Concentration City
The dystopian world of encroaching and bewildering mega cities has always seemed fascinating for me, cities are the most dangerous places on Earth and that is because of the sheer number of dangerous humans that call cities their homes. The Concentration City (CC) is the first short story to appear in my collection discussing this contemporary urbanized onslaught and it is easy to see why cities are becoming uncontrollable entities. Right now there are around 400 cities worldwide that contain at least one million people, and it is claimed that by 2050 two thirds of the world's population will reside in urban settlements.
Humans now flock to settlements of their own making while they disregard the natural origin that was the countryside and rural pastures. This phenomenon is not new, we have always sought the safety of walls, togetherness and closeness such as castles, strongholds and townships but these were for a much smaller population. It should then be obvious that with an ever increasing population these hotbeds will also grow and drain the inhabitants away from rural areas with the promise of opportunity. Today it can be argued that it is more advantageous to live in a city than it is not to, that cities are the next leap forward and are essential for forward progression and dynamism. Not only are these urban areas expanding but the relatively new concept of suburban areas are also growing and stretching further into the surrounding landscape. It is a vicious cycle that the more advanced and prosperous the city becomes, the more that people flock to it from more rural areas.
CC starts off by giving some snippets of daily life in the sprawling city, we hear directions such as take an elevator up "a thousand levels to Plaza Terminal", or how Pyromaniacs are attempting to burn the city down and break free from the confines of the cramped spaces. This opening paragraph is book-ended by auction like dialogue, people trying to cash in and exploit the fact that space is so treasured in the city that real estate sells by the cubic foot. This catapults the reader straight into the thick of the action and we are presented with a dystopian, dismal and multistory city.
The protagonist is called Franz and is in police custody as the story begins, he is charged with riding on the super speed trains that are called Supersleepers without sufficient tickets. He tells them he had a dream about being suspended in open space and this encourages him to both build a flying craft and to find wide open space to fly this craft but this journey then causes him to question whether his city has an end and what is outside the city. As he is riding on the Supersleeper he discovers that he has made a complete circle and arrives back where he started from. To makes things even more confusing for the poor chap, the date he came back was the same that he left on but he left three weeks ago. There could be the possibility that this city covers the entire planet and Franz just simply went around the world, but why is the date the same? Franz spent most of the time aboard these Supersleepers, could they travel at the speed of light, are they the cause for the time lapse?
Once again the bending of time is addressed in Ballard's stories and he is well adept at staging these trickeries of time. If in Escapement the prison was time itself, here it is the city and in the city time seems to have warped, the sheer numbers and levels of people have crumbed or upset the scales of time.
Venus Smiles
I shall move swiftly on to Venus Smiles (VS), or as swiftly as possible for my typing ability anyway! This story also takes place in Vermilion Sands and it very much similar to Prima Belladonna (PB) in its structure and its character designs, for example we have the mysterious and cataclysmic female being introduced shortly after the story has begun and we have the vaguely named protagonist who is initially overwhelmed by this new female presence but becomes increasingly cautious of her. I will also assume that the urban disaster short stories like CC and Billennium are more concerned not with the characters but the cities themselves while the Vermilion Sands stories do have more character interaction and these characters can be related to psychological classifications such as Freudian or Jungian.Music plays an important part just like it did in PB and music yet again leads to the main conflict of VS. The singing statue that Vermilion Sands commissions turns out to emit irritating sounds
and it soon grows to a threatening size. There is nothing too remarkable I admired about this story, perhaps for the classical music aficionado there would be moments when the statue's ability to churn out masterpieces would be pleasant to read. There is a slight plot twist at the end that could hint at the destruction of Vermilion Sands and possibly even the planet but it's nothing some earphones wouldn't solve really.
Track 12
And now we arrive at this ugly duckling among the pristine, future bright swans that are the better Ballard stories. There is a retired athlete called Maxted (his dad must have been called Ted and the father wanted to spice up the name) who is at the house of a scientist bloke who has the strange affliction of being interested in very boring stuff, like amplified, minute microsonic sounds such as a pin dropping or the sound of someone's face tightening at the insanity of the very idea. Maxted was a very naughty fellow and slept with this man's wife so revenge is carried out and Maxted dies, by drowning in fresh air.
The death scene is melodramatic but enjoyable and a little confusing because I didn't have a clue what was happening at first. The insane sound technician wannabe is shouting out "In a kiss ... a kiss" which brings the song 'It Started With A Kiss' to mind, maybe the scene would have benefited from a hearty rendition of the classic through his loudspeakers. These is a sense of an impending climax throughout the story and the way the affair between Maxted and the madman's wife revealed itself was subtle and chilling. It is a short read but just because it is short, that doesn't mean it will be sweet. It is not scary enough for me to skip through a track 12 from albums any time soon nor is it entertaining enough to make me want to finish writing about it. I guess the point of the story was really
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