false74972000071381219780007138128596The Complete Short Storieshttp://photo.goodreads.com/books/1178014424m/749720.jpg
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2889561J.G. Ballard824683143falseWed Oct 31 15:24:21 -0700 2007Fri Aug 14 16:18:42 -0700 2009 1) 1956-64 - At first he was writing actual science fiction, really cranking it out. There are some beautiful ones in this early part, probably my favourites - "The Sound Sweep", "The Concentration City", "Billenium", "The Voices of Time". It became gradually clear - to JG and to the reader - that he wasn't really able to do the hard-sf thing (extrapolation with knobs on), but instead, he was developing, slowly, a genuine voice, a way of seeing the present in the guise of the future, a unique form of poetry. He also wrote a trio of potboiling disaster novels.
2) 1965-83 - he became noticably strange in 1965, at the exact time when the 60s counterculture was becoming self-conscious. Falling in with a bunch of other new crazed experimentalists (like Michael Moorcock) he became part of the take-over of the formerly staid British sf mag New Worlds. This mag then became a major platform for madness in print for the next five years, like a literary version of Oz or IT. (And was duly prosecuted for obscenity.) So JG was like the professor amongst the hippies. There was an assumed sf sensibility behind the madness published by New Worlds but often it was hard so see because it wasn't there. This was when sf became "speculative fabulation". I wish I had a collection of New Worlds 1965-1970. Man alive! I would look over them and be amazed – so prescient, and so gone. So anyway, in this period JG invented "the compressed novel", i.e. the very refined, hyperintellectualised mashup of Hollywood Babylon, the National Enquirer, the facelifts of the rich and famous, the autopsies of the rich and famous, the study of autoerotic fatalities, the architecture of Los Angeles with especial reference to its swimming pools, inner space as alien landscape, the topography of hospitals and beaches, aeronautical engineering manuals, the soundless autogeddon of the near future, the frigid poetry of motorways, decayed technologies, abandoned futures – all rendered into gnomic prose distillations and hung onto lurid public events like the assassination of Kennedy or the death of Marilyn Monroe. This was not space opera. The apotheosis of this most ballardian phase of Ballard was, of course, Crash. Typical short story titles from this period:
The Terminal Beach
The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race
The Atrocity Exhibition
The Intensive Care Unit
Memories of the Space Age
Myths of the Near Future
3) 1984 – 2009 – With the publication of the non-sf, non-weird The Empire of the Sun, JG suddenly got himself a massive hit, and his long time fans were amazed to see him atop the bestseller lists and being filmed by Spielberg. Couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy but it was like seeing Captain Beefheart at No 1 in the pop charts. God help anyone who bought Crash after reading Empire of the Sun – “Oh look, dear, this is by the same author as that one you liked” “Oh okay, let’s see – whoah! Engine oil! Semen! Internal organs! Surgery! Deliberate car crashes! Aaaargh!”. So anyway, in his final phase JGB abandoned the short story form (only 80 pages of this 1186-page collection are from this period) and instead cranked out seven dystopian novels of varying qualities, which I confess have never tempted me. Maybe one day. No, what I like is JGB at his most elegiac, which is to say, at his most lethal. It's all in these short stories. Every home should have one.
Random quote generator - from page 817 :
“Already other memories were massing around him, fragments that he was certain belonged to another man’s life, details from the case-history of an imaginary patient whose role he had been tricked into playing. As he worked on the Fortress high among the dunes, brushing the sand away from the cylinder vanes of the radial engines, he remembered other aircraft he had been involved with , vehicles without wings.”
Some first lines of stories:
“In the evening, as Franklin rested on the roof of the abandoned clinic,he would often remember Trippett, and the last drive he had taken into the desert with the dying astronaut and his daughter.”
“All day this strange pilot had flown his antique aeroplane over the abandoned space centre, a frantic machine lost in the silence of Florida.”
“At dusk Sheppard was still sitting in the cockpit of the stranded aircraft, unconcerned by the evening tide that advanced towards him across the beach.”
“Later Powers often thought of Whitby and the strange grooves the biologist had cut, apparently at random, all over the floor of the empty swimming pool.”
“At sunset, when the vermilion glow reflected from the dunes along the horizon fitfully illuminated the white faces of the abandoned hotels…”
These stories are sad, wistful, clinical, upsetting meditations on the future we thought we were going to have and the future we turned out to be having all the while, which were two very different things.
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