small enough that even most of Canada doesn’t know it exists, but I’m currently living in Toronto, which is mainly notable to me for being the first real-world city to be obliterated in Robotech* (shortly before the Rain of Death wiped out every other city on the planet).
(* which I first encountered as novels, so it counts.)
Unfortunately, as a Calgarian, the only times I get to encounter my city in genre fiction is when it’s a stand-in for a better-known, usually American, city.
Vancouver at least got Mass Effect.
As a lifelong Chicagoan, I remember reading Dark Matter and being perplexed by some of the more glaring geographical blunders. But most egregious is when he described the south side as basically a burned out industrial wasteland. I was born and raised on Chicago’s south side, and I can assure everyone that it’s mostly middle-class homes and typical businesses—not tumbleweeds and blocks and blocks of gutted buildings.
I don’t know how much time Blake Crouch has actually spent in Chicago, but apparently his research didn’t involve venturing south of The Loop.
My city is only a city by Alaskan standards, but it has been used as a setting in SF. I recall nothing about the title or author of the story, but I do recall the thrilling and deadly struggle through the backcountry, which is indeed rugged enough to require bushwhacking and a lot of spare time…to reach the spaceport.
In order to go into space. By rocket.
There is no way to upgrade our current tiny spaceport to take humans into orbit. There is no place to put any more spaceport. There is no way to get a human-lifting rocket to the site in the first place. It is a spaceport for satellites. It is where it is because it is a good location from which to throw satellites up out of the well.
As a life long and current resident of NYC, I know that “mixed bag” referred to all too well. When I read Jemisin’s “The City Born Great”, I could visualize many of the scenes, including those at the FDR Drive. I haven’t yet read The City We Became; it’s on the “pile”.
I’ve only been to Minneapolis briefly, a couple of times, but I do wonder how those who live there feel when reading Emma Bull’s War For the Oaks.
It’s a whole country rather than a city, but Robert J Sawyer said in one book that New Zealand puts beets into hamburgers. Historically speaking this is true, but we had managed to mostly stamp out this disgusting practice by the time the book was published.
@16; aside from certain imported fast food chains, Australia proudly maintains that a hamburger isn’t a proper hamburger unless it includes beetroot, and that replacing it with a slice of gherkin is a vile blasphemy!
David Brin’s The Postman passes briefly through my current home of Eugene, Oregon, though he replaced the student union, where I worked at time of publication, with a fictional version dedicated to Theodore Sturgeon.
Ursula Le Guin does a much more respectful treatment of Portland in Lathe of Heaven.
My previous home is most noted for its namesake, Eddie LaCrosse, sword-for-hire and private detective in Alex Bledsoe’s fantasy series. Alex also names several of his fantasy city-states after small towns in southwestern Wisconsin.
As for Chicago SFF, I have to give a nod to Early Edition, the CBS series where Kyle Chandler found tomorrow’s Sun-Times–and a mysterious orange cat–on his doorstep every morning.
Someone setting a story in your city and getting obvious bits of it wrong because they didn’t do their research is annoying, of course (Connie Willis), but a subtler way of being annoying is to set a story in your city, get it generally right, but strive just a little too hard and too obviously to include all the cool landmark bits, so that you feel like you’re watching a story from the top of a tour bus. Not every film set in New York has to include a scene involving the Statue of Liberty! Not every film set in London has to feature Big Ben somehow!
Particularly egregious is when you warp geography in order to squeeze all the cool bits in – when your characters dive into a tunnel by Tower Bridge and emerge, minutes later, outside Westminster Abbey, for example, GUY RITCHIE.
In Severance I pictured Woodfield Mall as well! Now I’m trying to remember if there was something specific in the book that called out the mall or if it was just describing the road they took to get there.
I also read the ending as her driving into the city along Milwaukee Avenue until she has to leave the car and walk off into the (proverbial) sunset.
I loved that novel – but I’m always a sucker for parables in zombie novels. I really liked seeing her work through the way she was trapped in her own mind and deciding to finally take agency in her life in a world where no one can escape their own demons.
Jacqueline Carey thinly disguised her Michigan hometown in her fantasy series that begins with Dark Currents. My husband and I were personally very annoyed with the carelessness of Jim Butcher’s depictions of Chicago in the Dresden Files. There is no warehouse district on Lake Michigan–we also lived on the South side and it was obvious he had never bothered to visit. I recognized real places from old Florida and the Bahamas in Tim Power’s On Stranger Tides and of course, Las Vegas in his books like Last Call
Clive Barker’s Cabal started off in Calgary. It was pretty obvious he’d never been here.
Stross’ London — and the rest of the UK — feels like the London I live in. Aaronovitch’s London is accurate and hyperlocal – when I cross the footbridge over the overground next to Ackley Burgley, I think – `Oh, does he live in Tufnell Park also?’
Of US fantasy authors who use `London’ without any connection to the place — feh! You are not my people.
Leiber’s Lankhmar (SF?) has more in common with our teeming cosmopolitan city then any of your texts.
—
And then there is Oxbridge. JK Rowling has done more to shape two decades of students self articulation than any actual text of the city — including Pullman. `OMG, we are in Hogwarts!!!’ (yes, but without the transphobia, their friends respond)
—
Doctorow’s Bay Area has always felt pretty damn accurate – and again, became part of the self image for local school students. (Back then; now, I do not know.)
There are three cities that show up not infrequently in sf/f that I know and love so well, and not infrequently aren’t like the cities at all: NYC, New Orleans and Havana.
I read the title of the article when it came through my RSS feed (yes, people still use those), and my mind added a subtitle: “And when you see New York City in yet another book and can’t roll your eyes fast enough”
Grew up in the SF Bay Area myself, which sometimes gets some love. Only a few books I’ve read reference the town I grew up in (Livermore), if they do it’s because of the National Laboratory in it. Usually that’s either from authors who live there (Kevin J Anderson), or in the general area (Vernor Vinge).
I’ve read a few books that take place in Portland (Oregon), which isn’t my hometown but I’ve been here 20 years. One of the protagonists (who just moved to town) notes that when she says she doesn’t drink coffee, everyone looks at her like she grew another head, which is perfectly accurate.
Haven’t seen Sydney in SFF lit, but it does tend to make brief appearances in movies – mostly disaster movies – to show how widespread the destruction is. Everyone knows the bridge and opera house, now you get to see them destroyed!
(Pacific Rim has a particularly odd one where it decided the wall ran beneath the bridge. If they had taken four and a half seconds to look at a map of Sydney, they would have noticed that, no, no this is not in any way practical. I love Pacific Rim, but oy, that Sydney appearance (and the two ‘Australian’ characters)… so cringeworthy!)
Pacific Rim has a particularly odd one where it decided the wall ran beneath the bridge. If they had taken four and a half seconds to look at a map of Sydney, they would have noticed that, no, no this is not in any way practical.
Not least because, to fit underneath the bridge, the wall would have to be low enough that the kaiju could simply have stepped over it.
The only science fiction book that I’ve ever read set in my hometown, Winnipeg, was Quantum Night, by Robert J Sawyer; and, though I think Sawyer’s from Mississauga, he gets the details of Winnipeg absolutely perfect; even things like “When did the Polo Park McNally-Robinson shut down?”and making one of his academic characters a Mennonite.
@9 – I live near Washington, DC. Similar problem, generally either invaded by aliens or in the blast radius of an asteroid strike. (And in the movies/on TV, often surprisingly devoid of traffic.)
Though I was highly amused when the airpark 20 minutes or so from my house got a significant upgrade of its terminal and facilities courtesy of Mira Grant and Blackout.