My wife plays Transport Tycoon, and she always likes it when the streets and houses of one town join up with those of the next. This sprawl is what's at the heart of The Concentration City, although the sprawl in this case extends in all directions, including up and down. Space is bought and sold by cubic foot, and the real danger is fire. Restaurant food is universally cold due to strict cooking temperature regulations, and dissenting groups of "Pyros" are blamed for everything bad that happens.
This is all laid out in the first example of a great first paragraph, setting up the entire world and immersing the reader in it by means of snippets of overheard conversation. A Google search for the first line throws up several people who feel similarly inspired, and the text if you're interested. JGB has a habit of doing this with his first paragraphs, particularly in High Rise, which makes the cooking of a neighbour's Alsatian on a bonfire of telephone directories seem perfectly normal.
Anyway, the hero in The Concentration City, entertaining strange notions of building a flying machine, takes a journey as far as he can on public transport, only to wind up back where he started from. Along the way, various glimpses are given as to how and where such a massively populous city 'will all end', although again, as with Escapement, no answers are given. Perhaps the length of the short story only allows us to explore the problems rather than solve them. I think this is why I like short stories so much.
It made me think of Dark City, Asimov's The Naked Sun, and a little bit of Metropolis. Incidentally, the newly issued version of Metropolis, with the 25 extra minutes they found in Brazil last year, was received for Christmas. We'll get round to watching it soon.
No comments:
Post a Comment