The Concentration City

"The Concentration City" is a dystopian short story by British author J. G. Ballard, first published (as "Build-Up") in the January 1957 issue of New Worlds.

It has been reprinted in the Ballard collections Billennium, Chronopolis, and The Disaster Area,^[1] and appears in volume one of The Complete Short Stories of J. G. Ballard.^[2]

The story is set in the City, a densely-inhabited ecumenopolis that appears to extend indefinitely in all directions, and comprises the entire known universe of its inhabitants (essentially functioning as an arcology with no outside.) In terms of infrastructure and culture, the City resembles a large American metropolis of the 1950s, with period-typical streets, businesses, dwellings, and transit, but embedded in a three-dimensional matrix of eighty-foot-tall vertical Levels. Aside from humans, the City's environment is almost entirely artificial, with a few scattered remnants of nature preserved in small gardens and zoos (the protagonist's home County of thirty million can boast a single tree.)

Despite its obvious artificiality, the inhabitants of the City take their environment entirely for granted, being mostly concerned with their mundane day-to-day existence. Philosophical speculation on the origin and limits of the City is considered eccentric and a sign of immaturity; even the well-educated simply assume that the urban expanse has always existed and goes on forever. The only ontological concept commonly held by the population is a belief in a legendary and unelaborated-upon "Foundation," during which the first stone of the City had been set; this event is said to have occured some three hundred billion years in the past (revised to three million years in some reprints.) In turn, the only independent suggestion of the City's true age is the fact that the animals in its zoos have been there long enough for evolutionary processes to take place; its birds have not only become flightless, but have even lost their pectoral girdles, the attachment point for wings.

The City's vast population is - to all appearances - stable; there is no suggestion of Malthusian pressure, and the standard of living is adequate and relatively uniform (though there are references to slums and - more seriously - "dead zones," areas walled off from the rest of the City, where services are disconnected and urban decay is allowed to run rampant.) The conventional marker of a City neighborhood's quality is the cost of habitable space, with a dollar per cubic foot considered a "respectable" valuation. The principal cause of anxiety among citizens is fear of deliberate arson by deranged individuals, a phenomenon mentioned throughout the story but never explicitly confirmed to actually be happening. Nonetheless, monoxide detectors are ubiquitous, food is served cold, and "pyros" are treated as enemies of civilization and are the subject of widespread paranoia, in a clear analogy to the fear of communist infiltrators current at the time of Ballard's writing. Suspected pyros are regularly lynched by mobs in plain sight of the City authorities, though this is implied to often be a pretext, with the mobs' actual goal being the liquidation of undesirables and the poor.

The narrative follows Franz M., a twenty-year-old physics student who has become obsessed with the concept of "free space" - the idea that the City must have an edge, followed by some sort of void (a concept which his best friend Gregson has a difficult time even visualizing.) Franz experiences recurring dreams of flight or levitation in such a void, and experiments with building crude gliders propelled by fireworks, though he is handicapped by the relative underdevelopment of the theory of aerodynamics, a purely theoretical field with no practical applications. Franz eventually concludes that this approach is a dead end, as the City contains no empty space large enough to trial a device large enough to carry a human aside from restricted-access construction zones. He resolves to physically discover if the City has an edge by traveling for as long as possible in a single direction; to this end, he boards a Supersleeper, a long-distance rail service whose extremely high-speed trains are propelled by rocket through evacuated tubes.

Supersleepers are intended for trips of less than a day, but fares are only collected upon exit, allowing theoretically-indefinite range (as long as the traveler never disembarks.) In the course of ten days of westbound travel, Franz leaves his native KNI County in the 493rd Sector and 298th Local Union (with eleven trillion inhabitants), and passes outward through increasingly grandiose political subdivisions, culminating in a "755th Greater Metropolitan Empire" (the implied total population of the sections of the City mentioned being somewhere on the order of 10²⁷ people.) On his tenth day aboard, he notices that the Supersleeper's direction is now listed as "eastbound," despite the train never having reversed course. His incredulous reaction draws the attention of railway personnel, who arrest him for vagrancy and send him back to his point of origin. In a police station in his home neighborhood, Franz is questioned by a sympathetic doctor, who drops the charges but advises him to forget his obsession. Dazed, Franz glances at a wall calendar and discovers that time has also reversed: it is the day of his initial departure on the Supersleeper, three weeks earlier.

Ballard revised the story's final line several times; the original New Worlds version reads

You’re back where you first started from. $ HELL x 10.

...The concluding fragment being a formula for calculation the valuation of habitable space, used several times earlier in the story; later reprints add an exponent variable ("$ HELL x 10ⁿ."), and sometimes omit the penultimate sentence.

Ballard revisited the themes of urban dystopia and overpopulation several times, most famously in 1962's "Billennium". Similar concepts can be also found in other works of speculative fiction, in which several distinct types of "infinite cities" appear:

• Trantor - a planet-spanning city from Isaac Asimov's Foundation novels
• Diaspar - a sealed, self-contained city-state that endures for a billion years in Arthur C. Clarke's The City and the Stars
• The City - a finite-but-unbounded megastructure larger than the Solar System in Tsutomo Nihei's manga Blame!
• The Library of Babel - a near-infinite three-dimensional structure containing every possible unique book in Jorge Luis Borges' story of the same name

• The Concentration City title listing at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database

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