Floating cities and islands in fiction

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In science fiction and fantasy, floating cities and islands are a common trope, ranging from cities and islands that float on water to ones that float in the atmosphere of a planet by purported scientific technologies or by magical means. While very large floating structures have been constructed or proposed in real life, aerial cities and islands remain in the realm of fiction.

Seaborne cities and islands

Seaborne

Richard Head‘s 1673 novel The Floating Island describes a fictional island named Scotia Moria. In The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle, the characters sail to a floating island, which later becomes fixed in place. In the DC comics story of Wonder Woman, Themyscira is a group of floating islands. In Jules Verne‘s Propeller Island, the characters are on an artificial floating island that is actually a huge ship. In Yann Martel‘s novel Life of Pi, there is a floating island.

Airborne cities and islands

Earth

In the treatise De Grandine et Tonitruis ("On Hail and Thunder", 815),

I turned back and perceived a vast Opaque Body between me and the sun, moving forwards towards the island; it appeared to be about two Miles high, and hid the Sun six or seven minutes.[...] the Reader can hardly conceive my Astonishment, to behold an Island in the Air, inhabited by Men, who are able (as it should seem) to raise, or sink, or put into a Progressive Motion, as they pleased.[3]

During the 1920s, science fiction author Hugo Gernsback speculated about floating cities of the future, suggesting that 10,000 years hence "the city the size of New York will float several miles above the surface of the earth, where the air is cleaner and purer and free from disease carrying bacteria." To stay in the air, "four gigantic generators will shoot earthward electric rays which by reaction with the earth produce the force to keep the city aloft."^[4]

In 1960, the architects

In Isaac Asimov's story "Shah Guido G.", the hereditary Secretary-General of the United Nations ("Sekjen") is a tyrant who rules the Earth from a flying island called Atlantis.

Venus

A design similar to Fuller's Cloud Nine might permit habitation in the upper atmosphere of

(2003) features floating cities forever floating in the Jovian atmosphere, a worthwhile enterprise due to their ability to extract useful gases. The book concentrates on the cultural differences (and political tensions) developing between "Jovian" humans and Earthbound ones.

Fictional examples

This section may contain irrelevant references to popular culture. Please remove the content or add citations to reliable and independent sources. (November 2023)

Literature

• A floating city called Laputa is the third destination that Lemuel Gulliver visits in Johnathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels.
• Sky Island is a 1912 book by L. Frank Baum with the titular area split between the Kingdom of the Blues and the Pinks.
• The Flying Islands of the Night (1913) by James Whitcomb Riley, with illustrations by Franklin Booth.^[12]
• "Cities in the Air" by Edmond Hamilton (Air Wonder Stories, November–December 1929).
• The
  spindizzy
  drive.
• In the novel The Ringworld Engineers (1979), Louis Wu seeks a way to save the Ringworld by bartering for information in the library of a floating city.
• The novel Orion Shall Rise (1983) by Poul Anderson features an aerostat city called Skyholm, located above – and dominating – a post-apocalyptic France.
• In the novel Maiden Flight (1988), a post-apocalyptic civilization lives in floating cities named for some of the now-destroyed land-based cities, e.g. Calgary 5. These are highly-evolved spherical mile-wide aerostats that follow wind patterns across the face of nuclear-war-ravaged Earth. Travel between such cities is by zeppelin.^[13]
• In the 1992 novel, Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson, a floating collection of refugee craft are attached surrounding the decommissioned nuclear aircraft carrier, the USS Enterprise, to form The Raft.
• Airhaven is a floating city in the Mortal Engines Quartet, that, through attaching gas bags, lifted itself into the air to avoid being devoured by the mobile Traction Cities looking for resources on an Earth devastated millennia ago by the Sixty Minute War.
• The Tangled Lands, a collection of short stories by
  Tobias S. Buckell
  , references a lost city called Jhandpara that was once powered by magical means but became consumed by magic-seeking brambles.
• There are numerous floating habitats on the Venus-like planet Chilo in
  Tobias S. Buckell's novel Sly Mongoose. Buckell credits Geoffrey A. Landis with providing the background information on the floating cities.^[14]
• Saga of Seven Suns by Kevin J. Anderson
  has giant, occupied gas-mining platforms that mine the hydrogen necessary to, among other things, distill into ekti, a vital stardrive fuel.
• Saturn's Children
  begins in a floating city on Venus.
• Geoffrey A. Landis's novel The Sultan of the Clouds features floating cities in the Venus atmosphere and orbital airships.
• Similar to the famous 1990s Mars trilogy about colonization and terraforming of Mars, Pamela Sargent wrote from 1986 to 2001 starting with Venus of Dreams a trilogy set on Venus where from cloud settlements a terraformed Venus is created.
• In Hannu Rajaniemi's novel The Quantum Thief, the Mars colony began as a slave-labor latifundium. After war developed, all entities began taking turns being the beings who kept the city rolling (and deflecting the permanent attack vectors that had been created during the war). The city kept rolling, with everyone's help.
• The War of Powers series by Robert E. Vardeman and Victor Milán features a Sky City ruled by a race of human overlords called the Sky born who conquered the city from its original reptilian inhabitants. The city is powered by dark magic and floats in a set pattern over 5 surface cities.
• The mobile floating pirate city-state of
  Armada in China Miéville's novel The Scar (2002) has accreted in the seas of Bas-Lag
  from multiple ships and boats over centuries of development.
• In Paul Stewart and Chris Riddell's The Edge Chronicles series, Sanctaphrax is a city-state built upon an enormous floating rock. It was the seat of knowledge and academia in The Edge. It was lost to Open Sky after its anchor-chain became un-tethered during a violent storm.
• In the Japanese manga series One Piece, an island known as Skypiea, originally believed to be a myth, resides far within the skies above the seas of the Grandline.

Movies

• In the 1936 film serial Flash Gordon, Prince Vultan and his winged Hawkmen dwell in Sky City, a metropolis that floats in the sky.
• The Castle in the Air from the animated movie The Phantom Tollbooth (1970).
• Cloud City on the planet
  Bespin, in the Star Wars film The Empire Strikes Back (1980).^[15]
• Hayao Miyazaki's animated film Castle in the Sky (1986) involves a floating city hidden in the clouds called "Laputa", a name borrowed from Swift's Gulliver's Travels.
• In the anime film Steamboy (2004), a "Steam Castle" was shown, which was essentially a floating city, kept in the air by means of steam that was directed towards the soil.
• Metro City in the film Astro Boy (2009) is floating above the surface.
• In Avatar (2009), the Hallelujah Mountains are large floating islands that feature as a battlefield in the climax of the film.
• In the 2013 movie Elysium, the wealthiest class of humanity lives in an advanced toroidal-shaped space station orbiting the Earth at a high altitude.
• The 2019 movie Alita: Battle Angel based on the manga Gunnm by Yukito Kishiro involves a wealthy sky city named Zalem.

Television series

• Stratos, on the planet Ardana, in Star Trek episode "The Cloud Minders".
• In Firefly episode "Trash", the planet Bellerophon is the site of dozens of floating estates with "gracious living, ocean views and state-of-the-art security."
• Atlantis from the Stargate universe is a "city-ship" which is capable of flight and intergalactic travel. Due to the amount of power required to keep it airborne, it is frequently shown floating on water, but it could theoretically float at a fixed location in space. The Nox of Stargate SG-1 have floating cities.
• Airlandis in the animated television series Dragon Flyz (1996).
• Sky Realm in the animated television series Sky Dancers (1997).
• In the manga and anime series One Piece (1997-...), there are Sky Islands, cities built on a specific type of cloud that has hard, land-like properties, allowing civilizations to have ground to traverse and build on using the same cloud material, along with an ocean-like cloud throughout, making it a close parallel to a normal earthbound island. The unique environment of the Grand Line, an equatorial ocean that circles the globe and possesses all matter of mythical weather patterns, islands and equally mythical sea-behemoths, allows for these Sky Islands to occur regularly – yet are so rarely witnessed even the denizens of the legendary Grand-Line perceive them as a myth.
• Supertown is the floating city of the New Gods that appears in the Justice League (2001) episode "Twilight".
• The main setting in the 2004–2007 2D animated TV series Dragon Hunters and its 3D movie-prequel.
• The animated television show My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic (2010–2019) depicts a city made entirely of clouds called Cloudsdale, which is home to the Pegasi and whose name is a pun on the Clydesdale horse breed.
• In the 2011 animated TV series
  Mumm-Ra
  's four Power Stones.
• The anime television series Girls und Panzer (2012-...) features "school ships": massive ships that contain a school campus and a town on their surface.
• In the animated web-series RWBY (2013-...), the city of Atlas floats directly over the city of Mantle. The power to make it float comes from the Relic of Creation, housed in a vault underneath the city.
• The animated series, She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (2018–2020), has the magical floating island, called Mystacore.
• The LEGO science-fantasy series Legends of Chima features Cavora, a floating mountain responsible for distributing elemental chi falls to the population below. Cavora used to be the base of the Phoenix Castle and was later pushed up as a result of the first Great Illumination. It also has a protective forcefield that repels intruders and sanctuary for the Legend Beasts, but it's shown that the Crawlers have been able to bypass this and artificially block the falls.