Urban monads are indeed arcologies. An urbmon tapers upward from a relatively wide base to allow space for factories and supporting machinery on the lower levels. Each towers an identical one thousand floors high, divided into forty-floor cities that take their names arbitrarily from historic cities. In Urbmon 116 of the Chipitts cluster, where the stories take place, Reykjavik is on the bottom and Louisville is on the top. The original intent was fifty families per floor, but the population growth that the society so vigorously encourages means that most floors have more like 120 families, each crammed into an apartment that has been reduced to a single room. A relatively successful academic on a high floor has ninety square meters for six people, who use efficiently designed inflatable, wall-mounted, and built-in furnishings and appliances. The result is roughly eight hundred people per floor, thirty-two thousand per city, and eight hundred thousand per building. When Urbmon 116 reaches close to nine hundred thousand, it is time to hive off excess people to join with the extras from other towers to populate a brand-new urbmon.
Urbmonites never go outside, and many never stray beyond their own city except on school field trips. One character looks down at the manicured surroundings: “Below her are the tapered structures that hold the 40,000,000+ people of this urban cluster. She is awed by the neatness of the constellation, the geometric placement of the buildings to form a series of hexagons within the larger area. Green plazas separate the buildings. No one enters the plazas, ever, but their well-manicured lawns are a delight to behold from the windows of the urbmon” (49). Beyond the lawns, 90 percent of the continent is devoted to agriculture, with strangely primitive villagers operating vast industrial farms in exchange for manufactured goods from the cities—much like Soleri’s scheme to free the landscape of nasty human beings.
This is a world of literal social climbing. The cities are stacked by status, from administrators on the top floors to maintenance workers at the bottom. Nightwalking is the socially sanctioned practice of males finding casual sex partners by prowling corridors and entering random apartments. To nightwalk in higher cities is to aspire; to nightwalk in lower cities is to go slumming. Sociocomputator Charles Mattern explains to a visitor from Venus that they try to encourage contact between cities. “Sports, exchange students, regular mixed evenings. Within reason, that is. We don’t have people from the working-class levels mixing with those from the academic levels, much. It would make everyone unhappy, eh?” (29). Another character moves through Urbmon 116 as the liftshaft carries her upward in her imagination. “Up through Reykjavik where the maintenance people live, up through brawling Prague where everyone has ten babies, up through Rome, Boston, Edinburgh, Chicago, Shanghai, even Louisville where the administrators dwell in unimaginable luxury” (49).
Silverberg uses the massive physical presence of the urbmon as both the cause and the representation of inexorable social inertia. Several of the component stories deal with misfits whose vague dissatisfaction leads them to challenge the system. One commits suicide, and other “flippos” are summarily disposed of—arrested and immediately tossed down a recycling chute. Others find ways to reconcile themselves to their lives. Even the discontented understand and appreciate the vast inter-connectedness of urbmon society. One misfit realizes, when describing Urbmon 116, that it is “a poem of human relationships, a miracle of civilized harmony” (207). A drug-tripping musician envisions the intricate connections: “For the first time he understands the nature of the delicate organism that is society; he sees the checks and balances, the quiet conspiracies of compromise that paste it together. And it is wondrously beautiful. Tuning this vast city of many cities is just like tuning the cosmos group [a musical combo]: everything must relate, everything must belong to everything else” (90).
The result, even as world population continues to rise from seventy-five billion toward ninety billion, is equilibrium. The final paragraph takes an irenic tone: “Now the morning sun is high enough to touch the uppermost fifty stories of Urban Monad 116. Soon the building’s entire eastern face will glitter like the bosom of the sea at daybreak. Thousands of windows, activated by the dawn’s early photons, deopaque. Sleepers stir. Life goes on. God bless! Here begins another happy day” (256). This ending repeats much of the book’s opening paragraph, which starts: “Here begins a happy day in 2381” (15). We have come full circle to reaffirmation and stability.
If Silverberg’s urbmons are vast machines for maintaining social equilibrium and keeping people happy, not so the building in J. G. Ballard’s High-Rise, where stasis has no chance against chaos. Pity the ambitious and luckless Britons who have bought apartments in the brand-new tower within sight of the City of London. Set in the present of the 1970s, this is a book that has to work its way into the science fiction realm, and succeeds with devastating results. Things start a bit tense in the new building because of buried tensions between middle-class people on the lower floors and higher-status residents at the top. Upper levels have dogs, lower levels have children. Top-floor residents treat children as an intrusion and exclude them from an upper play area and pool to which they are supposed to have access. Everyone understands that there is a rough upper/middle/lower division (66–67).
The building itself is tiny compared with urbmons or Spearpoint, with two thousand residents in one thousand apartments in a forty-story high-rise. Nevertheless, it sucks people into its vortex. The building is largely self-contained; the entire tenth floor is a retail concourse with supermarket, liquor store, hair salon, bank, school, pools and other recreation areas. In the beginning (the story starts after the building is occupied), residents commute to work, pick up their mail, and watch news on the telly. Quickly, however, the outside world loses its salience. Men cease to leave the building for their jobs. Moms keep kids home from school, hunkering in shuttered apartments. Even the strongest personalities find that they can’t leave, even when they claim that is what they want. The police and other public authorities oddly ignore the building even as its parking lot fills with smashed and abandoned cars.
Tensions breed chaos over three short months. Trouble starts with a lot of noisy partying, as if all the residents are having simultaneous midlife crises. Small incidents soon escalate into random violence. The water supply fails; electricity goes out floor by floor; garbage piles up. Management ceases to respond to complaints. Residents of adjacent floors cluster into clans for self-defense and battle in the interior corridors with makeshift weapons. Each floor tries to block adjacent stairwells and guard elevator lobbies. Soon the clans fragment into small clusters of apartments. “The clan system, which had once given a measure of security to the residents, had now largely broken down, individual groups drifting into apathy or paranoia. Everywhere people were retreating into their apartments, even into one room, and barricading themselves away.” There are groups of wilding women, probably cannibalism, and finally everyone for him or herself. The last three survivors can look across the abandoned parking lot to see the same process starting in a newer tower.
High-Rise is barbed satire that skewers Britain on the verge of the Margaret Thatcher years, when the gospel of free markets impoverished the public sphere, and when the Docklands district would go through cycles of real estate boom and bust—although not as disastrously as the High-Rise high-rise. Ballard offers a dubious psychological explanation for the breakdown (the building is like a mother that allows residents to turn into uncontrolled two-year-olds). A better analogy is to see the building as a version of the generation starship (see chapter 4). Indeed, Ballard describes it both as a spaceship and as “a small vertical city, its two thousand inhabitants boxed up into the sky” (15). There are strong parallels to the generation ship in Brian Aldiss’s Non-Stop (1958), where the command deck (building management) has ceased to function and society has devolved to tribal warfare within confined spaces. What is different is the external resolution and rescue that Aldiss provides. Ballard has no such hope, giving us, perhaps, Non-Stop meets Lord of the Flies.
Skyscrapers are particularly tempting techno feats that still fascinate after 120 years. Exciting visions