Плавающие города и острова в научной фантастике

Science fiction concept

In science fiction, floating cities and islands are a common trope, which range 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 floating islands have been found in literature since Homer's Odyssey, written near the end of the 8th century BCE, described the island of Aeolia. They reappear in Pliny the Elder's Natural History of the 1st century CE. 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.

In the treatise De Grandine et Tonitruis ("On Hail and Thunder", 815), Carolingian bishop Agobard of Lyon describes Magonia, a cloud realm populated by felonious aerial sailors. In the novel Gulliver's Travels (1726) by Jonathan Swift, the island city of Laputa was revealed to be floating in the sky. Laputa purportedly levitated through use of artificial magnetism. It was primarily a fictional device that was intended to satirize far fetched pseudo scientific proposals:
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. 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." In 1960, the architects Buckminster Fuller and Shoji Sadao proposed the construction of a 1 mile (2 km) thermal airship, which they called Cloud Nine. This megastructure would be a geodesic sphere that, once it was sufficiently heated by sunlight, would become airborne. Fuller and Sadao envisioned that Cloud Nine would float freely in the Earth's atmosphere, giving residents and passengers a migratory lifestyle. They believed that it might be a partial solution to the depletion of non renewable resources. A team including Buckminster Fuller and Shoji Sadao was commissioned by United States Department of Housing and Urban Development to design the Triton City, a floating city intended to provide housing near Tokyo or Baltimore. The proposal called for tetrahedron–shaped modules supporting large housing blocks of 5,000 inhabitants each, and which would be anchored to the ground. A large model of the habitat is on display in the lobby of the Johnson Presidential Library in Austin, Texas. 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.

A design similar to Fuller's Cloud Nine might permit habitation in the upper atmosphere of Venus, where at ground level the temperature is too high and the atmospheric pressure too great. As scientifically and fictionally described by Geoffrey A. Landis, the easiest planet (other than Earth) to place floating cities at this point would appear to be Venus. Because the thick carbon dioxide atmosphere is 50% denser than Earth's atmosphere, breathable air with a composition similar to the latter is a lifting gas in the dense Venerean atmosphere, with over 60% of the lifting power that helium has on Earth. At an altitude of 50 km above the Venerean surface, the environment is the "most Earthlike in the solar system", according to Landis, with a pressure of approximately 1 bar and temperatures ranging between .

In addition to Venus, floating cities have been proposed in science fiction on several other planets. For example, floating cities might also permit settlement of the outer three gas giants, as the gas giants lack solid surfaces. Jupiter is not promising for habitation due to its high gravity, escape velocity and radiation, but the Solar System's other gas giants (Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune) may be more practical. In 1978, the British Interplanetary Society's Project Daedalus envisioned floating factories in the atmospheres of Jupiter refining helium 3 to produce fuel for an interstellar probe. Michael McCollum notes that the "surface" gravity of Saturn (that is, at the visible cloud layer, where the atmospheric pressure is about the same as Earth's) is very close to that of Earth, and in his novel The Clouds of Saturn, he envisioned cities floating in the Saturnian atmosphere, where the buoyancy is provided by envelopes of hydrogen heated by fusion reactors. Uranus and Neptune also have upper atmosphere gravities comparable to Earth's, and even lower escape velocities than Saturn. Cecelia Holland populated Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus with mutant humans, the Styth, in floating cities in her only SF novel, Floating Worlds (1975). Donald Moffitt's novel Jovian (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.

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). 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.

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 ThunderCats, a race of Birdmen live above the clouds in a technological floating city named Avista, powered and suspended in mid air by the Tech Stone, one of 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.