Metal Slinger

In Metal Slinger, the Alaha people have spent centuries banished from a life on land. As the trainee guards note on their trip to the Market in the early chapters, the brief visit to Kenta’s shores might be the only time they see land in all their lives. Instead, Alaha is built on a series of enormous trees that grow directly out of saltwater. This is something that, in the real world, only mangroves can do; mangroves are common in tropical and subtropical climates.

In the real world, many communities exist on bodies of water. Rather than being treated as lesser communities who have been ostracized due to violent political history (as is Alaha in the novel), proponents of floating communities argue that living on the water permanently offers many benefits. Water-based communities are seen as a way to maximize space along crowded shorelines, providing housing and businesses that enjoy picturesque water views. Floating agricultural centers (the first of which floats in Rotterdam, Netherlands) offer more space for needed food production and gathering sustainable energy sources like water or solar power, and they provide an eco-friendly alternative to land reclamation (Novenario, Celine. “Reasons Why Floating Development Is Set to Take the World by Storm.” Global Center on Adaptation, 17 Oct. 2022). Floating development is also often more affordable than land-based alternatives.

Some of these water-based communities are modern creations, built to accommodate increasing space demands or anticipate projected sea-level changes due to shifting climates. Others, however, have stood for centuries, shifting according to the needs of different indigenous peoples. The Uros people of Peru, for example, have lived in floating reed homes for hundreds of years, while Ha-Long Bay in Vietnam hosts four separate floating villages with approximately 1,600 residents (Ochoa, Danny. “The Uros People of Lake Titicaca - Peru Hop.” Peru Hop, 12 Sept. 2016; “Ha Long.” Vietnam Tourism).

Stilted communities offer another method for living on the water. Ganvie, Benin, the largest such community in Africa, has stilted houses and manmade islands that date back to the 17th century when a native community called the Tonin tribe built homes only accessible by water to protect themselves from enslavement by the Portuguese. Ganvie now boasts approximately 45,000 residents in 3,000 structures. The landscape of the town is ever-changing, as each building, buffeted by changing water levels, lasts only a few decades (Yakubu, Paul. “The Floating Village of Ganvie: A Model for Socio-Ecological Urbanism.” ArchDaily, 12 May 2023).

Though Venice, Italy, is widely renowned for being a “floating city,” it is neither a true floating city nor a stilted community. Instead, Venice was built atop silted land into which millions of wooden piles were driven. Flat platforms built atop the deep, wide stakes dispersed weight, and buildings were constructed atop these platforms. This generated a city that, if perhaps not technically floating, has proven to be more resilient to the test of time than other water-based establishments (Knight, Emily. “How Venice Stays Afloat.” Condé Nast Traveler, 28 July 2014).