Sci-Fi Settings on Earth

The Shared Worlds summer writing program at Wofford College in South Carolina asked five best-selling and award-winning science fiction and fantasy novelists to select the five most fantastical, futuristic, and strange locations on today's earth. Elizabeth Hand, Nalo Hopkinson, Ursula K. LeGuin, China Miéville, and Michael Moorcock respectively chose Reykavik, Iceland; Kingston, Jamaica; Venice, Italy; London, England; and Marrakesh, Morocco.

To quote LeGuin:

It isn't hard to imagine a city that's built on a marsh in a lagoon, and is slowly but inevitably sinking back into the marsh, but it's the details that count; and some of the details require an active fantasy. For instance, that all the main streets are water. Sidestreets are narrow and the bridges arched, so no horses, no motorized vehicles. For centuries and centuries all traffic is on foot and by boat; and the boats are special, long, narrow, driven not by oars but by poling, for the canal-streets aren't very deep. Then they allow motorized boats on the canals, and all of sudden there's pollution, noise instead of quiet, and also wakes, waves, swamping the streets and plazas, which are already going under water in storms. Long ago the city was a powerful community, wealthy, full of artists, and built beautiful palaces and churches along the canals and on the islands –high buildings that look as delicate and colorful as the creations of glass the city is famous for. Now these buildings are as battered and threatened by floods of tourists as they are by floods of water, and the city is forced to live as a sort of museum of itself, populated more and more not by its own citizens but by foreigners. What is it like, now, to be a Venetian in Venice?