The Bubble Metropolis: Manhattan Island Crises in Contemporary Science Fiction
Bibliographic record
Abstract
As “the island at the center of the world,” Manhattan has inspired countless writers and has served as a spatial archetype in science fiction’s world-building. From the interdisciplinary perspective of literature and economics, this article discusses the crisis imagination of the “bubble metropolis” in five contemporary Manhattan-related science fiction novels including Cities in Flight (1970), The Blister (1975), Terminal World (2010), Zone One (2011), and New York 2140 (2017). The spatial variety of Manhattan Island in these science fiction novels is closely combined with its economic condition. The characters, plots, and spatial imagery of these novels gather to reflect the different stages of the operation of a bubble economy, illustrating a historical cycle of capitalism that can never be escaped. Manhattan Island has long been the symbol of the world’s rush for wealth. The fear of economic recession, environmental degradation, and class conflict have formed the special geographical features of the island in the future. The crisis imagination of the “bubble metropolis” also seeks to stimulate critical thinking on economic ethics, urban design, and high technology, calling for social justice and public welfare.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".