
Authors are great exaggerators
I realised that while hammering out an essay on Jules Verne.
Verne conceived of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea after seeing a submarine — well, a model of one — at the world fair.
So a machine that took passengers under water existed in 1867.
Verne’s innovation was making the technology sleeker, grander, faster — capable of wonders:
A masterpiece containing masterpieces.
The adventure had its engine
Once Verne had conceived of a submarine with sodium-mercury batteries and floodable tanks, he could derive the rest of his plot.
A craft like Nautilus could travel for 20,000 leagues under the sea. It would be a pity not to make the journey.
Verne saw technological possibilities
I have always made a point in my romances of basing my so-called inventions upon a groundwork of actual fact, and of using in their construction methods and materials which are not entirely without the pale of contemporary engineering skill and knowledge.
But I have a frustration with A Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Because ripples from the invention don’t reach wider society.
What happens under the sea stays under the sea. And that leaves a lot unexplored.
This thought strikes me, because I’ve just read High-Rise by J. G. Ballard — a science fiction author who more sociologist than inventor.
The high-rise is another exaggeration
Ballard was writing a hundred years after Verne. Submarines had gone nuclear. Skyscrapers propagated like mushrooms.
He lived in a city enamoured with concrete. London poured the material into high-density building projects: Balfron Tower, Trellick Tower, The Barbican.
Those developments were big. So Ballard went bigger in his novel High-Rise.
With its forty floors and thousand apartments, its supermarket and its swimming-pools, bank and junior school — all in effect abandoned in the sky — the high-rise offered more than enough opportunities for violence and confrontation.
Did you catch that last part?
If Verne was turned on by engineering and inventors, Ballard was stimulated by architecture and theorists.
Theorists like Newman who suggested that people need to be surveilled to stay civilised. Like Ehrlich who thought a ‘population bomb‘ would cause catastrophic overcrowding. Like Calhoun who stuffed rats into a box (this was science in the ’70s).
They gave Ballard a set of anxieties to dramatise.
He soon recognized the extraordinary number of thinly veiled antagonisms around him. The high-rise had a second life of its own… At times he felt that they were all waiting for someone to make a serious mistake.
Over the course of the novel, the middle-class residents devolve into:
… small groups of killers, solitary hunters who built man-traps in empty apartments or preyed on the unwary in deserted elevator lobbies.
Even the main characters are exaggerations
And they are exaggerations of the reader. You can choose your avatar.
Will you be Anthony Royal, who attempts to restore order to the high-rise?
Dr. Laing, who passively follows events?
Or Richard Wilder, who thrives on the carnage?
These pure types — made by Ballard to represent the id, ego and super-ego — allow readers to tussle with themselves during passages of awful beauty.
First she would try to kill him, but failing this give him food and her body, breast-feed him back to a state of childishness and even, perhaps, feel affection for him. Then, the moment he was asleep, cut his throat. The synopsis of the ideal marriage.
Ballard housed big ideas in big structures
He enlarged the deliriums of a decade, so we can see where their shadows stretch into our own.
Aidan Clifford writes for Pinstripe Poets – artists who love their day jobs. This post is part of a series called ‘Write like the Greats’. See the rest here.