Laputa / Flying Cities
Jonathan Swift’s floating island in Gulliver’s Travels (1726) — a city sustained in the air by a magnetic lodestone, populated by philosophers and mathematicians so absorbed in abstract thought they require servants to tap them with “flappers” to remind them to speak and listen. The flying city as a satire of intellectual impracticality.
Miyazaki’s Castle in the Sky (1986) takes Swift’s floating island and transforms it: a lost civilization, an abandoned military power, a paradise reclaimed by nature. The ruins of a flying city as elegy.
A Partial Catalog of Flying Cities
- Magonia — medieval cloud realm of aerial grain-thieves (9th century)
- Laputa — Swift’s philosopher-island (1726)
- Vimana — flying palaces/chariots from Sanskrit texts
- 1800s Orkney and Finland — widespread reports of cities floating in the sky
- Buckminster Fuller & Shoji Sadao’s Cloud Nine (1960s) — thermal airship megastructure, a floating geodesic sphere large enough to contain a small city
- Cloud City / Bespin (Star Wars: Empire Strikes Back, 1980) — tibanna gas mining platform floating in a gas giant’s atmosphere, administered by Lando Calrissian
- NASA Space Settlement studies — Stanford Torus, O’Neill Cylinder, rendered by Chesley Bonstell and Donald Davis
Connected Entries