environments that nurtured social problems—whether U.S. examples like the infamous Pruitt-Igoe buildings in St. Louis or the sterile working-class apartment blocks of Paris or Moscow—and project social breakdown. Thomas Disch set his grittily detailed novel 334 (1972) in a subsidized twenty-one-story building at 334 East Eleventh Street, New York. In the 2020s its three thousand residents are supervised by a paternalistic bureaucracy, cope with malfunctioning elevators and deteriorating services, scam social workers to survive, and take refuge in drugs, television, and meaningless violence. As science fiction scholar Rob Latham has pointed out, Disch’s near-future New York embodies much of the analysis of neo-Marxist geographers like David Harvey and Manuel Castells. Except for the elderly isolated in upper floors, residents are free to use the city around them, but only on the terms set by the structures of power and authority.14
Robert Silverberg and J. G. Ballard, in contrast, set novels entirely within high-rise buildings and use those settings to explore the impacts of concentrated and claustrophobic living on individuals trapped inside and unable to escape to freedom or adventure. Silverberg’s The World Inside (1971) is pure science fiction, positing a world in which seventy-five billion humans live in megabuilding “urban monads”—urbmons—that could be characterized as cheerful dystopias. Ballard sets High-Rise (1975) in a skewed present in which an expensive condominium tower in the London Docklands erodes all social bonds and turns its residents into murderous sociopaths. In both books, however, the tall building is both a technological accomplishment and something more, a presence that conditions and drives individual behavior as much as the Alaska wilderness changes Buck from domestic pet to feral creature in Call of the Wild.
Silverberg wrote the linked stories that constitute The World Inside in 1970 and 1971, at a time when both the public and science fiction were obsessed with the threat of overpopulation. In good SF fashion, Silverberg decided to reverse the expectations and explore the possibilities of a society in which population growth was applauded—requiring vast buildings to house the multitudes and, in turn, elaborate systems of social regulation to maintain order. The social reversal draws directly on the sexual revolution of the baby boomer generation: urbmon society encourages sex for procreation from the early teens, has no nudity taboo, and promotes open promiscuity, with every woman theoretically available to any man. The structures that house the busy billions similarly extrapolate then-current urban thought. They are grouped in clusters with names like Chipitts, Sansan, and Wienbud (in Europe)—terms coined following publication in 1961 of Jean Gottmann’s Megalopolis: The Urbanized Northeastern Seaboard of the United States, which described the Boston-Washington corridor as an emerging urban superregion. Silverberg began thinking about the structures themselves by projecting familiar New York skyscrapers, but he soon found Paolo Soleri’s fantastic schemes for grotesquely gigantic self-contained arcologies that would concentrate human beings and free up the natural landscape (Soleri’s Arcology: The City in the Image of Man is one of the most misnamed books ever).
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
