… imagination is when you pull the carpet out from under yourself, but instead of falling, you fly away instead on that magic carpet through an imaginal city’s angelfirey girders, a city in the sky you share with your friend when you talk together, which only you and your friend can see, a city in the sky whose synthetic streets are paved with all sorts of adventures!

Image from Astounding Stories, November 1937, from the story “Queen of the Skies”:

How to explain the 1930s preoccupation with cities in the sky? Looking back on the literature at the time, you would think that people got together in their backyards with their amateur telescopes and looked for such cities in orbit above, eternal cities with cloud pavilions and Flash Gordon spaceship finials in the radium-wrought sunlight above. Why this 1930s fascination with cities in the sky? Perhaps it had something to do with the total environment of the 1930s — why for example would Piet Zwart or other industrial designers of the era put speeding aeroplanes on cigarette boxes or beer bottles? It was the 1930s, after all! An era of optimal-esperant futurism when it wasn’t unreasonable for there to be cities in the sky after all, especially when you consider that the Great Depression and Dust Bowl-era winds raged on the earth below.