ABSTRACT
Chapter 6 begins by returning to early twentieth-century science fiction to demonstrate how modernism influenced urban utopian visions about the future. However, with the rise of computerization in the 1960s, the depiction of cities in science fiction becomes increasingly less future-oriented. More and more, during the late twentieth century, science-fiction films are set in cities of the past or dilapidated urban environments in the present. These narratives repeatedly posit the problem of differentiating between humans and computers, often set in a city that is morphing or decaying. In sum, while the city embodied a modern utopia in early science fiction, it has lost this function throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
