House of Stairs (novel)
Sleator, William. House of Stairs. NYC: Dutton, 1974. See Internet Speculative Fiction Database for translation into German, and reprints.[1] Not to be confused with Trappenhuis (House of Stairs) lithograph by M. C. Escher.[2]
Publisher's description on ISFDb page cited above: "Publisher's description: 'Five fifteen-year-old orphans of widely varying personality characteristics are involuntarily placed in a house of endless stairs as subjects for a psychological experiment on conditioned human response.'"
Wikipedia summary includes,
On one landing is a basin of running water that serves as a toilet, sink and drinking fountain; on another, a machine with lights that intermittently produces food. The five, thrown together in these bizarre circumstances, must learn to deal with the others' disparate personalities, the lack of privacy and comfort, their clear helplessness, and a machine that only feeds them under gradually more exacting situations.[[3] ]
On a thread on the question, "Is freedom what the mind wants?" on Suzy McKee Charnas's Facebook page (as of summer 2022),[4] Stephanie Mauer Whelan notes in more depth:
In William Sleator's House of Stairs, a reality is forced upon a group of kids who are thrust into a building made of stairs with only water and a big red machine that blinks and gives out meat pellets if they do what it wants. To figure out what it wants means ongoing vigilance and trial and error. Three of the kids embrace this reality and get more and more violent and controlled as the time goes on. Two of them rebel, and the older girl gives the younger boy care and comfort and stories, giving them both a 'reward' that lets them ignore the machine and the lure of food and what it is doing to the other kids.
Note motif of threatening enclosure in a kind of Labyrinth in which there is no organic, if wildly hybrid, minotaur, but a controlling machine, using Skinnerian reinforcement for that "conditioned human response".
RDE, with thanks to Stephanie Mauer Whelan, 19/20Aug22
