Given the opportunity, many people would prefer to live in a self-sufficient fortress within a skull-shaped mountain that’s:
- powered by a semi-active volcano,
- surrounded by a verdant tropical wilderness,
- the wilderness populated by carnivorous plants and genetically engineered terror-birds,
- ringed by a border charmingly decorated with the imaginatively bedazzled skulls of trespassers.
Sadly, this is not always practical. Sometimes one has to optimize land use by maximizing the number of people per unit area. Since humans are made of incompressible water, the most practical way to accomplish this is to build up (or down). A tower block or its equivalent can house a thousand people on the same footprint as a few freestanding homes. Its larger cousin, the arcology, uses land even more efficiently.
While living surrounded by legions of people may not be to everyone’s taste, such a setting is attractive to authors. Plot, after all, benefits from human interaction. If there’s one thing a building housing hundreds, thousands, or hundreds of thousands of people offers, it’s human interaction. Don’t believe me? Consider these five works.
High-Rise by J. G. Ballard (1975)
Divorced Dr. Laing is persuaded by his sister to embrace modernity and move into a modern high-rise. Forty stories tall, the tower block houses one thousand well-to-do Britons. The edifice offers every amenity residents could want, from movie theatres to grocery stores. The only absence is any sense of community.
What follows is a glorious process of social distillation. Neighborhoods within the building instinctively sort themselves by class. Having done so, residents within each social stratum turn on each other. Violence and worse abound. The survivors might hope for rescue from the outside… but the world does not notice when phone lines are cut and the building falls silent. The dwindling population within the tower is on its own.
Readers might want to draw parallels between Grenfell Tower or Ronan Point1 and Ballard’s tower. There is a crucial difference. Grenfell and Ronan Point’s tragedies were inflicted on them by an indifferent, callous society. Ballard’s characters have nobody but themselves to blame for their situation.
Attack the Block, written and directed by Joe Cornish (2011)
Moses and his gang of bored teens make two errors, one embarrassing and one catastrophic. Firstly, they mug nurse Samantha Adams, a fellow Wyndham Tower resident. Secondly, when attacked by an unfamiliar creature, they kill it. The first is an egregious social faux pas. The second amounts to collective suicide.
The unfamiliar animal is the first and by far smallest of its kind to appear. For reasons unclear to the teens, the burly carnivores are obsessed with the gang. The creatures have no trouble tracking the kids. Equipped with an abundance of natural weapons, the beasts being picking off the teens one by one. Having gotten his friends into fatal trouble, it’s up to Moses to save them.
Viewer will recognize Moses as Star Wars actor John Boyega in his first film role. Doctor Who fans may also recognize the actor who plays Samantha Adams as Jodie Whittaker, who is perhaps better known for her portrayal of the Thirteenth Doctor. For some reason, this well-praised, taut science fiction thriller tanked at the box office. Personally, I blame David Cameron. That’s always an option.
Dredd (2012), written by Alex Garland, directed by Pete Travis
With most of North America reduced to toxic desolation, Mega-City One’s eight hundred million citizens live in densely-packed two-hundred-story towers. Rampant crime demands a forthright response. Accordingly, heavily armed Judges are given virtually unlimited authority to dole out justice—or at least punishment—as they see fit.
Judges Dredd (Karl Urban) and Anderson (Olivia Thirlby) enter slum-town block Peach Trees to investigate what appear to be unremarkable violent murders. By doing so, they inadvertently threaten local gang lord Ma-Ma Madrigal (Lena Headey) with exposure and arrest. The solution? Kill both Judges and Ma-Ma’s problems will vanish. Killing Judges proves much harder than it first appears.
Like most movie viewers (I assume), I am easily distracted by the implications of demographic data tossed off in a passing infodump. In this case, we’re told that Mega-City residents commit 17,000 serious crimes a day. That sounds like a lot but that’s the work of eight hundred million people. I think it’s 800 serious crimes per hundred thousand residents per year, which seems to be roughly equal to Alaska’s crime rate. 2 It’s possible the Judges are an overreaction. Of course, in law and order, perception matters more than facts.
This Time of Darkness by H. M. Hoover (1980)
The city is vast, decaying, and dystopian. Its numb inhabitants focus on consumption; adults like Amy’s mother have to be bribed into having children, and the whole apparatus is slowly running down. Eleven-year-old Amy might flee to a better neighborhood were she not (falsely) assured that all neighborhoods are equally squalid. Leaving the city entirely does not occur to her because as far as she knows, the city is all that there is.
Enter Axel, a strange boy with a wild tale. Axel claims to be from outside. A wild tale, but…Axel is clearly unsuited to life in the city. He is also manifestly incapable of escaping on his own. Amy resolves to accompany Axel in a bid to reach the mythical 80th floor…and escape.
The plots of many dystopic tales of this era were driven by catastrophic resource depletion: too many people for the resources available. In this case, the fatal error appears to be the calculation by the ruling classes that to provide the masses with the knowledge and skills needed to maintain the city would provide the masses with the knowledge and skill needed to overthrow their rulers. Safer, therefore, to let things slowly run down and hope that the deluge holds off until the current generation dies of old age.
The Snow Queen by Joan D. Vinge (1980)
Tiamat is an underdeveloped planet, its primary community the arcology known as Carbuncle. This is a scheme by the off-world Hegemony that dominates Tiamat. Tiamat is the sole source of Water of Life, on which immortality depends. To forestall the rise of a planetary government able to resist the Hegemony, the Hegemony encourages a highly centralized economy focused on one arcology dependent on off-world technology. During those periods when access to Tiamat is impossible, the Hegemony shuts off all advanced technology on the planet.
Arienrhod has ruled as Snow Queen for a century and a half. When the star gate linking Tiamat to the Hegemony closes, she will be sacrificed, all advanced technology will stop working, and Tiamat will fall into another dark age until the Galactics return. Arienrhod loves her world as much as she enjoys living. She has a cunning plan to save herself and Tiamat, one demanding only the death of an unremarkable rustic girl named Moon. Alas for the Snow Queen, intended victim Moon proves to have a prodigious capacity for screwing up perfectly good plans.
Given the events of this novel and its sequels, one could easily make the case that while Moon is the protagonist, Arienrhod is the hero. Between Moon and supporting character BZ Gundhalinu, they not only sabotage Arienrhod’s bid for Tiamatan independence, they provide the Hegemony with the means to spread far beyond its current borders.
***
Buildings of Unusual Size can be found throughout science fiction and fantasy.3 The five mentioned above are just a small taste. Feel free to mention outstanding examples in comments below.
In the words of fanfiction author Musty181, four-time Hugo finalist, prolific book reviewer, and perennial Darwin Award nominee James Davis Nicoll “looks like a default mii with glasses.” His work has appeared in Interzone, Publishers Weekly and Romantic Times as well as on his own websites, James Nicoll Reviews (where he is assisted by editor Karen Lofstrom and web person Adrienne L. Travis) and the 2021, 2022, and 2023 Aurora Award finalist Young People Read Old SFF (where he is assisted by web person Adrienne L. Travis). His Patreon can be found here.
[1]If you don’t know these places, search engines are close to hand.
[2]Assuming serious = violent. If it includes non-violent crimes, then Mega-City One has a crime rate lower than many developed nations.
[3]Is Gormenghast a fantasy?
An episode of the 7th Doctor was set in a high rise where things had gone very wrong. “Paradise Towers.”
A century ago, there was a science fiction story in which the entire world was basically one big residence, underground. “The Machine Stops” by E.M. Forster.
I was expecting OATH OF FEALTY but I expect a whole post could be done on THAT one…
Nah, if I was going to mention OoF, I’d mention it in a context that let me focus on the rather Lord Haw Haw-esque Canadian who puts in an appearance.
See also Broken Homes (2013) by Ben Aaronovitch, the fourth book in the “Rivers of London” urban-fantasy series. The suspicious death of the architect of the South London high-rise Skygarden Towers leads to discovery that it was designed to harvest magical energy from its tenants and convert it to a usable power-source.
WILD MASSIVE by Scotto Moore takes place in a vast skyscraper in the center of the multiverse. Any floor could contain an entire new ecosystem. There’s a network of Wild Massive theme parks throughout the building. The elevators go up and down but also teleport. Fascinating, wildly imaginative setting.
Though more steampunky fantasy than SF, if you consider the Tower to be one giant building (large enough that each floor is a more-or-less independent “ringdom”), then Josiah Bancroft’s Books of Babel should get a place on this list.
MA Foster’s novel Preserver – third in the Morphodite trilogy – is set on Teragon, a completely urbanized planetary city, and his novella “Entertainment” is set in a sprawling unnamed (The) City with nothing outside it similar to the environment in Hoover’s This Time of Darkness. Other relentless cityscapes and megastructures that come to mind are William Gibson’s The Sprawl, Alfred Bester’s Boswash Corridor, and the cityplanet Helior of Harry Harrison’s Bill, the Galactic Hero.
Thank you for mentioning H.M. Hoover! My middle-school library had several of her books, and I’d never have discovered her otherwise. I own a copy of This Time of Darkness to this day, it’s always stuck with me as a dystopia aimed directly at middle-grade/YA readers, but that an adult can also read with mounting horror.
Robert Silverberg’s The World Inside has a building/high rise/massive bloc–the majority of the population lives in these, society runs on free love and never going outside, and if being shamed by your neighbors doesn’t bring you back into the fold and the lifestyle, there’s always the “reclaimation chute”…
Wot, no love for Walter Jon Williams’ Metropolitan and City on Fire? (While the high rise aspects are understated, it is another world-city, powered by geomancy: WJW is reportedly finally working on the third book in the trilogy.)
Silverberg’s The World Inside qualifies, being set in a thousand-story skyscraper.
Hugh Howey’s Wool (now apparently retitled Silo following the release of the Apple TV series) takes place in a large, 144-storey building — it’s just inverted, so that the inhabitants are underground.
I suppose one could argue that all space-Ark stories are simply variations on this theme — but that way might lead madness.
I have a fond memory of Steven Gould’s 1988 story ‘Peaches for Mad Molly’, which has our protagonist scaling the outside of a tower to retrieve said fruit. It was published in Analog and appeared in some of the year’s best anthologies in 1989, including Gardner Dozois’s sixth annual year’s best anthology.
9: ! All I need now is the next Steerswoman, Gentlemen Bastard, Moonstar, and Anthony Villiers novels for a Five Sequels I Am Happy to Add to Mount Tsundoku.
The Building, aka the Third Pentagon or the Last Pentagon, is a single immense structure that is the final hermetically-sealed redoubt of the future USA’s Department of Defense. Filled with bureaucratic, military, and espionage people engaged in plots about each other, The Building is the setting of Stanislaw Lem’s Memoirs Found in a Bathtub.
Cory Doctorow’s Unauthorized Bread, a novella set in the poor/immigrant floors of a high rise, explores the many ways capitalism oppresses us. It follows a technically-adept immigrant as she helps the poor residents of her high rise, who are segregated on separate floors with time-segregated elevator access via a segregated entrance, jailbreak their sell-the-razor-for-cheap-and-make-money-from-the-expensive-razor-blades appliances that only accept affiliated consumables sold at higher prices. It’s expensive to be poor.
There’s Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi, which is mostly set in an enormous building.
In comics, there are the two issues of Scott McCloud’s Zot! containing the story “Getting to 99”, set in a city consisting of 99 underground stories which is the only inhabited place on its planet.
Arcologies feature in several of Niven’s works I guess, there’s one in the later Ringworld books too. The buildings of the aliens in William Tenn’s Of Men and Monsters are also tremendous by human standards.
Technically, would some shells in Colin Kapp’s Cageworld series count as giant arcologies (or at least the individual cities should really be BOUS)? The population density certainly fits…
I wonder if the ST:OS episode “The Mark of Gideon” counts? The Fake Enterprise is built inside a city. All the windows on every level look out onto the passageways of the city. That should count as a Building Of Unusual Size.
Surely William Hope Hodgson’s “The Night Land,” featuring the remnants of humanity living within a massive enclosed pyramid city on a future Earth after the sun’s demise, rates as the grandfather (or at least uncle) of all such yarns.
David Wingrove’s Chung Kuo series definitely comes to mind here.
Coruscant? Trantor?
For a taste of this in reality, visit Canadian Forces Base Saint Jean, not terribly for South of Montreal. Much of the base buildings were flattened in the 1980s and replaced by a block-long 11 story building.
Living there was a study in dehumanisation. The air conditioning system had its own ecosystem, the windows were single pane (in Quebec, which faces its own ice age each winter) so they merely added a second layer of single pane windows fastened directly to the outside walls by metal frames which conducted the cold so well they were always frozen over. It was so dire and suicides were so routine that we student officers were tasked to patrol the hallways each night. Not so much to prevent suicides, but to serve as the military’s Official Witnesses whenever we found a successful one.
All of the civilian teaching staff (the base is mostly a huge school) were separatists who had no appreciation for the irony of being paid by the Canadian Government they were officially opposed to.
Based on my experiences there, I’m pretty certain that most of your listed works are actually documentaries.
I’ll toss in a “Building of an Unusual Size” from the manga/anime Hakumei to Mikochi. It’s the “Honey House”, which is not a monolithic building, but instead a collection of buildings built on top of other buildings, creating a chaotic complex of passageways, streets, stairs, and even underground connections. Honey House was the creation of a brewer and his assistant, with a lengthy contract for all residents that ended in “And ya know what, you can ignore all of this!”
Yes, it’s an anarchists’ dream, but there are rules in place. It’s more in keeping with how the real world version, Freetown Christiania, operates. In the fictional version, there are “rules” that are implicit to the setting, more common law than written. It’s a fun idea, but one wonders how well it would actually work.
Downtown Calgary may count as “an effort was made”, as the buildings at the core are connected by skyways and tunnels allowing the inhabitants to avoid Alberta winters. The film waydowntown concerns a set of office workers who both live and work downtown as well, who are a month into a “who can go the longest without going outside” contest; their emotional health is starting to wear…
While Trantor and Coruscant are likely the most famous world-spanning buildings in SF, I remember a brilliant take on that construct via the eponymous House in Tad Williams’ Otherland novels. Sure, it’s hyper-VR, but it certainly has a ‘Hotel California’ vibe to it about being able to check out.
You can always check out of a skyscraper, as Garry Hoy proved.
The Luckiest Man in Denv is set in a high rise with higher rank/status associated with higher floors. Ossian’s Ride by Fred Hoyle seems as forgotten as some of Hoyle’s astrophysics. The more Utopian society crowds people into high rises to leave more land open.
I adore this sub-sub-genre.
The Library of Babel by Borges deserves a mention.
House of Stairs as well, though not a great entry.
The Book that Wouldn’t Burn is a better option.
I love that the writers of these books must constrain themselves, and find creativity in other ways.
Am I allowed to talk movies?
Cube, Exterminating Angel, Twelve Angry Men, Cabin in the Woods, the list goes on and on.
Richard Wilson’s 1950s short story ‘Man Working’ takes place in Chicago’s 528 story Mile-Hi Building, whose abandoned upper floors have been taken over by alien talent scouts. Our reluctant hero finally lands a job working as a monster for alien filmmakers…
I was expecting The Drowning Towers. This story, about post-apocalytic skyscrapers in a world of rising waters has lived in my memory since long before climate change was a common fear. George Turner?
9: Oh, I do so hope that Walter Jon Williams really is working on a third book!
27: Ossian’s Ride was one of the very first adult sf books I ever read, must be more than 60 years ago. I think I’ll dig out my copy and give it another go.
I would suggest “Ora;cle,” by Kevin O’Donell. Climate change and alien invasion have everyone confined to their apartment towers. The entire story takes place in the protagonist’s apartment, with a couple of brief forays into the hallway and out onto the balcony. Oddly prescient about the Internet and drones in particular.
30: Yup, George Turner. Also published as The Summer and the Sea.
The builds in 1984 are quite huge.
Kage Baker’s fantasy series, starting with The Anvil of the World has the wicked sorcerer living in just such a place- skulls and all. We find in The House of the Stag that it was built that way by magic, our sorcerer knowing what good advertising was worth.
Earthport
Some of White Light by Rudy Rucker takes place in the Hilbert Hotel. While it’s only a small part of the book, I feel it must get extra credit for the building being not merely large but infinitely large (countably infinite, which in this book actually matters).
The one that jumped to my mind was Farewell Horizontal by K.W. Jeter, which is mostly set on the outside of a massive tower in some apocalyptic future.
William Gibson’s book Idoru, touches on a virtual community called the Walled City, which was based on the real Kowloon Walled City, a dense lawless enclave in Hong Kong, which was ungoverned by either Hong Kong/Britain or China.
Honestly it was a stranger place than many of the fictional examples noted above.
Patrick Morris Miller @24: All of Carleton University’s buildings are connected by underground tunnels, a nice convenience during an Ottawa winter. Students living in residence don’t need to go outside unless they want to, and I gather than some of them go for months without doing so during the coldest part of the year.
Unfortunately, UW’s pedestrian tunnel systems have gaps so one must always venture out into the realm of snow and territorial geese.
The Ballard, Silverberg, Howey all memorable. Just for fun, give a listen to Leonard Cohen’s “Tower of Song,” from the album I’m Your Man:
I said to Hank Williams, “How lonely does it get?”
Hank Williams hasn’t answered yet
But I hear him coughing, all night long
Oh, a hundred floors above me in the tower of song
I just finished reading (this morning!) Charlie N. Holmberg’s The Hanging City. Cagmar is a whole city of many many levels built hanging down into a crevasse, besieged by monsters from the deep and populated by trollic (“troll” is racist). There is a small enclave of low-caste humans in the city, and a ravaged outside world with small scattered human settlements. Lark (our heroine with a Mysterious Power) has been on the run from her abusive father from the age of 12, and the city, where she initially lives with a trollic sister and brother is her last hope for a home. The world-building is pretty strong, with some clever details (for example how long it takes to get anywhere or buy anything when you constantly have to give precedence to trollic denizens who all out-rank you…).
@491col: which Earthport? ISTR the name appears in several authors’ works. One author who didn’t use that name was Cordwainer Smith, whose Meeya Meefla (appearing in assorted Instrumentality shorts and IIRC in Norstrilia) was both port and arcology.
One could argue whether Arthur C. Clarke’s Diaspar (in Against the Fall of Night / The City and the Stars) is a building of unusual size or just a city with walls so high the outside world is invisible from any point not on the outer surface of the enclosure.
Ballad of lost C’mell.
Set in Earthport.second paragraph.
It all happened in Earthport,greatest of all buildings,smallest of cities, standing twenty-five miles high,at the western end of the smallest sea of earth.
The dead lady of clown town.fifth paragraph.
An- Fang was near a city,the only city with a pre- atomic name The meaning less name was Meeya Meefia.
surely Iain M. Banks’ “Feersum Endjinn” belongs on this list? Set in a building so large that one character makes his comfortable home in the eyeball of a gargoyle decorating the outer wall, a war has taken place in the ruins of an external building, and the city built in the chandelier of the chapel has seceded from the control of the King.
BoUSs? I don’t think they exist.
@43 the Cordwainer Smith information is incorrect.
See 44
@43 @44 And I don’t know how many years after I first read it that it was pointed out to me that Meeya Meefla was Miami, Fla. :-)
The High House, The False House, and Evenmere by James Stoddard
Atmosphaera Incognita, by Neal Stephenson, about a 20-km skyscraper.
The whole “giant building in which humans live like mice” is a different take on the idea. In one, the building is built to human scale, for human use. In the other the humans are, at best, subtenants surviving under the notice of the builders. There are plenty of fun stories using this premise, to be sure.
I’d like to chime in with @32 about Ora:Cle by Kevin O’Donnell. It’s a really excellent book, probably O’Donnell’s best, and a lot more exciting than you’d expect for a book set largely in one apartment. The plot is interesting and weird, dealing both with aliens using the world as a sort of hunting preserve and a secretive, unaccountable government that seems to be assassinating scholars, based on criteria that are initially unclear. And, the way it gets resolved is pretty damn cool, both simply as cool plot and in its political approach.
It’s not a particularly large building… but nearly the entire population of Whittier, Alaska lives (and some work) in the Begich Towers Condominium… I don’t know if any science fiction stories have been written about it though.
Two of Sheri Tepper’s books: The Companions and Beauty fall in this category.
I can see someone has already mentioned the Foundation series but for the Large Buildings/Cities (and their opposite on Spacer Worlds) it would probably be worthwhile checking out the Elijah Bailey novels by Asimov – City life at it’s worse…
Farewell Horizontal by KW Jeter.
Am astonished and delighted to be the first to mention Asimov’s Caves of Steel. The cultural developments required by living so piled up are a major driver to the story.
And the giant urbs in Sherri S. Tepper’s The Companions should be on this list, though they aren’t the major setting.
1990’s Pegasus in Flight, from Anne McCaffrey’s Talent series includes the Linear developments of Jerhatten and the same themes of overcrowding, class disparity, and turning to crime for survival in those circumstances. I will always have a soft spot for that series.
I’m surprised no one has mentioned The Cinderspires series by Jim Butcher with the newest book out this week. I’ll grant you that it’s more Steampunk than Sci Fi but it IS set in the far far future so it technically counts and the Spires themselves are so massive that each functions as a nation unto itself with each floor effectively it’s own state.
How did everyone forget the best The Caves of Steel by Isaac Asimov?
I must take issue with the notion that Arienrhod is a hero, given that her plan is built on the annihilation of a sentient species.
Shadrach in the Furnace – Robert Silverberg 1976
I was of an age where this description of city towers left an impression of wonder on me.
Drowning Towers, by George Turner.
Also, the monastery in ANATHEM by Stephenson appears to be larger on the inside than it is on the outside.
Another shout out to discovering H. M. Hoover while reading through my middle school library’s entire fiction section. The plots and cover art of This Time of Darkness and Away Is a Strange Place to Be embedded themselves in my brain… But unfortunately neither their titles nor the author’s name lodged as permanently. You’ve just helped me figure out exactly which books I’ve been remembering (and lamenting losing the title and author of) for the past 25 years! Thank you!
In wikipedia, you have the following entry:
Jan Weiss (10 May 1892 – 7 March 1972) was a Czechoslovak writer, best known for his surrealist novel House of a Thousand Floors (Czech: Dům o Tisíci Patrech).
I read “House of a Thousand Floors” (translated to French and published by Marabout Géant) more than 50 years ago. I loved it. I recall it (possibly wrongly) as a mix of dream and reality, with floor based discrimination. It is one of those books you do not forget, but may reread. Unfortunately I donot dare say more since I cannot comment accurately, but there are several descriptions and comments to be found on the Internet. The book, published in 1929 in Prague, was influenced by Weiss deportation in Siberia during WW1. He wrote other SciFi books.
This book should definitely belong to any selection of stories set in buildings of unusual size. And it is worth reading.
However, it is not too easy to find, especially as an ebook (I would welcome any pointer to an ebook version in English or French).
No mention of 334 by Thomas M. Disch?
No mention of the sprawling Korean manhwa Tower of God? In the TOG universe everyone lives and battles inside a huge tower, wherein each level appears to be a world unto itself. You can find the English translation in the WEBTOON app.
@65 Babou: Amazon.com lists both a Kindle and a paperback version of House of a Thousand Floors:
https://www.amazon.com/House-Thousand-Floors-Press-Classics-ebook/dp/B07MMF92DC/
This is an English version. I haven’t checked for a French version.
@@@@@ 52 the assassination of scholars plot I thought was particularly well-done. And exactly – some unknown criteria for eliminating those who might stumble on the big secret.
Larry Niven has built more than one arcology – The California Voodoo Game, the 3rd Dream Park novel, is set in an abandoned arcology.
@70: And one of the Gil the A.R.M. stories -“The Defenseless Dead”, I think – has a scene set in an arcology.
• Frank Herbert – Paul’s massive Keep in Dune Messiah, then surpassed in size by his son’s in God Emperor of Dune (though I think Leto II called his a sietch). The regular sietches in Dune would count as well.
• Janet Edwards – The Earth Girl series has three massive city structure projects from earth’s past: Australia’s subterranean Arc, the unbuilt bottom of the sea city, and the white plas city in Africa the class excavates in vol.2. Her Telepath/Hive Mind series has most people living in massive subterranean Hives (with parks, beaches, etc all inside), while being afraid of the Outside.
• Andrea K Höst – The Touchstone trilogy‘s mega city buildings on Tare (some built within caves for added protection), created because the planet’s storms are too severe to survive otherwise.
• I’m not sure whether Genevieve Cogman’s Library within The Invisible Library counts or not, it’s huge, but it’s in a pocket dimension with no outside that’s mentioned in the volumes I’ve read (I’m saving the last).