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 of towering supercities from the early twentieth century influenced not only the golden age science fiction writers of the 1930s and 1940s but also the boomer generation who grew up with those stories as part of their SF universe. Some readers and writers have since repudiated it, but others have recapitulated or incorporated it into new work. The choices that designer Syd Mead made for Blade Runner very explicitly invert the techno-utopianism of Hugh Ferriss. William Gibson’s early story “The Gernsback Continuum” from 1981 is both homage and critique of the visions of golden age science fiction. Its gentle satire posits an alternative history in which the world of the pulp covers breaks through into “reality,” providing fleeting visions of cars like an “aluminum avocado with a central shark-fin rudder jutting up from its spine” and a city that mirrors that in Metropolis: “Spire after spire in gleaming ziggurat steps that climbed to a central golden temple tower ringed with the crazy radiator flanges of the Mongo gas stations…. Roads of crystal soared between the spires…. The air was thick with ships: giant wing-liners, little darting silver things … mile long blimps, hovering dragonfly things that were gyrocopters” (8–9). Gary Westfahl comments that the story “pays fond tribute to the now-quaint prophecies of science fiction writers and futurists of the 1920s and 1930s, and ponders how their visions still influence residents of the future they failed to predict.”15
The exaggeration of these already larger-than-life buildings can authenticate otherness, as in thousands of drawings and paintings of future cities, but it can also call the whole idea of a bright urban future into question. In The Futurological Congress (1971; translated 1974) the brilliant Polish writer Stanislaw Lem sends his recurring character Ijon Tichy to a scientific meeting held at the Costa Rica Hilton, which rears 164 stories into the sky and offers bomb-free rooms and the luxury of an “all-girl orchestra [that] played Bach while performing a cleverly choreographed striptease.” At the meeting, convened to address seven world crises (urban, ecology, air pollution, energy, food, military, political), a Japanese delegate presents plans for the housing of the future: “eight hundred levels with maternity wards, nurseries, schools, shops, museums, zoos, theaters, skating rinks and crematoriums … intoxication chambers as well as sobering tanks, special gymnasiums for group sex (an indication of the progressive attitude of the architects), and catacombs for nonconformist subculture communities” (21). Seventeen cubic kilometers in volume, the completely self-contained building would reach from the ocean bed to the stratosphere. A scale model was already at work recycling all its waste products into food. The outcome of techno city may not be techno utopia, says Lem; it may be artificial bananas, ersatz wine, and synthetic cocktail sausages.
CHAPTER TWO
MACHINES FOR BREATHING
South Colony was arranged like a wheel. The administration building was the hub; tunnels ran out from it in all directions and buildings were placed over them…. Each was a hemispherical bubble of silicone plastic, processed from the soil of Mars and blown on the spot.—Robert Heinlein, Red Planet (1949)
“More money, more freedom, more air.”—Total Recall (1990)
Deep Space Nine is a space station. Hovering over the planet Bajor, it monitors wormhole access to the Gamma Quadrant. It’s a trade and diplomatic outpost with a permanent population of perhaps three hundred, augmented periodically by individual visitors and transients. Its population embraces multiple races—humans, Ferengi, Klingons, Bajorans—but the feel is small town. There is only one bar, after all, where everyone runs into everyone else.
Babylon 5 is another space station, floating in isolation at the intersection of translightspeed travel corridors. It is also a city—a place that is big, dense, and full of different sorts of people. Like Deep Space Nine, it has identifiable boundaries—it’s a big metal container in the middle of nothingness—but Bab 5 is larger by three orders of magnitude. Its six levels teem with 100,000 humans and 150,000 members of other species. Interior spaces are specialized into residential neighborhoods and economic districts. A big bustling business district—the Zocalo—occupies part of Red Sector. Facilities range from baseball diamond to casino to courtrooms to factories and machine shops. There are officials, well-accounted citizens, a militant labor union, refugees, and an urban underclass in the partly finished Downbelow, where thieves and gangsters run a thriving black market and illicit businesses. On Deep Space Nine, Constable Odo can pretty well keep tabs on every resident. On Babylon 5, security chief Michael Garibaldi is constantly surprised by new faces, new problems, new gangs, new conspiracies.
Silhouetted in the vastness of space, the space habitat city Babylon 5 sits astride interstellar trade routes that bring it residents and representatives from multiple species and worlds. Tensions between its human majority and its diverse communities model the conflicts of a cosmopolitan crossroads city like fifteenth-century Venice or twenty-first-century London. Courtesy Warner Bros. Television/Photofest © Warner Bros. Television.
These imagined megastructures are the settings for two of the most popular—and simultaneously broadcast—science fiction television series of the late twentieth century. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, which aired 174
