Gas sprayed over the city/building to hide reality from people

[Valentino]

Please help me recollect the author and the title of the following scifi story.

In 1990s I've read a short story (or novel) in which some ruler (or government) sprayed some narcotic gas in big building (or over the city) to prevent people to see the reality as it is. So people are happy and think that they live in a wonderful city/building. Main character at some point starts to see the ugly reality (or less likely that he could see it from the beginning of the book) - people are actually poor, sick and starving, etc.

Initially I thought it could be Jan Weiss's novel House of a Thousand Floors, but it doesn't seem like it.

 

[PaulMmn]

Not a narcotic gas, but there was a story about everyone living in a virtual reality overlay on top of reality. Our Hero convinced his family to turn off the VR, and reality was the dilapidated, poorly maintained world. The family turned their VR back on.

 

[Danny McG]

Try "Jesting Pilot" by Lewis Padgett (Henry Kuttner)

I have it as a short story in ebook format and it matches your tales outline

 

[hitmouse]

The trope was nicely inverted in one of Jack Vance's Cugel the Clever stories. Cugel finds a squalid village where everyone is filthy and disfigured. There are violet lenses, worn in the eyes which make everything look luxurious and beautiful. These belong exclusively to the leaders, and the rest of the villagers spend their time waiting enviously until one of them dies so that one of them can have a chance to wallow in apparent luxury.

 

[Ravensquawk]

Try "Jesting Pilot" by Lewis Padgett (Henry Kuttner)

I have it as a short story in ebook format and it matches your tales outline

I discovered and read this story because of this post.
In "Cities of Wonder" edited by Damon Knight.

Not certain that it's the exact one sought, but buildings called "Monuments" 1 through 7 project some kind of field that keeps Citizens well-adjusted and satisfied (or so they think), inside the mysterious 600-year-old Barrier.

The story was published two years after the bombs were dropped, so that was the supposed motive for whoever created the Barrier.

"Controllers" don't really control the barrier, nor know how to eradicate it. They don't even know when it might stop being projected. All they have is a switch to turn it back on again, never off. They somehow figure out how to "control" how well-adjusted "Citizens" are by diverting their desires toward something useful. Everyone, Citizen or Controller, has been heavily conditioned since birth.

It was unsustainable ecologically, a five-mile radius isolated from the rest of the world.

Anyone living in the city would have developed a neurosis in two minutes, a psychosis in ten.

There was one answer.
Hypnosis.
Everyone in the city was under hypnosis. It was selective telepathic hypnosis, with the so-called Monuments -- powerful hypnopedic machines -- as the control devices.

The main character Citizen has flashes of "split-second rational periods".

"....He's heard and seen the city as it is--"

The Controllers divert him to using his scientific bent to research.

"...He's happy now. He's stopped rocking the lifeboat."

The story is never resolved. It ends with the two MC Controllers wondering

"But suppose we just think there's a Barrier?"

There are other city-inside-barrier stories and some of them may also match this question. Thanks for the lead on a Blish*-- oops, I mean a Kuttners' story, though!

*Also reading "The Box" by Blish. Another "City In Barrier" story. And it's also written soon enough after WWII that the MC engineer trying to solve the barrier around New York is being arrested simply because he is German. Even though he is haunted by his memories of imprisonment in Dora -- the Mittelbrau-Dora concentration camp.

 

[JunkMonkey]

Not the answer to rhe OP question but I think the most literal example of this sort of thing I can think of is a van Vogt book in which, in a female dominated society, all men were forced to wear pink sunglasses to make everything look nicer.

 

[Danny McG]

in a female dominated society, all men were forced to wear pink sunglasses to make everything look nicer

Yeah!

 

[Yammerhant]

Please help me recollect the author and the title of the following scifi story.

In 1990s I've read a short story (or novel) in which some ruler (or government) sprayed some narcotic gas in big building (or over the city) to prevent people to see the reality as it is. So people are happy and think that they live in a wonderful city/building. Main character at some point starts to see the ugly reality (or less likely that he could see it from the beginning of the book) - people are actually poor, sick and starving, etc.

Initially I thought it could be Jan Weiss's novel House of a Thousand Floors, but it doesn't seem like it.

It sounds like "The Volvax Immersion" by Tom Arden, originally published in Interzone magazine in 1999. You can read it online at the Internet Archive at this link.

 

[Ravensquawk]

It sounds like "The Volvax Immersion" by Tom Arden, originally published in Interzone magazine in 1999. You can read it online at the Internet Archive at this link.

I just finished reading it! It's a closer match to the question description than the story I found.
No city within a barrier, and we're (i.e. the readers are) not certain if it is a gas, but it is an illusion generator.

“The Immersion, Emmy! If the machine is magic, then this valley below us is all under its spell. Oh, there’s nothing you can see. The Immersion’s invisible, like wireless waves, but you know you’re in it when you see a place like this.


At last I was beginning to understand. “It’s a way to make people think they’re happy. . . when they’re not?”

“That’s putting it simply, Emmy, but yes. Daytime dreaming, some used to call it. Radiophonic psychosis, that was one of the terms we used to bandy about. Oh, there’s been opposition from the first. Agitators like young Miles, creating a great stink. Never thought they’d get a majority on their side. Hmph! Give the people back their freedom, he says. Freedom? For what?”​

The Immersion, whether gas or EM field, was used to keep the Axis/Nazi powers from defeating England (and everyone else) in WWII.
The story was based in post-WWII England, where the war was more deadly than in the distant Americas.
You could see the ending coming for the narrator, a very young "high society" girl living on a "landed estate" with "servants".

It's as depressing as The Matrix -- which means it's good sci-fi doing its job.

Thanks!