The Aquifer That Never Warmed

Most of the genre's mid-century city books assume entropy — Ballard's dissolving towers, the slow rust that Disch clocked down to zoning codes. Pohl's graph position is the odd one out: urban decay and future technology sit in opposition in his corpus, and *The Years of the City* is built to prove the opposition literal. New York doesn't collapse. It gets engineered out of collapse — domed against weather, wired for full employment, its worst neighbor