Which is not to suggest that Max Page is not a scholar, too. Almost every destruction of New York in the SF literature seems to have been examined here, or at least name-checked; there are several 19th-century texts cited that this reviewer had not encountered before, and this reviewer was grateful for the chance to learn about them; the numerous illustrations seem to have been selected by the author, and are mostly relevant; the scholarly notes are competent (though there is no checklist provided of cited works, which will be a constant nuisance for any constant user of the text, which is to say any user for which the text was not designed to be popular to gain the attention of); and outright errors are few. There are, moreover congenially laid-out thoughts about stuff: speculations on the reason for the huge number of imaginary destructions of New York that Americans have managed to concoct; grave thoughts about 7/11; a moment or two on the rising waters of the warming globe. 
I suppose the real problem with The City's End is that Max Page has written it as though he'd been asked to; as though it were enough to be an associate professor of architecture, which he is, and to love New York, which he clearly does, to write The City's End. What he lacks—I think he needed to have in order to write this book with conviction—is any genuine consuming speculative thought held with passion about his ostensible subject matter. Max Page knows a good deal about a number of things, and conveys bits of his knowledge where and when it seems convenient to do so; but as regards the story of the destruction of New York, a story told and retold for two centuries by creative men and women conveying their own and others' stories of the same obsessive event, he does not have a clue he cares about. This may not be the place to spend a tome on the nature of New York; but of the main central threads that help tell the story of New York and explain the inveteracy of its destructions, one does seem particularly central to any understanding of New York's magnetic appeal. Other cities of the English-speaking Western world—London in particular—have clearly merited imaginary erasure for as long as New York; and London has indeed been subjected to oblivion fairly often: but much less frequently than Manhattan. The problem with destroying most cities is not how to justify the impulse but how to shape the drama, how to make the drama seeable, storyable, so the enormity can grasped in the mind's eye.
London is a great wallow; the first two texts I know to focus narratively on its destruction—William Delisle Hay's The Doom of the Great City (1880) by fog, and Richard Jefferies' After London or Wild England (1885) by drowning—just make the Stink disappear, which is easier than describing the death of something shapeless. But New York—or, rather, Manhattan—is a storyteller's dream, a dream to be dwelt within. Not simply is it an island, and therefore bounded, with an inside and an out: it is an island whose shape is inherently, astonishingly, dramaturgically storyable: a great ship of rock pointing into wider waters, a cigar, a sword, a City in Space. You cannot imaginarily destroy a metropolis (or a world) until you can imagine how to do it. Manhattan can be destroyed because it can be seen to be destroyed.
The word "island" may crop up now and then in The City's End, but without emphasis. The closest Max Page gets to anything specific is when he tells us that "New York remains a place apart, to many an island thankfully on the edge of the continent." When Max Page does go into detail on a story or a film, he loses himself in the shoals of parataxis, defocusing away (in true academic fashion) from any attentive rendering of the spine of story or the thread of telling (or to the long conversation of fantastika to which almost every exemplum he adduces joins in, contributes to, swerves from: but Max Page is not interested in SF or for that matter any particular form of telling). He may know Manhattan is an island (who doesn't?), but he fails to understand (or thinks it irrelevant to convey) the fact that almost every aspect of the grammar and weighting of almost every story told about the destruction of Manhattan is shaped throughout by the drama of its geography. From within, the waters resound at the end of every Street. From without, no ship or plane ever fails to find the prow of the end place. A book which does not correspondingly resound with the shape of Manhattan will be a book whose shape is accidental, whose litany of cites is mumble. Here is some more of what he thinks:
We destroy New York on film and paper to bound (in the frame of the screen or between the book covers) the fear of natural and man-made disaster. And we destroy New York on film and paper to escape the sense of inevitable and incomprehensible economic transformations, by telling stories of clear and present dangers, with causes and effects, villains and heroes, to make our world more comprehensible than it has become.
This amiable op-ed skaz—the sort of psychobabble generated by people who have no idea why stories are told, or how, or to whom, or when—could be about any place in the world. Or none.
So we as readers are left with the task of cherry-picking some of the tastier bits; fortunately, there are a lot; nothing one might say about the conceptual vacancy of The City's End should be taken as deprecatory of the goods that have been gathered here. Max Page has done a lot of homework, and it shows. I had never heard of the earliest tale adduced here, Nicodemus Havens' Wonderful Vision (1812), in which New York (but also the rest of the world) is destroyed, which turns the survivors to thoughts of God and good behavior; the diffusion of the disaster may derive from a sense of universal religious apocalypse, but may (it seems) have been easier for Havens to conceive because the population of Manhattan was still too small to push at the dramaturgic edges of the island. Nor had I heard of Joaquin Miller's Destruction of Gotham (1886), where Manhattan is seen as a theater of moral loathsomeness, and is properly burned down to the waterline. It is good to have tales like these made known to one; good to get a sense of the roots that feed the later tree, which is to say good to be reminded of the depth of the conversation of SF. (In references of this sort, Max Page helps us a lot more than he seems to help himself.)
As we proceed up the 19th century, there are occasional troubling slurries of reference and explication. A book like John Ames Mitchell's The Last American (1889) is namechecked but not examined, though its rendering of a deserted Manhattan strikingly invokes the Ruins and Futurity topos so central to SF of the period, and its visual and textual use of the Statue of Liberty (only three years after its erection) works as a telling emblem of that topos. That this may be the first use of the Statue in this (or any other imaginative) fashion does not seem to concern Page, who refers to her often in The City's End, but without ever speculating on the polysemic density that increasingly attends her. Once again one senses pages shuffled, threads ignored, the inner story of the narrative of Manhattan almost wholly invisibled. But then, in the same chapter, we are given an exemplary synopsis of Ignatius Donnelly's Caesar's Column (1890), a book that now begs to be read.
The City's End as a whole is divided into chapters which conflate periods of time and thematic patterns: "Utopian and Dystopian Fantasies of the 'Stone Colossus' in the 1920s and 1930s"; "Atomic Fears of the 1940s and 1950s"; "Escape from New York: Fictions of a City's Decline and Rebirth"; "The Future of the City's End: New York and its Fantasies after 9/11." This sort of thing is of variable use: it helps sort chapters out; but it tends to apply cookie-cutter theme-criticism shibboleths to a very wide range of modes and media. Theme-criticism, being endemically insensitive to contexts of time and place, has created much noise but little gist in the study of fiction in English; this is very clear in the worlds of fantastika (and it is way more than very clear in SF, which is of course deeply time-dependent). One consequence of this (or contributor to it) has been the terrible English humanities scholarly habit of citing books without paying much attention to their first iterations, whether in magazine or book form. A reprint in Modern Language Associaton practice can be cited in peer-refereed journals without reference to the original date of the text so cited. That this is dumb beyond belief is obvious enough for scholars in other disciplines, like history; and it's obvious to any of us who have to read the stuff. As most of the texts Max Page adduces have never been reprinted, he doesn't usually fall into the trap, though his references to J.G. Ballard's Hello America (1981) as a late-1980s text (a time quite different from 1981 in his understanding) is based on his depending on an American edition published in 1988. (The gurus of the MLA might find this perfectly copacetic, but lay readers, who expect their scholars to demonstrate their scholarship, find it less than amusing.) The end result is again slurry.
More embarrassingly, Max Page follows the same "scholarship" shibboleths in his presentation of H.G. Wells' The World in the Air (1908), which, as he has a decades-later reprint on his desk, he feels no need to examine in the first edition. As the reprint is not illustrated, and as he seems to have no idea that the 1908 edition is full of pictures, he accompanies his description of the text with a full-page illustration from Wells' The War of the Worlds (1898). This illustration depicts Martians investing the town of Windsor, some distance outside of London. Its lack of relevance is more than simply total, because it actively slurs our sense of the actual story (on page 208 of the 1908 edition of The World in the Air, a competent researcher would have found a spectacular full-page illustration of airships destroying New York. Ah well).
Having mentioned this goof, one should be fair and emphasize the large number of illustrations in The City's End, and the fact that many of them are both very well selected, or preiously unknown (certainly to me), or both. The ascribing of the cover illustration to Charley Bonestell is clearly not Max Page's fault—he refers to Chesley Bonestell several times in the text, with clear respect. And he is good on most of the many recent disaster movies that target (and frequently inundate, because it is an island) our beloved Manhattan. And his synopsis of Michael Cunningham's Specimen Days (2005) is savvy.
And so it goes. Nobody who loves New York or SF can afford not to own this book. So don't kill the messenger. But all the same, all the same. New York is not only storied; it is story. It is all there, headline and rock, Liberty and cigar, from the beginning. Nobody who loves New York or SF can fail to mourn a book that could not find the lede.
John Clute is a writer, editor and critic. His first novel in 25 years, Appleseed, was a New York Times Notable Book for 2002. He co-edited The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, and wrote Science Fiction: The Illustrated Encyclopedia, all Hugo Award winners. His criticism and reviews have appeared in various journals in the UK and America. Much of this material has been collected in Strokes: Reviews and Essays 1966-1986, Look at the Evidence: Reviews and Essays and Scores: Reviews 1993-2003, which includes most of the first 75 "Excessive Candour" columns, and other pieces. Canary Fever: Reviews, which is due later this year, will contain most of the next 70 or so "Excessive Candour" columns, plus other work. The Darkening Garden: a Short Lexicon of Horror appeared in 2006; he is working on a much enlarged third edition of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, due to go online in late 2009 or so.
