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Build-Up

door J. G. Ballard

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There is only 'the city', nothing else... ( )
  AlanPoulter | Nov 16, 2016 |
"The Concentration City" (1957) is one Hell of a story. That Ballard named his leads Franz and Gregson and set certain bureaucratic procedural crime dramas around them made me think immediately of The Metamorphosis, but I'm not positive Ballard was intentionally riffing off Kafka here. And regarding Concentration City's history there's multiple mentions to a time "before the Foundation" millions of years ago, which seems to be a gracious nod in Isaac Asimov's direction.

Franz aims to fly in Concentration City (it was a dream he had) but there's really no room to fly in a city that has no open air space -- not even for a single bird. Any available space is already occupied with construction. So he hatches a plan with Gregson not so much to escape Concentration City but to ride the commuter train, a "Supersleeper" that connects the various Sectors and Federations of the city, West for as long as necessary in order to find "Free Space," as the going rate for space is a pricey $1/cubic ft. After days on the "sleeper" Franz passes slums where space is as low as five cents/cubic ft., but those neighborhoods have been walled off so that no one can enter and those unlucky inhabitants who live there cannot leave. No exit indeed.

Franz discovers that streets and levels of Concentration City go up to the millions, like 3,456,877th Street, another fascinating concept of Ballard's, and one he uses to great effect in conveying what is the most likely location of Concentration City. It's like New York, Mumbai, and Hong Kong all combined, to roughly the hundreth power; this Concentration City so built up and out that each floor of its buildings are now levels of the interconnected city, with perhaps only elevated alleyways separating the buildings, whose passageways through the floors of the buildings form what I gather is some semblance of a 3-D city, a matrix, built out in every conceivable direction infinitely. Ballard uses "infinitely" more than once. Franz passes his time on the train drawing dreams, but they're not his.

Anyway, after about ten days of nonstop riding on the train, Franz learns he is now heading East. WTF? he asks the crew, who then inform him that the train he's on has always been heading East. Huh? When he got on is was heading West. There was no confusion, no obfuscation, no delusion, no dreams. So what gives? I think it was a brilliant stab of Ballard's in defining the direction of eternity: there is no direction, there is every direction. And then there's time. When Franz returns to where he hopped on, at the mainline terminal three weeks later, how is it possible that it is now the same day as when he left? Either time folded or there is no time in Concentration City. Ballard is building on his theory of time he began in "Escapement" (1956): that the future is now and the past may be present, on, from what I've gathered in commentaries, is his "time's malleable continuum". Dreams and some unconscious element (collective memories?) backlight this story too, and from what I've gathered will eventually be the main stage of several of his later stories.

Beware "The Pyros" of "The Concentration City" -- nice ironic twist of Ballard's -- of those who wish to set fire to the tenements of Hell; but beware more the Fire Police, who'll send you to The Slums, where you can never leave. As if anybody ever leaves Concentration City. Whispers, or maybe shouts, obviously, of Sartre, abound in this escapist -- but at times startlingly profound -- fun read. Easily his best story so far. ( )
2 stem absurdeist | Jan 17, 2013 |
A slightly frivolous and ever-so-slightly-quaint fifties take on the "infinite metaphor(i)city" universe; more Borges's The Lottery in Babylon than The Library of Babel. In a sort of neverending multilevel New York crossed with the continent-cities in those Chung Kuo books, or ecumenopoleis like Trantor, Coruscant, &c. The question is "How can you think beyond what is?", the answer is figured in hero-scientist terms (one man takes off to find "Free Space"--meaning both empty and unmonetized-- because he just wants to fly), and the return to the beginning moment in time as well as space seems like a copout, a tired modernist hell. But it is certainly vivid, and I like the matter-of-factness of Franz's dismissals from smart people: "Well, of course you can imagine there being something outside the City, but that's just a thought experiment, like the statement 'I am lying'!" It is to har.

(Appeared in New Worlds.) ( )
1 stem MeditationesMartini | Jun 23, 2010 |
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