Hello, SFIA audio listeners. In this month's Nebula exclusive, big alien theory,

we're asked at the reason alien civilizations might be rare is because most aliens are huge.

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This episode is brought to you by Brilliant.

We often picture vast megacities in the future, and wonder if there will be utopian

garden scape arcoologies, or horrid hives of filth populated by gangs of mutants and cannibals.

Personally, I don't see why you'd have to pick, either or.

So today we'll be looking at the concept of mega cities, both from the science fiction

perspective, which is often dystopian hives of crime and despair, and the potential future

of giant cities and how they might be anything but such dystopias and how they might

do that.

In truth, we rarely see large cities as very nice places in science fiction.

Negative examples like Mega City 1 from the Judge Dread comic book series or the various

high cities like Necromunda from Warhammer 40,000 show extreme examples of crime and decay,

and the entire cyberpunk genre is basically built on crowded dark metropolises, but even the more

positive examples are fairly dark.

This may not be surprising.

A lot of the cyberpunk genre, for instance, is strongly influenced by mid-20th century film

noir, literally black film or dark film, frequently featuring hard-boiled detectives investigating crimes in

dark and crime-ridden cities, those works tend to be heavy on pessimism and fatalism.

Indeed, maybe the nicest example I know of is Isaac Asmos' classic novel, The Caves of Steel,

...