House of Stairs

Product Information

Escher makes use of geometry in most of his prints, and in this case he uses several rectangles to make the stairs and walls.

This is an incredibly creative and original science fiction tale that chronicles the events that take place when five teen-aged orphans are behaviorally trained to respond to a machine.AC Independent and The Veterans have teamed up on the film adaptation of William Sleator’s cult 1974 science fiction novel “House of Stairs.

Which is strange, because his fiction feels very fundamentally British in a way I can’t put my finger on. Five sixteen-year-old orphans, whose parents either died in ‘the war’ or were conveniently killed in recent car accidents, find themselves inside a bright white structure with seemingly no walls, ceiling or floor, and filled entirely with rail-less staircases, the occasional small landing and one unusual machine. The first person story is told by Elizabeth partly in present time (that is its 80s setting) and partly back to the time when she first encountered Bell, in the 60s, and their lives connected, in a dark and destructive way.Colorblind Confusion: The main characters lose the ability to tell the difference between a flashing red light and a flashing green light, because the color of the lights on the machine is irrelevant to whether they get food or not. First published in 1974, I imagine Sleator was influenced at least in part, by some of the more famous psych experiments of the first half of the 20th century including the Little Albert Experiment and the Milgram Obedience Experiment. The whole setup (which is thoroughly, if somewhat clunkily, explained at the end) is about conditioning, and changing people's personality through stimuli and reinforcement to make them behave as desired. Twenty-four students were selected out of 75 to play the prisoners and live in a mock prison in the basement of the Stanford psychology building. Things I wish: that I knew what happened to the fallout of the world, that I knew more about the characters’ previous lives, that I knew what happened to them after the stairs, we knew more of the characters’ inner thoughts.