CONCEPT
Last night I had the priviledge of picking two brilliant brains about Urbàntasm (I actually convinced the suckers into reading a little!) and I spent a lot of time afterward thinking about this project, its characters and processes and what transpires. In particular, since the emotion we discussed was “fear” I was thinking a lot about what fear represents in this project, from whence it derives, and why I expect (and hope for) fear in a reader.
I understand fear in Urbàntasm as unease and uncertainty resulting from a pervading sense that something is fundamentally wrong and flawed in the world… that the program is so essentially wounded that any elements contained therein are necessarily and systematically injured or destroyed.
In other words, my answer today for “what is Urbàntasm?” is:
A steamroller that crushes characters, allusions, themes, symbols, stories, and motifs into an undifferentiated mess of number, organs, images, contradictions, and words.
Characters are conscious and aware of this process, and while they can never apprehend the whole picture at once, their apprehension generates the fear that I hope to transmit to the reader.
Now a question (and my challenge) is whether it is possible for a character to survive in the end? Ideally, yes, and hopefully, a few will. But from my perspective, the fear, distress, and tragedy of the story results from the fact that, while any character can retain any one gift or aspect, the price of such retention is often (and sometimes literally) everything else. And these costs run the gamut from a computer to a home to a life to a name.