No matter how surreal or fantastical, the greatest fictional cities are always ways of examining real cities.

In Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift created the floating city of Laputa. A lesser writer would leave this as a superficial mythical curiosity but Swift, like all great thinkers, went further and considered the actual implications. If we had a levitating city, what would we do with it? The answer being, we’d use it to terrorise our weaker earthbound neighbours. What Swift was really depicting wasn’t a flying city at all but rather the city of London and its reign over Ireland.

The fictional cities that really resonate with readers are those that delve deep into layers of reality whilst transplanting them far enough away to provide the necessary space for perspective; Terry Pratchett’s Ankh-Morpork, Mega-City One in Judge Dredd, Otomo’s Domu: A Child’s Dream and Akira.

Writing about the future is almost always a reflection of the present, just as dystopia is always the following of current threads to baleful conclusions. Kafka crafted The Castle and The Trial in the shadow of Prague Castle, which the genocidal Reinhard Heydrich would soon occupy.

Haunted by Stalinism and Nazism on his Jura sickbed, George Orwell wrote 1984. Yet the terrifying Ministry buildings he featured in his book were those he’d walked through himself in London, like Senate House and BBC Broadcasting House with its Room 101. To further underline the sense that this is where we might be heading, Orwell simply changed around the year in which he was writing the book, 1948, for the title.

The absorption and transformation of influences is evident too, aesthetically. The writer Tom McCarthy has rightfully pointed out that culture is an echo-chamber. We see this acutely and masterfully in Schuiten and Peeters’ comic book series Les Cités obscures, which seems to contain traces of every city ever built (resurrecting the likes of Art Deco and Art Nouveau as well as retrofitted archaic architecture) and many unbuilt (the awe-inspiring designs of Albert Robida, Tony Garnier and Antonio Sant’Elia for example).

Again and again, we see visionaries like Boullée, Fuller, Hunterwasser, Gray, Taut and Tatlin ridiculed or sidelined when they were simply too far ahead of their time. When technology and the zeitgeist catches up, eccentrics are often retrospectively recast as prophets. We would do well not to repeat the folly by recognising that the only thing we are certain of is that nothing will remain certain for long. Time makes retrospective fools as well as seers.

Travelling around cities in Asia, it is tempting to think that the future has partially arrived. The prevailing model for this is often a nocturnal cyberpunk one. “It’s just like Blade Runner” goes the cliché. As prophetic as that film was, it too was composed of what came before. It was partly inspired by the comics of Moebius with their own reassembled idiosyncratic versions of the real (a waterless Venice with levitating gondolas in one case), and by the designs of Syd Mead, who realised the future would look both incredibly stylish and also in a state of perpetual decay, much like the present.

The director Ridley Scott recognised that the future would be older than now and would contain the wreckage of the present and the past.

For all the hovering police cars, mile-high digital advertisements and replicant technologies, the film’s settings exist, albeit as ghosts of themselves; from the eerie almost-abandoned Bradbury Building to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Ennis House, itself inspired by the lost Maya Civilisation. The opening shot of the Tyrell Corporation Building looks like a funereal tomb from a long-lost ancient empire reanimated by the magic of electricity. Like all buildings, it is its own memento mori and contains its own future ruins. The story told by the film, for all its futurist adornments, is a very old one, going back to the shifting identities and culpabilities of noir, back even to grail quests and beyond to the earliest surviving story: Gilgamesh, walking the ocean floor, searching for a cure for mortality. We are searching still.