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Memories of the Space Age
This is a limited-edition collection of J.G. Ballard's short stories from Arkham House united around the theme of the failed US space program, mostly set in a deserted and desolate Cape Canaveral, with a scattering of lone ex-astronauts and others still dreaming of the Space Age.
Cover artwork 'Europe After the Rain' by Max Ernst, illustrated by J.K. Potter
The Cage of Sand (New Worlds Jun ’62)
A Question of Re-Entry (Fantastic Mar ’63)
The Dead Astronaut (Playboy May ’68)
My Dream of Flying to Wake Island (Ambit #60 ’74)
News from the Sun (Ambit #87 ’81)
Memories of the Space Age (Interzone #2 ’82)
Myths of the Near Future (F&SF Oct ’82)
The Man Who Walked on the Moon (Interzone #13 ’85)
Cover artwork 'Europe After the Rain' by Max Ernst, illustrated by J.K. Potter
The Cage of Sand (New Worlds Jun ’62)
A Question of Re-Entry (Fantastic Mar ’63)
The Dead Astronaut (Playboy May ’68)
My Dream of Flying to Wake Island (Ambit #60 ’74)
News from the Sun (Ambit #87 ’81)
Memories of the Space Age (Interzone #2 ’82)
Myths of the Near Future (F&SF Oct ’82)
The Man Who Walked on the Moon (Interzone #13 ’85)
216 pages, Hardcover
First published November 1, 1988
5 people are currently reading
304 people want to read
About the author
J.G. Ballard
469 books4,090 followersJames Graham "J. G." Ballard (15 November 1930 – 19 April 2009) was an English novelist, short story writer, and essayist. Ballard came to be associated with the New Wave of science fiction early in his career with apocalyptic (or post-apocalyptic) novels such as The Drowned World (1962), The Burning World (1964), and The Crystal World (1966). In the late 1960s and early 1970s Ballard focused on an eclectic variety of short stories (or "condensed novels") such as The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), which drew closer comparison with the work of postmodernist writers such as William S. Burroughs. In 1973 the highly controversial novel Crash was published, a story about symphorophilia and car crash fetishism; the protagonist becomes sexually aroused by staging and participating in real car crashes. The story was later adapted into a film of the same name by Canadian director David Cronenberg.
While many of Ballard's stories are thematically and narratively unusual, he is perhaps best known for his relatively conventional war novel, Empire of the Sun (1984), a semi-autobiographical account of a young boy's experiences in Shanghai during the Second Sino-Japanese War as it came to be occupied by the Japanese Imperial Army. Described as "The best British novel about the Second World War" by The Guardian, the story was adapted into a 1987 film by Steven Spielberg.
The literary distinctiveness of Ballard's work has given rise to the adjective "Ballardian", defined by the Collins English Dictionary as "resembling or suggestive of the conditions described in J. G. Ballard's novels and stories, especially dystopian modernity, bleak man-made landscapes and the psychological effects of technological, social or environmental developments." The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry describes Ballard's work as being occupied with "eros, thanatos, mass media and emergent technologies".
While many of Ballard's stories are thematically and narratively unusual, he is perhaps best known for his relatively conventional war novel, Empire of the Sun (1984), a semi-autobiographical account of a young boy's experiences in Shanghai during the Second Sino-Japanese War as it came to be occupied by the Japanese Imperial Army. Described as "The best British novel about the Second World War" by The Guardian, the story was adapted into a 1987 film by Steven Spielberg.
The literary distinctiveness of Ballard's work has given rise to the adjective "Ballardian", defined by the Collins English Dictionary as "resembling or suggestive of the conditions described in J. G. Ballard's novels and stories, especially dystopian modernity, bleak man-made landscapes and the psychological effects of technological, social or environmental developments." The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry describes Ballard's work as being occupied with "eros, thanatos, mass media and emergent technologies".
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Displaying 1 - 24 of 24 reviews
November 4, 2015
Memories of the Space Age: Autopsy of a lost dream
Originally posted at Fantasy Literature
Memories of the Space Age (1988) is a limited edition hardcover published by small press Arkham House, with a gorgeous cover of Max Ernst’s ‘Europe After the Rain’ that captures the hallucinatory, decayed imagery of J.G. Ballard’s collection. It contains eight stories written between 1962 and 1985, thematically linked around rotting launch gantries at Cape Canaveral, the failure of the US space program, dead astronauts eternally orbiting in space, deserted hotels lining the Florida coast, and the lonely, disturbed individuals who linger at the fringes of this lost dream of the Space Age. The stories have so much overlap that some readers will find them very repetitive, and that is undeniable. Yet they do lure the reader into Ballard’s hypnotic world in a way few other writers do. These are the stories:
"The Cage of Sand" (1962), "A Question of Re-entry" (1962), "The Dead Astronaut" (1968), "My Dream of Flying to Wake Island" (1974), "News from the Sun" (1981), "Memories of the Space Age" (1982), "Myths of the Near Future" (1982), and "The Man Who Walked on the Moon" (1985).
All of the stories have a similar feel, and perhaps the earliest one, “The Cage of Sand,” captures Ballard’s ideas the best. It’s the story of Bridgeman, an architect who was not chosen to design a new colony on Mars, a failed astronaut named Travis, and Louise, the wife of a dead astronaut. They occupy some abandoned hotels near Cape Canaveral among the abandoned launch gantries, with the latter two obsessively watching the revolving satellites that revolve around the Earth, carrying dead astronauts — including Louise’s husband. Bridgeman is there for a different reason, since the site has been covered with Martian sand brought back from Mars to compensate for the lost mass from earlier Earth expeditions. That may make no sense at all, but it’s an irresistible image for Ballard: Earthlings basking in Martian sands on a Florida beach. However, the sands also contain an undetectable virus that attacks Earth’s flora and fauna, wrecking civilization. So Florida is now deserted except for a few eccentrics, and the security forces who decide to erect a fence to contain the site after failing to convince them to leave (hence the title). The atmosphere is drenched in languid images that reminded me of Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles:
At sunset, when the vermilion glow reflected from the dunes along the horizon fitfully illuminated the white faces of the abandoned hotels, Bridgman stepped onto his balcony and looked out over the long stretches of cooling sand as the tides of purple shadow seeped across them. Slowly, extending their slender fingers through the shallow saddles and depressions, the shadows massed together like gigantic combs, a few phosphorescing spurs of obsidian isolated for a moment between the tines, and then finally coalesced and flooded in a solid wave across the half-submerged hotels. Behind the silent facades, in the tilting sand-filled streets which had once glittered with cocktail bars and restaurants, it was already night. Halos of moonlight beaded the lamp standards with silver dew, and draped the shuttered windows and slipping cornices like a frost of frozen gas.
I think it’s very telling that “The Cage of Sand” was published in 1962, a year after the first manned space flight by Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin in 1961. Marilyn Monroe died of an overdose in Burbank, CA in 1962, and John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, TX in 1963. The conflict in Vietnam rapidly escalated in the early 1960s, with the Gulf of Tonkin incident happening in 1964, drawing the US into a drawn out conflict. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated within 2 months of each other in 1968. Finally, in 1969 the Apollo 11 mission allowed Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin take those historic steps on the Moon. The US and Soviet space programs were engaged in the Cold War and Space Race for supremacy. All of these events were extremely influential on Ballard’s writing, and it’s interesting to observe how his writing may have evolved as events unfolded. Notably, the space shuttle Challenger disaster did not happen until 1986, but Ballard seems to have already predicted the decline and failure of US space ambitions well before that. It makes sense that a thematic collection like Memories of the Space Age would be published in 1988.
It’s fascinating how consistently Ballard returned to these ideas over three decades, and his obsession with mankind’s attempts to penetrate space and leave the planet. Unlike the vast majority of Golden Age SF by writers like Asimov, Clarke, and Heinlein, Ballard takes a very negative view of ‘outer space’, and instead seeks to explore ‘inner space.’ His stories explore the psyche of spaceflight, and inevitably his characters encounter failure, insanity, and despair in their attempts to come to grips with it. It’s not clear exactly why Ballard found the idea of spaceflight so repellent, but if I may take a stab at it, I think he viewed it as humanity surrendering to its increasing adulation of technology and conquering of the natural environment. This can certainly be seen in extreme form in his tales of urban existential disaster: Crash, Concrete Island, and High-Rise.
It’s safe to say that Ballard has always taken a jaundiced view of modernity — our love of urban lifestyles, technology, and media imagery. I think his main intent in exploring these themes has been to expose the dangerous pathologies that have arisen as a result of our focus on surface comforts at the expense of our ‘inner space’ and emotional lives. And yet I don’t think he has ever explicitly shown us an example of the opposite, his idea of a utopian society. Returning to nature in his stories generally represents a return to barbarism, not the idyllic world of Eden. Yet between barbarism and an emotionally void modern life, what is there to uphold as a model for healthy living?
Based on reading four of his novels and over 50 of his short stories, Ballard’s most hopeful stories feature characters that have escaped the grips of time, but this takes the form of crystallization or plunging into the dreams of the distant past. Perhaps Ballard himself sought in vain to discover hope through his writing. And yet he wrote so eloquently of failed ambitions, a desire to escape the constraints of time and entropy, and our persistent modern myths, that his writing occupies a unique place that straddles literary ambitions and speculative fiction, both adopting and subverting the spaceflight and technology tropes of our beloved SF genre. It’s no surprise that J.G. Ballard is not always considered a welcome presence in the SF field, but for me his works represent a refreshing counterpoint to the usual SF themes.
Originally posted at Fantasy Literature
Memories of the Space Age (1988) is a limited edition hardcover published by small press Arkham House, with a gorgeous cover of Max Ernst’s ‘Europe After the Rain’ that captures the hallucinatory, decayed imagery of J.G. Ballard’s collection. It contains eight stories written between 1962 and 1985, thematically linked around rotting launch gantries at Cape Canaveral, the failure of the US space program, dead astronauts eternally orbiting in space, deserted hotels lining the Florida coast, and the lonely, disturbed individuals who linger at the fringes of this lost dream of the Space Age. The stories have so much overlap that some readers will find them very repetitive, and that is undeniable. Yet they do lure the reader into Ballard’s hypnotic world in a way few other writers do. These are the stories:
"The Cage of Sand" (1962), "A Question of Re-entry" (1962), "The Dead Astronaut" (1968), "My Dream of Flying to Wake Island" (1974), "News from the Sun" (1981), "Memories of the Space Age" (1982), "Myths of the Near Future" (1982), and "The Man Who Walked on the Moon" (1985).
All of the stories have a similar feel, and perhaps the earliest one, “The Cage of Sand,” captures Ballard’s ideas the best. It’s the story of Bridgeman, an architect who was not chosen to design a new colony on Mars, a failed astronaut named Travis, and Louise, the wife of a dead astronaut. They occupy some abandoned hotels near Cape Canaveral among the abandoned launch gantries, with the latter two obsessively watching the revolving satellites that revolve around the Earth, carrying dead astronauts — including Louise’s husband. Bridgeman is there for a different reason, since the site has been covered with Martian sand brought back from Mars to compensate for the lost mass from earlier Earth expeditions. That may make no sense at all, but it’s an irresistible image for Ballard: Earthlings basking in Martian sands on a Florida beach. However, the sands also contain an undetectable virus that attacks Earth’s flora and fauna, wrecking civilization. So Florida is now deserted except for a few eccentrics, and the security forces who decide to erect a fence to contain the site after failing to convince them to leave (hence the title). The atmosphere is drenched in languid images that reminded me of Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles:
At sunset, when the vermilion glow reflected from the dunes along the horizon fitfully illuminated the white faces of the abandoned hotels, Bridgman stepped onto his balcony and looked out over the long stretches of cooling sand as the tides of purple shadow seeped across them. Slowly, extending their slender fingers through the shallow saddles and depressions, the shadows massed together like gigantic combs, a few phosphorescing spurs of obsidian isolated for a moment between the tines, and then finally coalesced and flooded in a solid wave across the half-submerged hotels. Behind the silent facades, in the tilting sand-filled streets which had once glittered with cocktail bars and restaurants, it was already night. Halos of moonlight beaded the lamp standards with silver dew, and draped the shuttered windows and slipping cornices like a frost of frozen gas.
I think it’s very telling that “The Cage of Sand” was published in 1962, a year after the first manned space flight by Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin in 1961. Marilyn Monroe died of an overdose in Burbank, CA in 1962, and John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, TX in 1963. The conflict in Vietnam rapidly escalated in the early 1960s, with the Gulf of Tonkin incident happening in 1964, drawing the US into a drawn out conflict. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated within 2 months of each other in 1968. Finally, in 1969 the Apollo 11 mission allowed Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin take those historic steps on the Moon. The US and Soviet space programs were engaged in the Cold War and Space Race for supremacy. All of these events were extremely influential on Ballard’s writing, and it’s interesting to observe how his writing may have evolved as events unfolded. Notably, the space shuttle Challenger disaster did not happen until 1986, but Ballard seems to have already predicted the decline and failure of US space ambitions well before that. It makes sense that a thematic collection like Memories of the Space Age would be published in 1988.
It’s fascinating how consistently Ballard returned to these ideas over three decades, and his obsession with mankind’s attempts to penetrate space and leave the planet. Unlike the vast majority of Golden Age SF by writers like Asimov, Clarke, and Heinlein, Ballard takes a very negative view of ‘outer space’, and instead seeks to explore ‘inner space.’ His stories explore the psyche of spaceflight, and inevitably his characters encounter failure, insanity, and despair in their attempts to come to grips with it. It’s not clear exactly why Ballard found the idea of spaceflight so repellent, but if I may take a stab at it, I think he viewed it as humanity surrendering to its increasing adulation of technology and conquering of the natural environment. This can certainly be seen in extreme form in his tales of urban existential disaster: Crash, Concrete Island, and High-Rise.
It’s safe to say that Ballard has always taken a jaundiced view of modernity — our love of urban lifestyles, technology, and media imagery. I think his main intent in exploring these themes has been to expose the dangerous pathologies that have arisen as a result of our focus on surface comforts at the expense of our ‘inner space’ and emotional lives. And yet I don’t think he has ever explicitly shown us an example of the opposite, his idea of a utopian society. Returning to nature in his stories generally represents a return to barbarism, not the idyllic world of Eden. Yet between barbarism and an emotionally void modern life, what is there to uphold as a model for healthy living?
Based on reading four of his novels and over 50 of his short stories, Ballard’s most hopeful stories feature characters that have escaped the grips of time, but this takes the form of crystallization or plunging into the dreams of the distant past. Perhaps Ballard himself sought in vain to discover hope through his writing. And yet he wrote so eloquently of failed ambitions, a desire to escape the constraints of time and entropy, and our persistent modern myths, that his writing occupies a unique place that straddles literary ambitions and speculative fiction, both adopting and subverting the spaceflight and technology tropes of our beloved SF genre. It’s no surprise that J.G. Ballard is not always considered a welcome presence in the SF field, but for me his works represent a refreshing counterpoint to the usual SF themes.
February 9, 2024
Im delighted to discover that J.G. Ballard is one of the great dreamers of Speculative Florida.
May 1, 2014
In nearly every one of these eight dystopian, post-Space Age tales of desolation you'll encounter the following:
1. At least one dead astronaut
2. Cape Canaveral, abandoned and decrepit with derelict rocket gantries
3. Antique aircraft (Wright biplanes, B-17 bombers)
4. Pallid, obsessive widows of dead astronauts
5. Sand
6. Mental instability (mania, fugues)
The stories were written between 1962-1985, an appropriate range given the popularity and subsequent decline of the US space program. Ballard's prose is forward, right up front, his pointed imagination accurately rendered; but the thematic redundancies and identical settings in this collection become stale. The first story, "The Cage of Sand" is the best (and earliest: 1962). "A Question of Re-Entry" is refreshingly set in the Amazon jungle. Another favorite is "My Dream of Flying to Wake Island" (titled, curiously, in the first-person, though narrated in the third), a terse story, that might best represent the collection, in which a mildly disturbed airman uncovers a crashed WWII bomber in the dunes of an abandoned resort. Listen to a reading: http://tinyurl.com/28tjy3t
1. At least one dead astronaut
2. Cape Canaveral, abandoned and decrepit with derelict rocket gantries
3. Antique aircraft (Wright biplanes, B-17 bombers)
4. Pallid, obsessive widows of dead astronauts
5. Sand
6. Mental instability (mania, fugues)
The stories were written between 1962-1985, an appropriate range given the popularity and subsequent decline of the US space program. Ballard's prose is forward, right up front, his pointed imagination accurately rendered; but the thematic redundancies and identical settings in this collection become stale. The first story, "The Cage of Sand" is the best (and earliest: 1962). "A Question of Re-Entry" is refreshingly set in the Amazon jungle. Another favorite is "My Dream of Flying to Wake Island" (titled, curiously, in the first-person, though narrated in the third), a terse story, that might best represent the collection, in which a mildly disturbed airman uncovers a crashed WWII bomber in the dunes of an abandoned resort. Listen to a reading: http://tinyurl.com/28tjy3t
October 25, 2012
Such an interesting view of the Space Age in this collection of beautifully written and often startling stories. Ballard's melancholy and brilliantly Ballardian take is that humanity's urge to enter the cosmos is an expression of almost child-like hubris - which is bound to end badly! As someone who's spent time thinking and writing about space (cf 'Moondust'), I loved this for the brilliance of its storytelling and the way it raised unusual questions.
Read
April 24, 2025In terms of a short story collection that really fits together thematically, conveys an overarching idea, and tells compelling stories… this might be the best one I’ve read. It revolves around the idea that the Space Age was a mistake: policial grandstanding at the expense of astronauts and their families. The stories are filled with images of dead astronauts orbiting in capsules become coffins and their widows watch them fly endless overhead every night. There’s a sense of nostalgia and regret mixed with surrealism and uncanniness yet the characters and their slow mental breakdowns are the centerpiece of the narratives. I can’t say enough good about this collection. This is the Ballard I was promised, and I can’t wait to read more of his works.
November 16, 2009
It's been awhile since I last read this, I'm surprised that so few readers have posted about it and I'll have to read it again so as to better offer something to share; right now I have to go out and keep my date with all the dead astronauts parading across the night skies, I wonder who'll have dropped out since last they passed....
December 19, 2024
Added up all my ratings and it came to roughly 2.9. Unfortunately this was just really repetitive - it's not really Ballard's fault, as these stories were not meant to be collected together, and were written across his career. It felt like a lot of them were reworking of previous ideas which meant that we had similar dynamics replicated over and over. I do think it is interesting to examine the ways in which elements of the stories overlap - they almost exist in the same universe but not quite. I also do think some of the passages of writing are beautiful, but they are almost hollow to me - I didn't really connect to anything behind them, especially when the same metaphors and motifs had been repeated for the 100th time. Some of the weirdest stuff I've read in a while too; feels like a dream (and not in a comforting way, in a this follows dream logic scarily well way).
April 13, 2024
After I read the first story, I felt like I was settling in for a series of moody contemplations about how man tried to explore space, and not only failed but somehow broke space, causing time to gradually fall apart, leading to the slow motion mental and physical deterioration of humanity. After reading the second story, I suspected these might be a series of linked stories. After I read the fourth story. it seemed like Ballard was alternating between linked stories and rewriting the original story. it was almost like Ballard made multiple attempts to rework the original story into a final shape for the storyline, of which "Myths of the Near Future" was for me the most fully realized. As other reviewers have noted, there are common themes throughout:
1) The main character, always a man, is someone who was associated space exploration, but has never been to space. In several cases, he is someone who helped select the astronauts who did go into space.
2) This character usually has a wife or female love interest, who is separated or divorced from him, and, usually ends up with a former rival, collaborator, coworker, or friend of the main character.
3) Sand
4) Antique aircraft
5) Fugue states or lost time
6) Empty pools. Empty hotels. Empty stores. The empty state of Florida.
The three stories which did not feel like variations of the first story (The Dead Astronaut, My Dream of Flying to Wake Island, The Man Who Walked on the Moon) are refreshing in that they take the reader away from a desolate Cape Canaveral, and into other places in Ballard's depressing future. The repetitiveness of the plot and themes in the other stories became tiresome and I had to slog through a few of them.
I've read only one other J. G. Ballard book so far, "The Crystal World," and recognized some similar themes from there, such as time slowing down, emptiness and desolation in various forms. I have two other Ballard books on my reading list, "The Empire of the Sun" and "The Day of Creation" and am hoping these likely themes will also be presented in different and interesting ways, otherwise I have two more slogs ahead of me because i am just not smart enough to stop reading a book that I've lost interest in.
1) The main character, always a man, is someone who was associated space exploration, but has never been to space. In several cases, he is someone who helped select the astronauts who did go into space.
2) This character usually has a wife or female love interest, who is separated or divorced from him, and, usually ends up with a former rival, collaborator, coworker, or friend of the main character.
3) Sand
4) Antique aircraft
5) Fugue states or lost time
6) Empty pools. Empty hotels. Empty stores. The empty state of Florida.
The three stories which did not feel like variations of the first story (The Dead Astronaut, My Dream of Flying to Wake Island, The Man Who Walked on the Moon) are refreshing in that they take the reader away from a desolate Cape Canaveral, and into other places in Ballard's depressing future. The repetitiveness of the plot and themes in the other stories became tiresome and I had to slog through a few of them.
I've read only one other J. G. Ballard book so far, "The Crystal World," and recognized some similar themes from there, such as time slowing down, emptiness and desolation in various forms. I have two other Ballard books on my reading list, "The Empire of the Sun" and "The Day of Creation" and am hoping these likely themes will also be presented in different and interesting ways, otherwise I have two more slogs ahead of me because i am just not smart enough to stop reading a book that I've lost interest in.
May 20, 2017
This was the first thing of Ballard's that I've read. He's been on my list, but most of his novels seem like more than I want to deal with right now, and I'm on a space kick, so when I came across this in the library I picked it up. First of all, congratulations are in order because I actually finished a book of short stories! Admittedly, I did skim large portions of the last few stories.
So, plus sides: I like Ballard's writing style a lot. I will probably eventually get around to reading some of his famous stuff, when I feel like I can handle the subject matter. I also really liked the first story--the imagery is captivating and the whole thing balances nicely on larger thoughts about the relationship between earth and time and space.
Unfortunately, most of the stories were just rehashing the same thing: space travel replaced by a kind of delusional belief in time travel, or the compression or expansion of time, haunts almost every character in these stories. It's interesting the first time, but after that it just feels repetitive.
I would complain about the female characters being one-dimensional, but honestly so are the male characters. They seem like the same characters, rehashed across several stories.
So, plus sides: I like Ballard's writing style a lot. I will probably eventually get around to reading some of his famous stuff, when I feel like I can handle the subject matter. I also really liked the first story--the imagery is captivating and the whole thing balances nicely on larger thoughts about the relationship between earth and time and space.
Unfortunately, most of the stories were just rehashing the same thing: space travel replaced by a kind of delusional belief in time travel, or the compression or expansion of time, haunts almost every character in these stories. It's interesting the first time, but after that it just feels repetitive.
I would complain about the female characters being one-dimensional, but honestly so are the male characters. They seem like the same characters, rehashed across several stories.
Read
April 24, 2025I'm delighted by Ballard's fixation upon the psychic image - sci-fi is certainly a fertile hunting ground. I suspect the association runs that direction, and not the other. If I'm right, the repeated images - dead astronauts, old airplanes circling a decaying Cape Canaveral, variations upon time-as-sickness - are instructive of a certain underlying 'psychic reality', but what of it?
On these terms, many of these stories are not fully convincing, though I suspect I'll take a certain amalgamated image away: the vision of our own brash future as something that crumbles before us as we age, leaving us to mourn "what might have been" long before we, ourselves, are gone. In such circumstances, perhaps the malaise of the observing self, and the madness of the observed self, are both quite inevitable.
On these terms, many of these stories are not fully convincing, though I suspect I'll take a certain amalgamated image away: the vision of our own brash future as something that crumbles before us as we age, leaving us to mourn "what might have been" long before we, ourselves, are gone. In such circumstances, perhaps the malaise of the observing self, and the madness of the observed self, are both quite inevitable.
April 26, 2019
Variations on some common themes: Cape Canaveral rusting and abandoned, deserted hotels in empty Florida towns, drained swimming pools, fugue states, and insane retired astronauts buzzing overhead in antique biplanes. Very moody and evocative.
August 22, 2022
Got to love J.G. A prescient series of stories based around a dilapidated post-space program Cape Canaveral, which are really all the same story repeated with different outcomes. Clearly, the Apollo missions were to him deeply troubling, and for all his sci-fi cred, he remains deeply conservative, or a the very least, skeptical of the human animal and its ambitions. For example, the repeated idea of having dead astronauts from failed missions forever orbiting the Earth, to remind us nightly of our folly. Haunting. Unexpected, a great visual writer, too.
November 23, 2009
I tracked this down as one of the books I wanted to read about the Apollo missions, and this collection (of short stories written before, during and after Apollo 11's mission to the moon) basically focus in on Ballard's feeling that humankind committed an evolutionary crime by going into space, for which we will be punished (in his imagination, it is by time lapses or "fugues" - like an illness, people increasingly lose parts of each day, as the past, present andf future flood in on one another).
I preferred the earlier ones (written in the early 1960s) and the last one, about a man who pretends to be an astronaut to make money. I find Ballard quite hard, he's just too smart for me I think.
I preferred the earlier ones (written in the early 1960s) and the last one, about a man who pretends to be an astronaut to make money. I find Ballard quite hard, he's just too smart for me I think.
July 22, 2012
About 15 years ago I was asked to write a review column for an e-zine that never quite got off the ground. As a result, I have 5 installments of that column languishing on my computer drive. Memories of the Space Age was one of the books I reviewed in the first installment. I've decided to "publish" them myself in the writing section on my Home page about once a month (maybe sooner, we'll see). Each installment has a theme and reviews two books that fit that theme. I took a no holds barred approach a la Ellison in them, so they get pretty hard hitting at times. Feel free to take a look and let me know what you think.
February 17, 2010
What can I say; the dude's got his own word in the dictionary to describe his particular style. I could say: science fiction at its most elaborate and impressive. Or: the modern condition at its most stylistic and poetic. Or: each story an apocalypse come softly, dreamlike, at once horrifying and inviting. But more importantly than anything else: the man writes like a freaking magician.
Incidentally, I highly recommend Ernst Reijseger's Requiem for a Dying Planet as a musical accompaniment.
Incidentally, I highly recommend Ernst Reijseger's Requiem for a Dying Planet as a musical accompaniment.
February 17, 2013
Ballard's bizarre psychological tales of ex astronauts, engineers and doctors exploring and encountering themselves and one another at the defunct NASA launch sites in Florida is as surreal in prose as any work by Dali or Magritte. Ballard can say more in one sentence than most writers in an entire story - blurs the present future of mankind with damning and prophetic stories of criminal ventures into space and its consequences.
December 28, 2007
With every story I felt more and more disassociated with this world, till finally I couldn't read the last one because I had to come back from orbit! How can Ballard's words make me so damn lonely and lost! I'll have to come back to finish
February 28, 2015
The story Memories of Space Age is a great fantasy peace. Reading by the end of the story every peace fits together perfectly to understand what could possibly have happened in the small deserted town where also the time runs abnormaly.
April 17, 2017
A superb and mind bending collection.
this stories infect my imagination in profound way.
"My Dream of Flying to Wake Island"
"News from the Sun"
"Memories of the Space Age"
"Myths of the Near Future"
this stories infect my imagination in profound way.
"My Dream of Flying to Wake Island"
"News from the Sun"
"Memories of the Space Age"
"Myths of the Near Future"
Read
June 8, 2009I've never read Ballard...It's about time. Sci-Fi indeed.
December 12, 2011
Mostly late career, but Ballard at his best. You may actually begin to hallucinate while reading "News from the Sun."
Read
February 5, 20164 stars by Stuart: http://www.fantasyliterature.com/revi...
April 30, 2017
more like a requiem for a space dream, really, though by no means a eulogy. the rating is for the 2-3 better stories.
putting these stories into such a "thematic" book - or at least reading them all in rapid succession - probably wasn't a very good idea.
5 of them have a very similar feel to them, even though the earliest ("The Cage of Sand", 1962) and the latest ("Memories of the Space Age" and "Myths of the Near Future", 1982) were written/published 20 years apart. the shorter of the 5, "The Dead Astronaut", is the most poignant.
Ballard apparently had a serious thing with time distortion/space flight. so much so, that the 3 of the stories from the '80s ("News from the Sun", 1981, "Memories..." and "Myths...") almost feel like 3 different drafts of the same story, which he felt he couldn't nail and so kept rewriting: similar characters, similar premise, similar symbolism/fixations... the titular "Memories..." is probably the better version.
the remaining 3 stories are mercifully different enough, though "A Question of Re-entry" has a strong smell of Conrad's Heart of Darkness to it. "The Man Who Walked on the Moon" is nice.
putting these stories into such a "thematic" book - or at least reading them all in rapid succession - probably wasn't a very good idea.
5 of them have a very similar feel to them, even though the earliest ("The Cage of Sand", 1962) and the latest ("Memories of the Space Age" and "Myths of the Near Future", 1982) were written/published 20 years apart. the shorter of the 5, "The Dead Astronaut", is the most poignant.
Ballard apparently had a serious thing with time distortion/space flight. so much so, that the 3 of the stories from the '80s ("News from the Sun", 1981, "Memories..." and "Myths...") almost feel like 3 different drafts of the same story, which he felt he couldn't nail and so kept rewriting: similar characters, similar premise, similar symbolism/fixations... the titular "Memories..." is probably the better version.
the remaining 3 stories are mercifully different enough, though "A Question of Re-entry" has a strong smell of Conrad's Heart of Darkness to it. "The Man Who Walked on the Moon" is nice.
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