"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.
Ballard retitled the story for its inclusion in his 1967 his collection The Disaster Area ; [1] it has also been republished in Billennium and Chronopolis, 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 comprises the entire universe of its inhabitants (essentially, an arcology with no outside.) In terms of infrastructure and culture, the City resembles a large American metropolis of the 1950s, with period-typical dwellings, businesses, streets, and transit - but extended indefinitely in all directions, including vertically, where the urban landscape is embedded in a three-dimensional matrix of eighty-foot-tall 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.) The City's inhabitants are mostly concerned with the mundane business of day-to-day existence; despite the obvious artificiality of their surroundings, philosophical speculation regarding the exact nature the City is rare, and regarded as a sign of immaturity and eccentricity. The only ontological concept common among the population is a belief in a vague, semi-legendary "Foundation," during which the first stone of the City had been laid down, an event said to have occurred some three hundred billion years ago (a figure Ballard revised to three million years in reprints.) This belief is however viewed with condescension by the better-educated, who hold that the City has always existed. The only independent data point regarding the City's true age is the fact that the animals in its zoos have been there long enough to be shaped by evolutionary processes; the City's birds have not only become flightless, but have lost their pectoral girdles, the attachment point for wings.
The City's unimaginably vast population is - to all appearances - stable; there is no suggestion of Malthusian pressure, and the standard of living depicted is adequate and relatively uniform (though there are 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 status marker of a City neighborhood is the cost of habitable space, which is priced in cubic (as opposed to square) feet; the formula for calculating the value of cubic space reoccurs several times in the story, with anything above a dollar per cubic foot considered a "respectable" valuation. The main source of anxiety in such middle-class areas is deliberate arson by "pyros"; suspected pyros are regularly lynched by mobs in plain sight of the City authorities. Nonetheless, monoxide detectors are ubiquitous, food is only served cold, and pyros are thought of as implacable enemies of civilization.
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 a theoretically-indefinite voyage (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 of the 298th Local Union (with eleven trillion inhabitants), and passes through increasingly grandiose political formations, culminating in a "755th Greater Metropolitan Empire" (the implied total population of the sections of the City mentioned adding up to approximately 1027 people.) After five days, Franz notes he has traveled ninety-five billion kilometers. The 190 billion km he would have reached by the tenth day can be assumed to be the minimum diameter of the City, whose volume - if it indeed has no outer surface (i.e. is a 4-dimensional hypersphere) - can then be estimated as at least 1.6 x 10⁷⁹ km³. KNI County is noted to have a volume of 416,818 km³; if its population density is average, the City must have a minimum population of around 10⁸⁶ humans.
On his tenth day aboard, Franz notices that the Supersleeper's direction is now listed as "eastbound," despite the train never having had reversed course. His incredulous reaction draws the attention of the railway staff, who detain 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 physician, who tells him he will have the charges dropped, but advises him to forget his obsession. Still 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 calculating the real-estate valuation of habitable space, which appears several times earlier in the story; later reprints add an exponent variable ("$ HELL x 10ⁿ."), and sometimes omit the penultimate sentence.
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