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Playa terminal
J.G. Ballard nació en Shangai en 1930, de padres ingleses, pasó dos años en un campo de concentración japonés y hoy reside en Shepperton, Middlesex, Inglaterra. En artículos aparecidos en "New Worlds" y "The Guardian" ha preconizado una ciencia-ficción más introspectiva, que examine los paisajes del tiempo, la búsqueda de la identidad, los arquetipos, los temas ontológicos (la fenomenología del universo, la existencia misma de la conciencia). La crítica lo ha comparado con Melville, Ray Bradbury, William Burroughs.
184 pages, Paperback
First published June 1, 1964
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2425 people want to read
About the author
J.G. Ballard
469 books4,118 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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November 18, 2024
J. G. Ballard’s unique mentality makes his stories unique as well…
The Terminal Beach is a far out collection of short stories – all the tales are diverse but uniformly dark and pessimistically prophetic.
The title story, opening this collection, is a powerful metaphor of self-destruction of both an individual man and humanity as a whole – any time the earth may turn into a terminal beach and become a graveyard.
The Drowned Giant is an ironic parable of nine day wonders and short memory of mankind.
But of course dystopian tales are the best, of which sardonic Billennium is most original and memorable.
The planet is overpopulated and every square foot of the living space is an object of a fight.
The future must be cherished like a child.
The Terminal Beach is a far out collection of short stories – all the tales are diverse but uniformly dark and pessimistically prophetic.
Once he entered a small street of metal shacks, containing a cafeteria, recreation rooms and shower stalls. A wrecked jukebox lay half-buried in the sand behind the cafeteria, its selection of records still in their rack.
Further along, flung into a small target lake fifty yards from the shacks, were the bodies of what at first he thought were the former inhabitants of this ghost town – a dozen life-size plastic models. Their half-melted faces, contorted into bleary grimaces, gazed up at him from the jumble of legs and torsoes.
The title story, opening this collection, is a powerful metaphor of self-destruction of both an individual man and humanity as a whole – any time the earth may turn into a terminal beach and become a graveyard.
On the morning after the storm the body of a drowned giant was washed ashore on the beach five miles to the northwest of the city. The first news of its arrival was brought by a nearby farmer and subsequently confirmed by the local newspaper reporters and the police. Despite this the majority of people, myself among them, remained sceptical, but the return of more and more eye-witnesses attesting to the vast size of the giant was finally too much for our curiosity.
The Drowned Giant is an ironic parable of nine day wonders and short memory of mankind.
But of course dystopian tales are the best, of which sardonic Billennium is most original and memorable.
All day long, and often into the early hours of the morning, the tramp of feet sounded up and down the stairs outside Ward’s cubicle. Built into a narrow alcove in a bend of the staircase between the fourth and fifth floors, its plywood walls flexed and creaked with every footstep like the timbers of a rotting windmill. Over a hundred people lived in the top three floors of the old rooming house, and sometimes Ward would lie awake on his narrow bunk until 2 or 3 a.m., mechanically counting the last residents returning from the all-night movies in the stadium half a mile away.
The planet is overpopulated and every square foot of the living space is an object of a fight.
The future must be cherished like a child.
October 22, 2015
The Terminal Beach: The best of Ballard’s early stories
Originally posted at Fantasy Literature
J.G. Ballard is best known for his autobiographical novel Empire of the Sun (1984), along with his early novels like The Drowned World (1962), The Crystal World (1964), The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), Crash (1973), Concrete Island (1974), and High-Rise (1975). But many consider his best work to be his huge catalog of short stories, many of which were pivotal in the New Wave SF movement in the late 60s/early 70s. Ballard’s style may have been suited to the short form, as it plays to his strengths (hallucinatory imagery, bizarre concepts, powerful descriptions) and avoid his weaknesses (lack of empathetic characters, weak plots, unrealistic motivations).
He has published many short story collections, but the publishing gods have seen fit to be kind and provide readers with a single volume, The Complete Stories of J.G. Ballard, which contains 98 stories (1,200 pages) from throughout his career. Not only is this available in hard copy and Kindle, it is also available for a single credit on Audible, providing 65 hours of thoughtful listening pleasure, read by 5-6 excellent veteran narrators. However, to provide a balanced overview, I will review some of his most famous collections separately.
The Terminal Beach (1964) was published as a paperback in the US from Berkeley Books, and as a hardcover from Gollancz in the UK. The contents of the two collections are very different, and my review will cover the UK version. These are stories in the UK edition:
“The Terminal Beach” (1964), “A Question of Re-entry” (1962), “The Drowned Giant” (1964), “End-Game” (1962), “The Illuminated Man” (1964), “The Reptile Enclosure” (1962), “The Delta at Sunset” (1964), “Deep End” (1961), “The Volcano Dances” (1964), “Billennium” (1961), “The Gioconda of the Twilight Noon” (1964), “The Lost Leonardo” (1964)
Ballard’s stories generally feature solitary characters in strange, doomed situations. There is often a feeling of entropy, melancholy, hopelessness, and (sometimes) transformation and revelation. The language is formal, lush, hallucinatory, and detached. Frequently the world is succumbing to some form of environmental disaster, like rising seas, crystallization, overpopulation, etc. He is also deeply interested in ‘inner space,’ modernization, obsession with technology, and alienation with the environment. His characters usually seem resigned to their fates and contemplate them with intellectual detachment. Sounds unappealing, you say? No fun, perhaps? And yet if you open yourself to his stories and images, you will find yourself drawn into his inner space, and the worlds he creates have a strange and hypnotic beauty. These are the standout stories:
“The Terminal Beach” Perhaps the most quintessential Ballard short story. A disturbed man named Traven has lost his wife and son in a car accident and smuggles himself onto Entiowok Island, the site of an abandoned nuclear testing site. The island is covered with concrete bunkers, disturbing test dummies, and decay. There are some biologists conducting tests there, but when Traven encounters them he is not happy at encountering other people — instead, his rapidly deteriorating mental state mirrors the state of the island with its empty monuments to the nuclear age. He escapes them and takes refuge in the bunkers, aimlessly exploring the bizarre and inscrutable symbols of man’s modern alienation with himself and submission to the imminent possibility of atomic destruction.
“A Question of Re-Entry” Here we have another classic Ballardian tale of exploration of ‘inner space’ in the form of a symbolic journey up a river a la Heart of Darkness to encounter a Colonel Kurtz character who has set himself up as a god to a local tribe of Indians. His means of control turns out to relate to an artificial satellite that revolves through the sky, mystifying the Indians who worship its movements. The title of the story refers in part to a crashed space capsule and the mission to recover its astronaut, but can also refer to the choice of whether to re-enter civilization or remain among the primitive peoples.
“The Illuminated Man” This is a longer story that eventually was expanded into the novel The Crystal World. It details the strange crystallization of the forest in central Africa, a process that seems to stop time and transform plants, animals and minerals into beautiful crystals. Ballard includes some pseudo-scientific explanations of why the process occurs, but the story is stronger when it focuses on the process itself, and people’s varied reactions to it. Ballard leaves it very open to interpretation, but the loving descriptions of crystal houses and plants and eventually people are guaranteed to haunt your imagination and memory.
“The Drowned Giant” This story is deceptively simple and fable-like, in a Borges vein. A giant’s body washes ashore one day, and a series of scientists, curious onlookers, and profiteers come and take what they want. Initially people are amazed and intrigued by the body, but as it starts to decompose, their wonder gives way to indifference, and then finally the body is carved up and sold to museums and other institutions. In the end, the memory of the giant fades, and even the preserved parts are misidentified by museums as belonging to a whale. Perhaps Ballard is suggesting that we take what is wondrous in the world and make it prosaic. Or maybe something else entirely?
“The Delta at Sunset” Here is another story that has the typical Ballardian elements: scientists in remote and primitive locations, a protagonist who is suffering from some type of malaise, a jaded love triangle in which the principals don’t even seem that upset, mysterious worms that appear and multiply, references to the prehistoric past, visions of antiquity that nobody else sees, and finally the main character states something to the effect that “As a paleontologist, he was searching for a past in which life made sense. He had never really liked other people, and didn’t particularly like himself either.” Let’s hope these sentiments don’t represent the author himself.
Overall, I think The Terminal Beach is a perfect introduction to J.G. Ballard’s most recurrent themes, images, and storylines. A number of these stories also appear in his collection The Best Short Stories of J.G. Ballard, but that collection has stories from his earlier, more conventional SF period, along with his weirder, more experimental period, as seen in Crash and The Atrocity Exhibition, so in terms of consistent quality, I would recommend The Terminal Beach or Vermilion Sands, which is set in a remote desert community of artists, former film stars, and wealthy eccentrics.
Originally posted at Fantasy Literature
J.G. Ballard is best known for his autobiographical novel Empire of the Sun (1984), along with his early novels like The Drowned World (1962), The Crystal World (1964), The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), Crash (1973), Concrete Island (1974), and High-Rise (1975). But many consider his best work to be his huge catalog of short stories, many of which were pivotal in the New Wave SF movement in the late 60s/early 70s. Ballard’s style may have been suited to the short form, as it plays to his strengths (hallucinatory imagery, bizarre concepts, powerful descriptions) and avoid his weaknesses (lack of empathetic characters, weak plots, unrealistic motivations).
He has published many short story collections, but the publishing gods have seen fit to be kind and provide readers with a single volume, The Complete Stories of J.G. Ballard, which contains 98 stories (1,200 pages) from throughout his career. Not only is this available in hard copy and Kindle, it is also available for a single credit on Audible, providing 65 hours of thoughtful listening pleasure, read by 5-6 excellent veteran narrators. However, to provide a balanced overview, I will review some of his most famous collections separately.
The Terminal Beach (1964) was published as a paperback in the US from Berkeley Books, and as a hardcover from Gollancz in the UK. The contents of the two collections are very different, and my review will cover the UK version. These are stories in the UK edition:
“The Terminal Beach” (1964), “A Question of Re-entry” (1962), “The Drowned Giant” (1964), “End-Game” (1962), “The Illuminated Man” (1964), “The Reptile Enclosure” (1962), “The Delta at Sunset” (1964), “Deep End” (1961), “The Volcano Dances” (1964), “Billennium” (1961), “The Gioconda of the Twilight Noon” (1964), “The Lost Leonardo” (1964)
Ballard’s stories generally feature solitary characters in strange, doomed situations. There is often a feeling of entropy, melancholy, hopelessness, and (sometimes) transformation and revelation. The language is formal, lush, hallucinatory, and detached. Frequently the world is succumbing to some form of environmental disaster, like rising seas, crystallization, overpopulation, etc. He is also deeply interested in ‘inner space,’ modernization, obsession with technology, and alienation with the environment. His characters usually seem resigned to their fates and contemplate them with intellectual detachment. Sounds unappealing, you say? No fun, perhaps? And yet if you open yourself to his stories and images, you will find yourself drawn into his inner space, and the worlds he creates have a strange and hypnotic beauty. These are the standout stories:
“The Terminal Beach” Perhaps the most quintessential Ballard short story. A disturbed man named Traven has lost his wife and son in a car accident and smuggles himself onto Entiowok Island, the site of an abandoned nuclear testing site. The island is covered with concrete bunkers, disturbing test dummies, and decay. There are some biologists conducting tests there, but when Traven encounters them he is not happy at encountering other people — instead, his rapidly deteriorating mental state mirrors the state of the island with its empty monuments to the nuclear age. He escapes them and takes refuge in the bunkers, aimlessly exploring the bizarre and inscrutable symbols of man’s modern alienation with himself and submission to the imminent possibility of atomic destruction.
“A Question of Re-Entry” Here we have another classic Ballardian tale of exploration of ‘inner space’ in the form of a symbolic journey up a river a la Heart of Darkness to encounter a Colonel Kurtz character who has set himself up as a god to a local tribe of Indians. His means of control turns out to relate to an artificial satellite that revolves through the sky, mystifying the Indians who worship its movements. The title of the story refers in part to a crashed space capsule and the mission to recover its astronaut, but can also refer to the choice of whether to re-enter civilization or remain among the primitive peoples.
“The Illuminated Man” This is a longer story that eventually was expanded into the novel The Crystal World. It details the strange crystallization of the forest in central Africa, a process that seems to stop time and transform plants, animals and minerals into beautiful crystals. Ballard includes some pseudo-scientific explanations of why the process occurs, but the story is stronger when it focuses on the process itself, and people’s varied reactions to it. Ballard leaves it very open to interpretation, but the loving descriptions of crystal houses and plants and eventually people are guaranteed to haunt your imagination and memory.
“The Drowned Giant” This story is deceptively simple and fable-like, in a Borges vein. A giant’s body washes ashore one day, and a series of scientists, curious onlookers, and profiteers come and take what they want. Initially people are amazed and intrigued by the body, but as it starts to decompose, their wonder gives way to indifference, and then finally the body is carved up and sold to museums and other institutions. In the end, the memory of the giant fades, and even the preserved parts are misidentified by museums as belonging to a whale. Perhaps Ballard is suggesting that we take what is wondrous in the world and make it prosaic. Or maybe something else entirely?
“The Delta at Sunset” Here is another story that has the typical Ballardian elements: scientists in remote and primitive locations, a protagonist who is suffering from some type of malaise, a jaded love triangle in which the principals don’t even seem that upset, mysterious worms that appear and multiply, references to the prehistoric past, visions of antiquity that nobody else sees, and finally the main character states something to the effect that “As a paleontologist, he was searching for a past in which life made sense. He had never really liked other people, and didn’t particularly like himself either.” Let’s hope these sentiments don’t represent the author himself.
Overall, I think The Terminal Beach is a perfect introduction to J.G. Ballard’s most recurrent themes, images, and storylines. A number of these stories also appear in his collection The Best Short Stories of J.G. Ballard, but that collection has stories from his earlier, more conventional SF period, along with his weirder, more experimental period, as seen in Crash and The Atrocity Exhibition, so in terms of consistent quality, I would recommend The Terminal Beach or Vermilion Sands, which is set in a remote desert community of artists, former film stars, and wealthy eccentrics.
July 21, 2019
La presente edición de Minotauro de 1971, corresponde a la edición estadounidense de ‘Terminal Beach’ (1964). La diferencia con la otra edición de Minotauro (1987), que se corresponde con la edición británica, radica en que sólo comparte dos relatos.
Estos son los relatos contenidos en la recopilación de 1971, siendo los dos primeros los comunes a ambas ediciones:
-Playa terminal. El protagonista está atrapado en una isla donde se realizaban pruebas nucleares. Relato extraño, sobre todo en su narrativa, pero igualmente fascinante.
-Final de partida. Relato claramente kafkiano, donde el protagonista es condenado a vivir en una villa junto a su verdugo, que lo puede ejecutar en cualquier momento. Buen relato.
-Los cazadores de Venus. El doctor Ward, del Observatorio del Monte Vernon, se ve intrigado por Charles Kandinski sobre la visión que este tuvo de un venusiano.
-El hombre subliminal. La sociedad, sin darse cuenta, no hace más que consumir, aunque no lo necesite. Extrañas antenas aparecen sobre las autopistas, algo que llama la atención del protagonista.
-Menos uno. Un paciente ha desaparecido del asilo de Green Hill, y el director se empeña en que esto es imposible.
-Despierta el mar. Mason sueña con que el océano inunda la ciudad con sus olas. Pero, ¿es realmente un sueño?
-El último mundo del Señor Goddard. El protagonista, un anciano, trabaja en un centro comercial. Es poco apreciado por sus compañeros, quizás por sus excentricidades. Pero cuando llega a su casa cada día, se dedica a observar su “secreto”.
-Las tumbas del tiempo. En un desierto, unos hombres se dedican a saquear tumbas milenarias para adquirir unas cintas con la firmas genéticas de los muertos.
-La tarde repentina. El protagonista empieza a tener recuerdos de una vida que nunca tuvo.
Todos los relatos son muy buenos, pero los que más me han gustado y fascinado son los tres últimos.
Estos son los relatos contenidos en la recopilación de 1971, siendo los dos primeros los comunes a ambas ediciones:
-Playa terminal. El protagonista está atrapado en una isla donde se realizaban pruebas nucleares. Relato extraño, sobre todo en su narrativa, pero igualmente fascinante.
-Final de partida. Relato claramente kafkiano, donde el protagonista es condenado a vivir en una villa junto a su verdugo, que lo puede ejecutar en cualquier momento. Buen relato.
-Los cazadores de Venus. El doctor Ward, del Observatorio del Monte Vernon, se ve intrigado por Charles Kandinski sobre la visión que este tuvo de un venusiano.
-El hombre subliminal. La sociedad, sin darse cuenta, no hace más que consumir, aunque no lo necesite. Extrañas antenas aparecen sobre las autopistas, algo que llama la atención del protagonista.
-Menos uno. Un paciente ha desaparecido del asilo de Green Hill, y el director se empeña en que esto es imposible.
-Despierta el mar. Mason sueña con que el océano inunda la ciudad con sus olas. Pero, ¿es realmente un sueño?
-El último mundo del Señor Goddard. El protagonista, un anciano, trabaja en un centro comercial. Es poco apreciado por sus compañeros, quizás por sus excentricidades. Pero cuando llega a su casa cada día, se dedica a observar su “secreto”.
-Las tumbas del tiempo. En un desierto, unos hombres se dedican a saquear tumbas milenarias para adquirir unas cintas con la firmas genéticas de los muertos.
-La tarde repentina. El protagonista empieza a tener recuerdos de una vida que nunca tuvo.
Todos los relatos son muy buenos, pero los que más me han gustado y fascinado son los tres últimos.
July 8, 2019
Nadie como J.G. Ballard para contarnos la desintegración de la sociedad y el ser humano, y además narrada de la manera más poética. Resulta fascinante la similitud entre el paisaje exterior y el paisaje interior de los protagonistas. A veces entiendo sus alegorías, aunque otras no, pero no me importa por las impresionantes imágenes que logra crear. Algunas de sus historias perduran en la memoria durante bastante tiempo.
‘Playa terminal’ (Terminal Beach, 1964; la presente edición corresponde a la recopilación británica, pero existe otra con el mismo título correspondiente a la edición americana, donde sólo coinciden dos relatos) contiene los siguientes cuentos:
-El gigante ahogado. Un buen día, aparece un gigante ahogado en la playa, interrumpiendo la cotidianidad de la población cercana. Gran relato.
-Problema de reingreso. Un científico viaja al recóndito Amazonas en busca de una cápsula lunar y su tripulante. Magnífico relato.
-Final de partida. Relato claramente kafkiano, donde el protagonista es condenado a vivir en una villa junto a su verdugo, que lo puede ejecutar en cualquier momento. Buen relato.
-El hombre iluminado. Algunos lugares del mundo están sometidos a un extraño fenómeno de cristalización. Sin duda, mi relato favorito del libro, que ampliado, daría lugar a la novela El mundo de cristal.
-La jaula de los reptiles. Un matrimonio está en una playa repleta de personas, hasta que de pronto la sobrevuela un satélite. Flojo.
-El delta del crepúsculo. El arqueólogo Charles Gifford, con una pierna herida, se resiste a abandonar el lugar donde trabaja junto a su esposa, ayudante y guía aborigen. Flojo.
-Playa terminal. El protagonista está atrapado en una isla donde se realizaban pruebas nucleares. Relato extraño, sobre todo en su narrativa, pero igualmente fascinante.
-Ocaso. Los océanos han desaparecido y los últimos habitantes de la Tierra están siendo evacuados, aunque el protagonista no se decide a dejar el planeta. Buen relato.
-Las danzas del volcán. Los protagonistas viven cerca de un volcán a punto de hacer erupción. Flojo.
-Bilenio. El planeta está sometido a la superpoblación, y vive en lugares sumamente reducidos. La ironía de Ballard hace aparición en este estupendo relato.
-La Gioconda del mediodía crepuscular. El protagonista se está recuperando de una lesión ocular, y mientras tiene ciertas visiones. Buen relato.
-El Leonardo perdido. El cuadro de la Crucifixión de Leonardo Da Vinci ha sido robado del Louvre, un robo aparentemente imposible que ha de investigar el protagonista. Tras este misterio se oculta algo más intrigante. Buen relato.
‘Playa terminal’ (Terminal Beach, 1964; la presente edición corresponde a la recopilación británica, pero existe otra con el mismo título correspondiente a la edición americana, donde sólo coinciden dos relatos) contiene los siguientes cuentos:
-El gigante ahogado. Un buen día, aparece un gigante ahogado en la playa, interrumpiendo la cotidianidad de la población cercana. Gran relato.
-Problema de reingreso. Un científico viaja al recóndito Amazonas en busca de una cápsula lunar y su tripulante. Magnífico relato.
-Final de partida. Relato claramente kafkiano, donde el protagonista es condenado a vivir en una villa junto a su verdugo, que lo puede ejecutar en cualquier momento. Buen relato.
-El hombre iluminado. Algunos lugares del mundo están sometidos a un extraño fenómeno de cristalización. Sin duda, mi relato favorito del libro, que ampliado, daría lugar a la novela El mundo de cristal.
-La jaula de los reptiles. Un matrimonio está en una playa repleta de personas, hasta que de pronto la sobrevuela un satélite. Flojo.
-El delta del crepúsculo. El arqueólogo Charles Gifford, con una pierna herida, se resiste a abandonar el lugar donde trabaja junto a su esposa, ayudante y guía aborigen. Flojo.
-Playa terminal. El protagonista está atrapado en una isla donde se realizaban pruebas nucleares. Relato extraño, sobre todo en su narrativa, pero igualmente fascinante.
-Ocaso. Los océanos han desaparecido y los últimos habitantes de la Tierra están siendo evacuados, aunque el protagonista no se decide a dejar el planeta. Buen relato.
-Las danzas del volcán. Los protagonistas viven cerca de un volcán a punto de hacer erupción. Flojo.
-Bilenio. El planeta está sometido a la superpoblación, y vive en lugares sumamente reducidos. La ironía de Ballard hace aparición en este estupendo relato.
-La Gioconda del mediodía crepuscular. El protagonista se está recuperando de una lesión ocular, y mientras tiene ciertas visiones. Buen relato.
-El Leonardo perdido. El cuadro de la Crucifixión de Leonardo Da Vinci ha sido robado del Louvre, un robo aparentemente imposible que ha de investigar el protagonista. Tras este misterio se oculta algo más intrigante. Buen relato.
August 9, 2012
JG Ballard is a master of the psychological SF short, and with clinical intentions, his surreal landscapes tend to gather more substance as the character in the story slowly devolves, as they usually do in his fiction. Madness, desperation, even sentimentality are what fuel his characters, and a mere means of survival is replaced by the characters submitting to the landscape, whether an island ravaged by atomic testing or a quaint riverside in the English country. This collection is superior, a must-have for any fans of SF, Horror, Surreal Fantasy.
Quick breakdown of some of the best tales in this collection:
'Question of Re-Entry' - Ballard's ode to 'Heart of Darkness' with satellites crashed in the jungle becoming holy, interstellar artifacts.
'Terminal Beach' - a man hides on an island used for nuclear testing, and he finds that he's not alone. Amidst the sun-bleached concrete towers and buildings, he follows his dead wife and son to what he hopes will be a reunion.
'Drowned Giant' - here Ballard takes the symbolic stamp of Swift's Gulliver and tears it to shreds in this haunting, acidic yet humorous tale of humanity.
'The Reptile Enclosure' - Ballard is a cynic and misanthrope and here takes an apocalyptic vision to a crowded beach during summertime. He describes the mass of half-naked bodies sunning as if they were 'boiled pink meat'. This one is so good I didn't want it to end.
'The Gioconda of the Twilight Noon' - an Oedipal dream-like tale of what dangers day-dreaming can bring. Horrific visuals climax this one.
'The Illuminated Man' - In Florida, something is turning all the vegetation into crystals. Horror and surreal match up so well here, and the last visual he leaves us with is a beautiful image, no matter how terrifying it is deep down.
'Billennium' - a rare sense of humor carries this story of overpopulation into a sad, frightening vision of city life in the future.
And the rest of the book is staggering as well. He even takes some tropes of fiction, the lost painting and a chess-match ('The Lost Leonardo' and 'End-Game'), and adds his own unique spin on them with his bountiful imagination and his scalpel-like pen. Truly he was one Britain's finest writers.
A classic collection, one of the best.
Quick breakdown of some of the best tales in this collection:
'Question of Re-Entry' - Ballard's ode to 'Heart of Darkness' with satellites crashed in the jungle becoming holy, interstellar artifacts.
'Terminal Beach' - a man hides on an island used for nuclear testing, and he finds that he's not alone. Amidst the sun-bleached concrete towers and buildings, he follows his dead wife and son to what he hopes will be a reunion.
'Drowned Giant' - here Ballard takes the symbolic stamp of Swift's Gulliver and tears it to shreds in this haunting, acidic yet humorous tale of humanity.
'The Reptile Enclosure' - Ballard is a cynic and misanthrope and here takes an apocalyptic vision to a crowded beach during summertime. He describes the mass of half-naked bodies sunning as if they were 'boiled pink meat'. This one is so good I didn't want it to end.
'The Gioconda of the Twilight Noon' - an Oedipal dream-like tale of what dangers day-dreaming can bring. Horrific visuals climax this one.
'The Illuminated Man' - In Florida, something is turning all the vegetation into crystals. Horror and surreal match up so well here, and the last visual he leaves us with is a beautiful image, no matter how terrifying it is deep down.
'Billennium' - a rare sense of humor carries this story of overpopulation into a sad, frightening vision of city life in the future.
And the rest of the book is staggering as well. He even takes some tropes of fiction, the lost painting and a chess-match ('The Lost Leonardo' and 'End-Game'), and adds his own unique spin on them with his bountiful imagination and his scalpel-like pen. Truly he was one Britain's finest writers.
A classic collection, one of the best.
May 12, 2024
It has been a spectacularly grim few weeks reading-wise. A hundred pages here, a few score there without traction. I did conceive of a project regarding the new Iain Sinclair. One of his models is Mr Ballard and I thought this would foment excitement. I was largely mistaken.
I really liked Now Wakes the Sea. I found Minus One a Piece like spin on the philosophical foundation of the asylum. End Game had a great Koestler vibe. Terminal Beach would have been great two thirds shorter. The rest left me indifferent.
I really liked Now Wakes the Sea. I found Minus One a Piece like spin on the philosophical foundation of the asylum. End Game had a great Koestler vibe. Terminal Beach would have been great two thirds shorter. The rest left me indifferent.
October 24, 2025
Ballard is a conjurer of dreams, and above all, an impressively versatile and gifted writer. Here you will encounter Ballard's obsession with the ailments and potential future dystopias of technological modernity, as well as his Vermillion Sands landscape, a painterly and baroque world layered with sand, phantoms, and ancient memory. As Ballard dances between exotic atmospheres, beauty and nightmares, he has the skill and infatuation with the unconscious shared by the likes of Kōbō Abe and Kafka.
Sand, water, and endless concrete - these are obsessive points of interest for Ballard. He is interested in things that swallow. These universal symbols for the unconscious give Ballard creative license, a sort of blank canvas where anything goes, like experimental music consisting of detailed gestures and complex polyphony. His protagonists drift through these psychogeographic wastelands, each grain of sand a neuron firing in some vast collective dream.
"The Venus Hunters" is core Ballard, an existential case study masquerading as a first contact trope. In this story, Ballard single-handedly diagnoses the public perception of science fiction, the ridicule and social displacement for those willing to dream, and presents the world of the unconscious as a ghost that few can contend with. It's a brilliant entry showing how exceptional genre writers like Ballard knew exactly what the Apollo program would mean for the archetype of humanity, the death of certain mythologies and the birth of an anxious and paranoid zeitgeist.
All of Ballard's landscapes are psychic. Environments are not isolated from the individual; they are reflections and projections of an arena of personas. His protagonists appear to be effortlessly approaching some critical apex of instability, whether it's the obsessive beachcomber of the masterful title story counting down to his own personal apocalypse or the various artists and drifters of Vermillion Sands swallowed by a haze of red winds, swiftly becoming unaware.
What makes these stories endure is Ballard's prescience about the core mystery of life, the unconscious. He understood that humanities fundamental condition wouldn't alter through sentient machines, nuclear war, or alien invasion but perpetually remain in a mirky fog of unknowns. Here lies a collection of masterful stories that will continue to age and be eagerly read until only the trees and empty homes recall our once being here.
Sand, water, and endless concrete - these are obsessive points of interest for Ballard. He is interested in things that swallow. These universal symbols for the unconscious give Ballard creative license, a sort of blank canvas where anything goes, like experimental music consisting of detailed gestures and complex polyphony. His protagonists drift through these psychogeographic wastelands, each grain of sand a neuron firing in some vast collective dream.
"The Venus Hunters" is core Ballard, an existential case study masquerading as a first contact trope. In this story, Ballard single-handedly diagnoses the public perception of science fiction, the ridicule and social displacement for those willing to dream, and presents the world of the unconscious as a ghost that few can contend with. It's a brilliant entry showing how exceptional genre writers like Ballard knew exactly what the Apollo program would mean for the archetype of humanity, the death of certain mythologies and the birth of an anxious and paranoid zeitgeist.
All of Ballard's landscapes are psychic. Environments are not isolated from the individual; they are reflections and projections of an arena of personas. His protagonists appear to be effortlessly approaching some critical apex of instability, whether it's the obsessive beachcomber of the masterful title story counting down to his own personal apocalypse or the various artists and drifters of Vermillion Sands swallowed by a haze of red winds, swiftly becoming unaware.
What makes these stories endure is Ballard's prescience about the core mystery of life, the unconscious. He understood that humanities fundamental condition wouldn't alter through sentient machines, nuclear war, or alien invasion but perpetually remain in a mirky fog of unknowns. Here lies a collection of masterful stories that will continue to age and be eagerly read until only the trees and empty homes recall our once being here.
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August 30, 2025Rating: 3.5 stars
This is a collection of twelve science fiction short stories published in 1964. Ballard has some really odd but interesting ideas. All these stories have powerful imagery and also have something to say about humanity and what goes on inside the mind - and they aren't particularly optimistic. There is usually something to reflect upon, and slowly digest, in each story.
A list of the stories and my spoilery thoughts on each can be found behind the spoiler tags:
This is a collection of twelve science fiction short stories published in 1964. Ballard has some really odd but interesting ideas. All these stories have powerful imagery and also have something to say about humanity and what goes on inside the mind - and they aren't particularly optimistic. There is usually something to reflect upon, and slowly digest, in each story.
A list of the stories and my spoilery thoughts on each can be found behind the spoiler tags:
March 6, 2022
Escritor tão produtivo quando original, J. G. Ballard tornou-se conhecido por sua obra de ficção científica. Poucos sabem, no entanto, que o filme "Império do Sol", dirigido por Steven Spielberg, é baseado em um livro baseado na vida desse autor britânico. E que dessa história sensível ele foi ao extremo da polêmica e causou escândalo com "Crash", também transformado em filme por David Cronenberg.
"Menos um", um dos nove contos dessa rara edição em português, fica entre esses dois extremos. Mas também não é a ficção cientifica de viagens interplanetárias, através do tempo ou cheia de alienígenas. Fica mais na linha dos contos de estranhamento de "Além da Imaginação", clássica série de TV antológica criada por Rod Serling no princípio dos anos 1960. Leitura desconcertante, e altamente prazerosa.
"Menos um", um dos nove contos dessa rara edição em português, fica entre esses dois extremos. Mas também não é a ficção cientifica de viagens interplanetárias, através do tempo ou cheia de alienígenas. Fica mais na linha dos contos de estranhamento de "Além da Imaginação", clássica série de TV antológica criada por Rod Serling no princípio dos anos 1960. Leitura desconcertante, e altamente prazerosa.
February 22, 2015
Tarkovsky's 'Stalker' and the work of De Chirico vividly sprung to mind when reading this collection.
December 29, 2022
Ballard once wrote Empire of the Sun, an autobiography (later movie) of Ballard's childhood: he was a child of the British upper class in Hong Kong when it was a British colony, until the Japanese invaded. He lost his parents during the ensuing chaos of British flight, lived alone for a time in the abandoned mansions of the elite, then lived alone in a Japanese POW camp.
That traumatic experience pops up again and again in Ballard's fiction, as it does here in these great short stories. An interstellar anomaly turns random regions of earth into a dreamlike glass; the description of American refugees fleeing the glass feels straight out of Hong Kong. Another story is about a man who disappears into an atomic bomb test-site; the way he walks around the abandoned military site mirrors Ballard's childhood in abandoned British mansions. People out of time in out of place places.
The last story, The Lost Leonardo is a big change from the rest of the stories here; a very fun art-history/supernatural crime story. It could've come from a more SF-inclined Umberto Eco.
That traumatic experience pops up again and again in Ballard's fiction, as it does here in these great short stories. An interstellar anomaly turns random regions of earth into a dreamlike glass; the description of American refugees fleeing the glass feels straight out of Hong Kong. Another story is about a man who disappears into an atomic bomb test-site; the way he walks around the abandoned military site mirrors Ballard's childhood in abandoned British mansions. People out of time in out of place places.
The last story, The Lost Leonardo is a big change from the rest of the stories here; a very fun art-history/supernatural crime story. It could've come from a more SF-inclined Umberto Eco.
May 30, 2023
In my university years, bac in the mid-70s.... (yes I am that old) I took a Science Fiction novel course. Besides the fact that it was an easy grade because our grade was split in two (first term write a new ending to an existing Sci-Fi short story and 2nd term, write a Sci-Fi short story), it also allowed me to really explore the Sci-Fi genre. We were reading and discussing two novels / short stories a week. Anyway, this course introduced me to J.G. Ballard. I believe the novel we read was The Drowned World. Since then, and mainly in the past 10+ years, I've read another 10+ books by Ballard, including this collection of short stories, The Terminal Beach.
Ballard is hit or miss with me. I've enjoyed some of his novels immensely as they present a unique dystopian look at the world. The Drowned World, The Wind from Nowhere, Crash, High-Rise are all examples of stories I found fascinating and in some cases, downright weird. But others, like The Crystal World and The Day of Creation didn't do anything for me. Now, Ballard was a prolific writer and just due to the sheer volume of his work, some are bound not to work for people. Anyway, back to The Terminal Beach. Like the novels, some stories worked, some didn't.
Ballard generally presents a bleak, dystopic world in these stories; the remains of the island where nuclear testing was conducted, a Florida that is being crystalized by some 'virus', Earth where the water is drying up and people are being sent to the planets, cities filled to the maximum, where citizens are forced into smaller and smaller spaces, etc. The description of these visions are dark, cold (even when it's really, really hot) and impersonal. Ballard has an unemotional way of presenting the stories.
My main problem with the stories are that Ballard doesn't seem to be able to wrap them up succinctly. The stories end and kind of leave you hanging. Now, Ballard probably wants you to come to your own conclusions, but I can be lazy that way. There were still some excellent stories in this collection; Deep End - water is drying up, Earth's citizens are being sent to space, except the elderly. Satellites are crashing to earth and in one such crash, the protagonist discovers a fish in a pool of water; Billenium - the streets overflow with people as rural land must expand to feed the masses. People are crowded in 4' square rooms, mass traffic jams of pedestrians, quite well crafted; The Lost Leonardo - Leonardo's Crucifixion is stolen, was the picture changed by a historical character pictured in the painting and others? A neat mystery, quite different from the others.
The book is not perfect by any means, but at the same time, it does present Ballard's unique story telling and if you want to be introduced to it, The Terminal Beach is a good book with which to start. (3.5 stars)
Ballard is hit or miss with me. I've enjoyed some of his novels immensely as they present a unique dystopian look at the world. The Drowned World, The Wind from Nowhere, Crash, High-Rise are all examples of stories I found fascinating and in some cases, downright weird. But others, like The Crystal World and The Day of Creation didn't do anything for me. Now, Ballard was a prolific writer and just due to the sheer volume of his work, some are bound not to work for people. Anyway, back to The Terminal Beach. Like the novels, some stories worked, some didn't.
Ballard generally presents a bleak, dystopic world in these stories; the remains of the island where nuclear testing was conducted, a Florida that is being crystalized by some 'virus', Earth where the water is drying up and people are being sent to the planets, cities filled to the maximum, where citizens are forced into smaller and smaller spaces, etc. The description of these visions are dark, cold (even when it's really, really hot) and impersonal. Ballard has an unemotional way of presenting the stories.
My main problem with the stories are that Ballard doesn't seem to be able to wrap them up succinctly. The stories end and kind of leave you hanging. Now, Ballard probably wants you to come to your own conclusions, but I can be lazy that way. There were still some excellent stories in this collection; Deep End - water is drying up, Earth's citizens are being sent to space, except the elderly. Satellites are crashing to earth and in one such crash, the protagonist discovers a fish in a pool of water; Billenium - the streets overflow with people as rural land must expand to feed the masses. People are crowded in 4' square rooms, mass traffic jams of pedestrians, quite well crafted; The Lost Leonardo - Leonardo's Crucifixion is stolen, was the picture changed by a historical character pictured in the painting and others? A neat mystery, quite different from the others.
The book is not perfect by any means, but at the same time, it does present Ballard's unique story telling and if you want to be introduced to it, The Terminal Beach is a good book with which to start. (3.5 stars)
June 6, 2022
I read the Berkley paperback edition, which contains a different set of stories than the main entry on this page. My favorite stories were "The Subliminal Man" and "Minus One."
April 10, 2025
کتاب شامل 12 داستان کوتاه با تم علمی تخیلی میشه، قصه ها واقعا خاص و پرکشش و در عین حال روان نوشته شدن، توصیفات فوق العاده ای هم دارن.
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دو نکته توی کتاب برام خیلی جالب بود، اولیش این بود که بیشتر داستان دارای یک نقطه اشتراک هستن، ماهواره! توی بیشتر داستان ها ردی از یک ماهواره دیده میشه! و نکته دوم هم ارجاع هایی بود که نویسنده به کتاب های دیگه اش داده بود. ( با خوندن کتاب کامل متوجه این نکات میشید)
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در کنار همه این ها نباید از ترجمه خوب و روان و مقدمه و توضیحاتی که مترجم نوشته غافل شد.
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دو نکته توی کتاب برام خیلی جالب بود، اولیش این بود که بیشتر داستان دارای یک نقطه اشتراک هستن، ماهواره! توی بیشتر داستان ها ردی از یک ماهواره دیده میشه! و نکته دوم هم ارجاع هایی بود که نویسنده به کتاب های دیگه اش داده بود. ( با خوندن کتاب کامل متوجه این نکات میشید)
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در کنار همه این ها نباید از ترجمه خوب و روان و مقدمه و توضیحاتی که مترجم نوشته غافل شد.
March 15, 2024
In the way Bukowski and Hunter Thompson encourage my worst habits, Ballard reinforces my worst feelings about civilization.
August 12, 2013
Generally very good, often excellent. Ballard's language is occasionally overgrown here, but it's never flat — I don't know why the man isn't recognized more widely as a significant prose worker. While The Terminal Beach is ostensibly a collection of short stories, they fit together nicely, with numerous repetitive themes and images, making it seem like a single work. A few of the stories are true gems: "End-Game," "The Illuminated Man," "The Reptile Enclosure," "Billennium," and "The Lost Leonardo." Others — like "The Terminal Beach" and "The Gioconda of the Twilight Noon" — are maybe not as successful in some ways, but I find they give me even more to think about. (Note the continuation from "The Gioconda" to "The Lost Leonardo," which finish the book in that order.)
My caveats: I don't care as much about these characters as I could. I'm actually not sure I'm supposed to. Many of the main characters are almost two-dimensional mirrors of each other, with names like Connolly, Charles Marquand, Charles Sherrington, Roger Pelham, Charles Gifford, Rossiter, Richard Maitland, Charles Vandervell, and yet another Charles in "The Lost Leonardo." In that story — my favorite — one character appears to have changed his name several times, perhaps echoing the characters of these stories — or is it just one character, over and over again? — themselves.
A second caveat: situation is sometimes more important than plot here. You've got crazy settings, bizarre concepts, but sometimes not much is happening.
I hope to try more by Ballard soon. I think this and "Super-Cannes," which I really enjoyed, are the only two I've read.
My caveats: I don't care as much about these characters as I could. I'm actually not sure I'm supposed to. Many of the main characters are almost two-dimensional mirrors of each other, with names like Connolly, Charles Marquand, Charles Sherrington, Roger Pelham, Charles Gifford, Rossiter, Richard Maitland, Charles Vandervell, and yet another Charles in "The Lost Leonardo." In that story — my favorite — one character appears to have changed his name several times, perhaps echoing the characters of these stories — or is it just one character, over and over again? — themselves.
A second caveat: situation is sometimes more important than plot here. You've got crazy settings, bizarre concepts, but sometimes not much is happening.
I hope to try more by Ballard soon. I think this and "Super-Cannes," which I really enjoyed, are the only two I've read.
August 20, 2021
بالارد رو انتخاب کردم تا یکم سبک متفاوتی بخونم.هرچند که بالارد برای مخاطبان سینما چهره ی نام آشناییه اما در دنیای رمان و حداقل در ایران اونقدر نامدار نیست.
این کتاب شامل ۱۲ تا داستان کوتاه بود و اولین اثری بود که از بالارد خوندم.
سبک بیشتر داستان ها سورئال و رئالیسم جادویی بود و ژانر داستان ها هم تخیلی و علمی تخیلی غالبا
به طور کلی داستان هارو دوست داشتم و باهاشون ارتباط برقرار کردم.هرچند که همه شباهت کلی و همراستایی رو داشتن برای حضور کنار هم در یک کتاب اما فضای داستان ها متنوع و متفاوت بود و این از نقاط قوت کتاب بود.
اشاره های زیادی به روانشناسی داشتن داستان ها اما توی زندگینامه ی بالارد ندیدم که آکادمیک روانشناسی خونده باشه
به طور کلی دنیای جذابی داشت داستان ها.من گذر کردن بالارد از فضای رئال رو خیلی دوست داشتم.توش تکلف و سختی و ادا نبود و کاملا انگار داشت این فضاهارو تجربه میکرد و مینوشت.خلاقیت بالا،هیجان بالا و گره داستانی حساب شده.
اما یکم با درونمایه ی بعضی داستان ها سخت ارتباط برقرار میکردم.متوجه نمیشدم الان چی میخواد بگه داستان.نمیتونستم از لایه ی اولیه ی داستان عبور کنم و همین حوصله م رو سر میبرد.همه ش فکر میکردم من اونقدرا عمیق نیستم یا داستان؟!
اما شیوه ی داستان پردازیش رو واقعا دوست داشتم
مثلا داستان "مرد نورانی " یا داستان "جایگاه مخصوص خزندگان" رو اصلا نفهمیدم
با دلتا هم اصلا ارتباط برقرار نکردم
اما "در اعماق" به نظرم فوق العاده بود یا مثلا "بیلینیوم" که درباره ی افزایش جمعیت کره ی زمین بود
اطلاعات کلی بالارد هم جالب بود که اینقدر در حوزه های مختلف زیاد بود.از نجوم و سفینه ی فضایی تا نقاشی و آثار هنری...
درکل خوب و سرگرم کننده و جذاب و فکرانگیز بود و امیدوارم ۲تا کتاب معروفش رو هم بخونم در آینده
این کتاب شامل ۱۲ تا داستان کوتاه بود و اولین اثری بود که از بالارد خوندم.
سبک بیشتر داستان ها سورئال و رئالیسم جادویی بود و ژانر داستان ها هم تخیلی و علمی تخیلی غالبا
به طور کلی داستان هارو دوست داشتم و باهاشون ارتباط برقرار کردم.هرچند که همه شباهت کلی و همراستایی رو داشتن برای حضور کنار هم در یک کتاب اما فضای داستان ها متنوع و متفاوت بود و این از نقاط قوت کتاب بود.
اشاره های زیادی به روانشناسی داشتن داستان ها اما توی زندگینامه ی بالارد ندیدم که آکادمیک روانشناسی خونده باشه
به طور کلی دنیای جذابی داشت داستان ها.من گذر کردن بالارد از فضای رئال رو خیلی دوست داشتم.توش تکلف و سختی و ادا نبود و کاملا انگار داشت این فضاهارو تجربه میکرد و مینوشت.خلاقیت بالا،هیجان بالا و گره داستانی حساب شده.
اما یکم با درونمایه ی بعضی داستان ها سخت ارتباط برقرار میکردم.متوجه نمیشدم الان چی میخواد بگه داستان.نمیتونستم از لایه ی اولیه ی داستان عبور کنم و همین حوصله م رو سر میبرد.همه ش فکر میکردم من اونقدرا عمیق نیستم یا داستان؟!
اما شیوه ی داستان پردازیش رو واقعا دوست داشتم
مثلا داستان "مرد نورانی " یا داستان "جایگاه مخصوص خزندگان" رو اصلا نفهمیدم
با دلتا هم اصلا ارتباط برقرار نکردم
اما "در اعماق" به نظرم فوق العاده بود یا مثلا "بیلینیوم" که درباره ی افزایش جمعیت کره ی زمین بود
اطلاعات کلی بالارد هم جالب بود که اینقدر در حوزه های مختلف زیاد بود.از نجوم و سفینه ی فضایی تا نقاشی و آثار هنری...
درکل خوب و سرگرم کننده و جذاب و فکرانگیز بود و امیدوارم ۲تا کتاب معروفش رو هم بخونم در آینده
August 19, 2020
The title story reads like a concrete embryo of the themes that would haunt THE ATROCITY EXHIBITION, 'The Illuminated Man' is his novel THE CRYSTAL WORLD in digest, and 'Deep End' is another of his chilling/relieving tales of universal entropic catastrophe. Doesn't get much better than this.
May 6, 2016
Taken from a review posted on my blog here
Before ‘The Terminal Beach’ I hadn’t read any Ballard before, but I’m aware of his other work (Empire of the Sun, the Crystal World, the recently cinematised High-Rise) and the reputation he’s built on them. I’ve spoken before on this blog about the trepidation one can feel approaching a renowned authors work, and with Ballard it was no different. But short stories are an ideal way of sampling an authors work before undertaking their novels, and The Terminal Beach has certainly inspired me to explore his other output.
This collection was published in 1964, and so contains some of his earliest short form fiction. Most of it was written at the height of the cold war, and the themes and locations reflect the times; abandoned nuclear testing grounds, spacecraft crash sites, the effects of contamination by alien substances, all set a vivid scene for the, at times psychological, drama to come.
The title story, “The Terminal Beach” (1964), appears half way through the collection, and explores the uniquely artifical landscape of Eniwetok (a collection of islands in the pacific, now officially spelt ‘Enewetak’) through the eyes of Traven, willingly marooned on the atoll after the death of his wife and daughter in a car crash. The site for 43 Atomic weapons tests in the 1950’s, Eniwetok is scattered with reminders of what Traven calls the ‘Pre-Third’ age, the years before the seemingly inevitable third world war, characterised “above all by its moral and psychological inversions, by its sense of the whole of history, and in particular of the immediate future… suspended from the quiversing volcano’s lip of World War III”. The creepiest inhabitants of the island are the plastic test dummies, their shadows burned in to the concrete pens and bunkers dotted around the rim of the atoll by the initial flash of the tests.
The human mind is a common subject across all of these stories, and in “The Terminal Beach” it is the main scene for the narrative. We see Traven’s mental deterioration first hand: he begins to hallucinate, seeing mirages of his dead family, as a result of dehydration, hunger and isolation, but also, Ballard seems to suggest, as a direct consequence of the bleak, foreboding landscape he has immersed himself in.
“Billennium” (1961) is one of my favourite stories from the collection. The premise is simple - unabated population growth has swelled the world’s cities to the point where they are almost uninhabitable, creating a Malthusian nightmare. Persons are restricted to four square meters of floor space each, so when the heroes of the story discover a large uninhabited room they are almost overcome with the space it affords: “For an hour they exchanged places, wandering silently around the dusty room, stretching their arms out to feel its unconfined emptiness, grasping at the sensation of absolute spatial freedom”. Paradoxically, families with children are granted extra floor space, incentivising the population growth that is drowning the world - a stark warning against future socio-economic mismanagement.
“Deep End” (1961) also portrays a dystopic vision of humanities future on Earth, depicting a world dehydrated through the mining of oxygen from the oceans. When a young romantic, who has chosen to remain on Earth despite all his fellow adolescents migrating to the space colonies and other planets, discovers one of the last remaining fish in a small pool, he dreams of preserving it, a relic of the Earth that once was.
“A Question of Re-entry” (1962) is symbolic of Heart of Darkness, following a scientist as he travels up an Amazonian tributary to a local tribe, searching for any evidence of a stricken space probe. The tribe is controlled by a shady westerner, who has a mysterious control over the tribes affairs. A fascinating collision of the traditional and the space age; the title refers to both the fall of the space probe, as well as the questions around assimilation of traditional tribes and peoples in to twentieth century civilisation.
“The Illuminated Man” (1964) was apparently the basis for Ballard’s later novel ‘The Crystal World’. It follows a journalist granted access to a mysterious crystalline growth off the Florida peninsula, and the futile resistance of the plants, animals and people against it. One particularly chilling scene depicts a priest marooned in his church, who sacrifices himself to the growth. The style of the story, and the effect of the interminable growth on the characters, reminded me a little of the style and characters in the game ‘Bioshock’, where the societal and physical decline of Rapture turns the inhabitants slowly insane.
“The Reptile Enclosure” (1962) is set on a crowded beach on a sunny day, but builds in dread to a terrifying climax. It’s one of my favourites from the collection for its mix of the modern and the Lovecraftian. “The Delta at Sunset” (1964) also follows this formula, with a psychological decline of its main character similar to ‘The Terminal Beach’, and a mix of the prehistoric with the contemporary portrayed through chilling visions of snakes writhing in the sunset.
“The Drowned Giant” (1964) is one of the shorter, more romantic of the novels. A giant, dead, washes up on the coast of England, and people travel from far and wide to see it. As it begins to decay, interest wanes, and pieces of the remains are removed and taken away indiscriminately and exhibited across the continent, often without attribution to the original fantastical source. A commentary on our tendency to dismantle the extraordinary and make it ordinary?
Some of the stories are not strictly science fiction at all. “End-Game” (1962) follows the trials and deliberations of a Soviet official awaiting the execution of his sentence whilst imprisoned in a remote chalet. Unfortunately for him, the sentence is death at the hands of his sole companion at the chalet, a strong but quite man who both guards him and provides his final company. “The Volcano Dances” (1964) is a bizarre, stunted story of a man and a woman living on the side of the active Mexican volcano Iztaccihuatl, accompanied by a mad, dancing shaman who they appease with regular donations of a single dollar. “The Gioconda of the Twilight Noon” (1964) exhibits the lovecraftian themes of ‘The Delta at Sunset’, such as the disintegration of the mind under stress. The collection ends with the “The Lost Leonardo” (1964), a biblically inspired detective story, set in the gossiping art world of Western europe.
Ballard’s prose can get a bit overblown and flowery at times. My vocabulary was certainly given a good work out; I now know ten different ways of describing the way light eminates from crystals thanks to ‘The Illuminated Man’.
In all, this is a brilliant short story collection, and if it is indicative of the quality of his novels, a great introduction to Ballard.
Before ‘The Terminal Beach’ I hadn’t read any Ballard before, but I’m aware of his other work (Empire of the Sun, the Crystal World, the recently cinematised High-Rise) and the reputation he’s built on them. I’ve spoken before on this blog about the trepidation one can feel approaching a renowned authors work, and with Ballard it was no different. But short stories are an ideal way of sampling an authors work before undertaking their novels, and The Terminal Beach has certainly inspired me to explore his other output.
This collection was published in 1964, and so contains some of his earliest short form fiction. Most of it was written at the height of the cold war, and the themes and locations reflect the times; abandoned nuclear testing grounds, spacecraft crash sites, the effects of contamination by alien substances, all set a vivid scene for the, at times psychological, drama to come.
The title story, “The Terminal Beach” (1964), appears half way through the collection, and explores the uniquely artifical landscape of Eniwetok (a collection of islands in the pacific, now officially spelt ‘Enewetak’) through the eyes of Traven, willingly marooned on the atoll after the death of his wife and daughter in a car crash. The site for 43 Atomic weapons tests in the 1950’s, Eniwetok is scattered with reminders of what Traven calls the ‘Pre-Third’ age, the years before the seemingly inevitable third world war, characterised “above all by its moral and psychological inversions, by its sense of the whole of history, and in particular of the immediate future… suspended from the quiversing volcano’s lip of World War III”. The creepiest inhabitants of the island are the plastic test dummies, their shadows burned in to the concrete pens and bunkers dotted around the rim of the atoll by the initial flash of the tests.
The human mind is a common subject across all of these stories, and in “The Terminal Beach” it is the main scene for the narrative. We see Traven’s mental deterioration first hand: he begins to hallucinate, seeing mirages of his dead family, as a result of dehydration, hunger and isolation, but also, Ballard seems to suggest, as a direct consequence of the bleak, foreboding landscape he has immersed himself in.
“Billennium” (1961) is one of my favourite stories from the collection. The premise is simple - unabated population growth has swelled the world’s cities to the point where they are almost uninhabitable, creating a Malthusian nightmare. Persons are restricted to four square meters of floor space each, so when the heroes of the story discover a large uninhabited room they are almost overcome with the space it affords: “For an hour they exchanged places, wandering silently around the dusty room, stretching their arms out to feel its unconfined emptiness, grasping at the sensation of absolute spatial freedom”. Paradoxically, families with children are granted extra floor space, incentivising the population growth that is drowning the world - a stark warning against future socio-economic mismanagement.
“Deep End” (1961) also portrays a dystopic vision of humanities future on Earth, depicting a world dehydrated through the mining of oxygen from the oceans. When a young romantic, who has chosen to remain on Earth despite all his fellow adolescents migrating to the space colonies and other planets, discovers one of the last remaining fish in a small pool, he dreams of preserving it, a relic of the Earth that once was.
“A Question of Re-entry” (1962) is symbolic of Heart of Darkness, following a scientist as he travels up an Amazonian tributary to a local tribe, searching for any evidence of a stricken space probe. The tribe is controlled by a shady westerner, who has a mysterious control over the tribes affairs. A fascinating collision of the traditional and the space age; the title refers to both the fall of the space probe, as well as the questions around assimilation of traditional tribes and peoples in to twentieth century civilisation.
“The Illuminated Man” (1964) was apparently the basis for Ballard’s later novel ‘The Crystal World’. It follows a journalist granted access to a mysterious crystalline growth off the Florida peninsula, and the futile resistance of the plants, animals and people against it. One particularly chilling scene depicts a priest marooned in his church, who sacrifices himself to the growth. The style of the story, and the effect of the interminable growth on the characters, reminded me a little of the style and characters in the game ‘Bioshock’, where the societal and physical decline of Rapture turns the inhabitants slowly insane.
“The Reptile Enclosure” (1962) is set on a crowded beach on a sunny day, but builds in dread to a terrifying climax. It’s one of my favourites from the collection for its mix of the modern and the Lovecraftian. “The Delta at Sunset” (1964) also follows this formula, with a psychological decline of its main character similar to ‘The Terminal Beach’, and a mix of the prehistoric with the contemporary portrayed through chilling visions of snakes writhing in the sunset.
“The Drowned Giant” (1964) is one of the shorter, more romantic of the novels. A giant, dead, washes up on the coast of England, and people travel from far and wide to see it. As it begins to decay, interest wanes, and pieces of the remains are removed and taken away indiscriminately and exhibited across the continent, often without attribution to the original fantastical source. A commentary on our tendency to dismantle the extraordinary and make it ordinary?
Some of the stories are not strictly science fiction at all. “End-Game” (1962) follows the trials and deliberations of a Soviet official awaiting the execution of his sentence whilst imprisoned in a remote chalet. Unfortunately for him, the sentence is death at the hands of his sole companion at the chalet, a strong but quite man who both guards him and provides his final company. “The Volcano Dances” (1964) is a bizarre, stunted story of a man and a woman living on the side of the active Mexican volcano Iztaccihuatl, accompanied by a mad, dancing shaman who they appease with regular donations of a single dollar. “The Gioconda of the Twilight Noon” (1964) exhibits the lovecraftian themes of ‘The Delta at Sunset’, such as the disintegration of the mind under stress. The collection ends with the “The Lost Leonardo” (1964), a biblically inspired detective story, set in the gossiping art world of Western europe.
Ballard’s prose can get a bit overblown and flowery at times. My vocabulary was certainly given a good work out; I now know ten different ways of describing the way light eminates from crystals thanks to ‘The Illuminated Man’.
In all, this is a brilliant short story collection, and if it is indicative of the quality of his novels, a great introduction to Ballard.
July 12, 2025
Honestly, I was expecting a freakier collection of short stories by the author of CRASH and THE ATROCITY EXHIBITION. This was kind of a mixed bag and only about half felt like SF or Weird Fiction. To give you an idea, the first three tales included a near future (for 1964 values of 'future') Heart of Darkness-esqe story where a UN investigator tries to track down a missing space capsule in the Amazon interior, a brief story of a giant (like-whale sized) human cadaver that appeared inexplicably just offshore, and a former government leader (in some unspecified, likely Soviet, nation) coming to terms with his jailer/executioner. My favorite stories were "The Reptile Enclosure," "The Terminal Beach," and "The Lost Leonardo." Many of the stories didn't do much for me. I'll give it a very low 3 stars, nudged up from 2.5 because it was better than the L. Sprague de Camp collection that I just read before it.
January 27, 2023
I read this from a poorly formatted EPUB so it wasn’t very pleasant to read. The stories are solid although somewhat somber. I feel like I’d have enjoyed it more if I didn’t have to decipher what half the words in the text were.
April 29, 2021
"There are rarer fish swimming in your head than in any submarine pen."
September 8, 2018
Ballard's importance lies, in part, in the role he played in opposition to the whole ghastly edifice of English 'literary fiction' that limited the writing of all but the bravest oddities - Mervyn Peake, say - to a suffocating sort of naturalism for too much of the Twentieth Century. His settings, characterisations and situations are distinctively disturbing. This selection of stories is a fascinating introduction to his work. Themes we recognise from the 'Crash' and 'The Drowned World' are recognisable, while the Pinter-or-Kafka-ish 'End Game' portrays an utterly broken and pathetic condemned man unsparingly. All far more interesting than who's shagging who in Hampstead.
November 2, 2022
Feels funny to say given the wildly varying settings and topics, but Ballard is very much a procedural writer; man thrown into extreme end of modernity which creates a form of high barbarism, man identifies the primordial within that supposed 'sci fi', man learns to embrace said high barbarism - usually having been offered an out, a road 'back to reality' spurned for the higher reality. In that sense, read one, read them all, but of course Ballard's trick isn't unexpected plot but exploring those emotions.
I think The Terminal Beach might be my favourite Ballard because, not needing to really establish all that much in terms of plot trajectory, as it varies so little, Ballard with short stories can focus entirely on the vignette, on the immediate display of this new world. It works as well in miniature as it does writ large.
As a collection, some excel, some fall flat(ish), I think you can see that this is the transition point for his writing. The more pedestrian 'tales of the unexpected' are mixed in with the uncanny ultramodern mirror images of today/tomorrow. Some of these stories are the best he wrote imo, the others... not so much. But that's the nature of a mixed bag.
The Drowned Giant is probably the best married of those two types of 'Ballardian', far more leaning towards the 'tales of the unexpected' end of the spectrum but with a sharp modernist take on the mythical or miraculous. In fact I think it's my favourite Ballard story of all.
I think The Terminal Beach might be my favourite Ballard because, not needing to really establish all that much in terms of plot trajectory, as it varies so little, Ballard with short stories can focus entirely on the vignette, on the immediate display of this new world. It works as well in miniature as it does writ large.
As a collection, some excel, some fall flat(ish), I think you can see that this is the transition point for his writing. The more pedestrian 'tales of the unexpected' are mixed in with the uncanny ultramodern mirror images of today/tomorrow. Some of these stories are the best he wrote imo, the others... not so much. But that's the nature of a mixed bag.
The Drowned Giant is probably the best married of those two types of 'Ballardian', far more leaning towards the 'tales of the unexpected' end of the spectrum but with a sharp modernist take on the mythical or miraculous. In fact I think it's my favourite Ballard story of all.
June 19, 2023
Atomic mania, nuclear psychology. Surreal, barren, sad, sombre.
February 25, 2015
This collection of Ballard's stories contains some of his earlier stuff; it may have been his first published collection. For someone like me, who has read a few of his books, it is interesting to see how some of the ideas he brings out here got worked on and elaborated in later books. Overall, it is a mixed bag, not as consistent conceptually as some of his other collections. Here are Ballard's lonely, stoic heroes, confronting extreme circumstances that are not always technological in origin. Some of the pieces find them dealing with primitive worlds, or inner demons, or the horrors of contemporary life. Ballard is usually not at his best when describing relationships; he is much more powerful when he focuses on his bleak speculative fictions, and he does this very well in the title story. "End-Game" is another good one; a look at a condemned politician from a totalitarian country who tries desperately to win over the thug who is watching over him.
I did at times have to ask myself what was enjoyable about this book. His prose is admirable, for one thing - always very cool and precise, with a powerful vocabulary and detailed descriptions. Below this metallic surface is often something dark and disturbing, a hypothetical scenario of the world falling apart, yet doing so in a way that is fascinating and strangely beautiful. There is a lot of unstated fear lurking in the corners of these stories and their dangerous speculative settings, and yet they can be very interesting places to visit.
I did at times have to ask myself what was enjoyable about this book. His prose is admirable, for one thing - always very cool and precise, with a powerful vocabulary and detailed descriptions. Below this metallic surface is often something dark and disturbing, a hypothetical scenario of the world falling apart, yet doing so in a way that is fascinating and strangely beautiful. There is a lot of unstated fear lurking in the corners of these stories and their dangerous speculative settings, and yet they can be very interesting places to visit.
May 23, 2024
To begin with, this review is of the British edition of
The Terminal Beach
; the American edition published at about the same time had an almost-completely different selection of stories in it.
Ballard was the master of science fiction where the "science" is abnormal psychology. Some of the stories here are more traditional science fiction, but his interests in surrealism and inner space are very much on display in many of them.
There are twelve stories here. Two of them ("The Drowned Giant" and "Billenium") are much-anthologized and need no comment. As for the others -- I'm not going to worry about spoiling a 60-year-old book.
In "A Question of Re-entry," Lieutenant Conolly, a UN official, travels up the Orinoco River into the interior of the Amazonas, piloted by a rough-and-ready Captain Pereira, searching for the landing point of the manned space probe Goliath 7. He is seeking the aid of Ryker, a European who has come to live among the Nambikwara people. (Yes: the setup is more than a little bit remniscent of Heart of Darkness .) Ryker has something of an obsession with clocks, and seems to have some strange power over the Nambikwaras. The situation gradually grows darker until Ryker's secrets are revealed.
"End-Game" is the story of Constantin, a resident of some Eastern European country (remember, this was written at the height of the Cold War) , sentenced to death for unnamed political crimes and living in a villa with Malek, his executioner, and a sort of cook-houseboy. Over a series of chess games with Malek, Constantin tries to learn the planned date and time for his execution. Things get stranger.
"The Illuminated Man" tells the story of an English journalist, who seems pretty clearly to be Ballard (though he is referred to only as "James"), who comes to visit a spot in Florida where a peculiar phenomenon has begun: the vegetation, the wildlife, even the ground and buildings, have begun to be coated with crystalline protrusions. This is one of three sites on Earth where this phenomenon is taking place; in addition, weird celestial phenomena have been sighted. James goes into the zone and meets certain inhabitants who try to enlist him in their various aims; one explains to him his belief that the crystals are actually crystallized time. In the end, he escapes the zone, but intends to return. (Incidentally, this story feels like a trial run for The Crystal World , one of a series of "cozy" end-of-the-world novels Ballard published between 1962 and 1966.)
In "The Reptile Enclosure," a couple sitting on a veranda above a crowded beach talk. He, a scientist, ponders a colleague's theory of IRMs, "Innate Releasing Mechanisms," instinctive reactions buried deep in the brains of animals, including humans; he also considers the new satellite which has just been launched. As it passes overhead, everyone on the beach stands up and walks into the water.
"The Delta at Sunset" is about Charles Gifford, an archaeologist, at a Toltec ruin, who has been wounded in the foot; the wound appears to be growing gangrenous. As he sits in his stretcher-chair day after day, he observes many snakes coming up out of the water in the early evening. His wife and colleague (who, it appears, are having an affair) want to leave, to bring him somewhere where he can get medical aid; he refuses to go.
And so, roughly at the book's midpoint, we come to the titular piece, surely one of the strangest Ballard had written to date. Traven, a man whose wife and son were killed in an automobile accident, comes to the Eniwetok (now known as Enewetak), where the US held dozens of nuclear weapons tests in the late 40s and early 50s. Traven brings almost no food, no water, and seems to accept that he will die here, among the ruins of American technology brought here to monitor the tests. The story -- if it can even be called that -- tells, in no clear chronological order, of his arrival, his gradual deterioration, his encounters with (he beleives) the spectres of his wife and son, and the brief intrusion of a researcher and his pilot. But he seems to be not happy, exactly, but fulfilled and satisfied by the way he has chosen to end his life.
"Deep End" is a more traditional science fiction piece. Humanity has mostly left Earth for "the new worlds," and taken much of Earth's water with them. One of the remaining people, Holliday, lives in the salt flats near the Atlantic Lake, a ten-mile body of highly saline water that appears to be the last remaining bit of the world's oceans. Holliday, a young man, refuses to leave Earth, remaining in a small community of older people. On a visit to the lake, he discovers to his surprise a living dogfish, which has great significance to him, saying, Earth is not yet dead. Bad stuff happens.
"The Volcano Dances," the shortest story in the book, is also the weakest. A man and a woman are living in a house on the mountain Tlaxihuatl, which seems likely to blow. One of them wants to leave. One of them wants to stay.
In "The Gioconda of the Twilight Noon," a man who has been temporarily blinded by an operation is staying with his wife in his mother's house (the mother is taking a cruise). He sees mysterious scenes in the darkness behind his bandages. They become realer to him than his wife or the house. He does something about it.
The final story, "The Lost Leonardo" is, to my mind, one of the strongest. A (fictional) da Vinci Crucifixion is stolen from the Louvre. This appears impossible, given the size and weight of the painting, and its essential unsellability. The narrator, an art specialist for "Northeby's" auction house, and a French colleague set out to find the painting and the thief. They discover along the way that a certain person, recognizable from painting to painting, appears in Crucifixion paintings across nations and centuries -- and that all of these paintings have, over decades, been stolen and returned with that figure's visage changed. The identification of the figure suggests the identity of the thief.
J.G. Ballard once remarked that "Earth is the only alien planet." In many of these stories, it is easy to see what he meant by that.
Ballard was the master of science fiction where the "science" is abnormal psychology. Some of the stories here are more traditional science fiction, but his interests in surrealism and inner space are very much on display in many of them.
There are twelve stories here. Two of them ("The Drowned Giant" and "Billenium") are much-anthologized and need no comment. As for the others -- I'm not going to worry about spoiling a 60-year-old book.
In "A Question of Re-entry," Lieutenant Conolly, a UN official, travels up the Orinoco River into the interior of the Amazonas, piloted by a rough-and-ready Captain Pereira, searching for the landing point of the manned space probe Goliath 7. He is seeking the aid of Ryker, a European who has come to live among the Nambikwara people. (Yes: the setup is more than a little bit remniscent of Heart of Darkness .) Ryker has something of an obsession with clocks, and seems to have some strange power over the Nambikwaras. The situation gradually grows darker until Ryker's secrets are revealed.
"End-Game" is the story of Constantin, a resident of some Eastern European country (remember, this was written at the height of the Cold War) , sentenced to death for unnamed political crimes and living in a villa with Malek, his executioner, and a sort of cook-houseboy. Over a series of chess games with Malek, Constantin tries to learn the planned date and time for his execution. Things get stranger.
"The Illuminated Man" tells the story of an English journalist, who seems pretty clearly to be Ballard (though he is referred to only as "James"), who comes to visit a spot in Florida where a peculiar phenomenon has begun: the vegetation, the wildlife, even the ground and buildings, have begun to be coated with crystalline protrusions. This is one of three sites on Earth where this phenomenon is taking place; in addition, weird celestial phenomena have been sighted. James goes into the zone and meets certain inhabitants who try to enlist him in their various aims; one explains to him his belief that the crystals are actually crystallized time. In the end, he escapes the zone, but intends to return. (Incidentally, this story feels like a trial run for The Crystal World , one of a series of "cozy" end-of-the-world novels Ballard published between 1962 and 1966.)
In "The Reptile Enclosure," a couple sitting on a veranda above a crowded beach talk. He, a scientist, ponders a colleague's theory of IRMs, "Innate Releasing Mechanisms," instinctive reactions buried deep in the brains of animals, including humans; he also considers the new satellite which has just been launched. As it passes overhead, everyone on the beach stands up and walks into the water.
"The Delta at Sunset" is about Charles Gifford, an archaeologist, at a Toltec ruin, who has been wounded in the foot; the wound appears to be growing gangrenous. As he sits in his stretcher-chair day after day, he observes many snakes coming up out of the water in the early evening. His wife and colleague (who, it appears, are having an affair) want to leave, to bring him somewhere where he can get medical aid; he refuses to go.
And so, roughly at the book's midpoint, we come to the titular piece, surely one of the strangest Ballard had written to date. Traven, a man whose wife and son were killed in an automobile accident, comes to the Eniwetok (now known as Enewetak), where the US held dozens of nuclear weapons tests in the late 40s and early 50s. Traven brings almost no food, no water, and seems to accept that he will die here, among the ruins of American technology brought here to monitor the tests. The story -- if it can even be called that -- tells, in no clear chronological order, of his arrival, his gradual deterioration, his encounters with (he beleives) the spectres of his wife and son, and the brief intrusion of a researcher and his pilot. But he seems to be not happy, exactly, but fulfilled and satisfied by the way he has chosen to end his life.
"Deep End" is a more traditional science fiction piece. Humanity has mostly left Earth for "the new worlds," and taken much of Earth's water with them. One of the remaining people, Holliday, lives in the salt flats near the Atlantic Lake, a ten-mile body of highly saline water that appears to be the last remaining bit of the world's oceans. Holliday, a young man, refuses to leave Earth, remaining in a small community of older people. On a visit to the lake, he discovers to his surprise a living dogfish, which has great significance to him, saying, Earth is not yet dead. Bad stuff happens.
"The Volcano Dances," the shortest story in the book, is also the weakest. A man and a woman are living in a house on the mountain Tlaxihuatl, which seems likely to blow. One of them wants to leave. One of them wants to stay.
In "The Gioconda of the Twilight Noon," a man who has been temporarily blinded by an operation is staying with his wife in his mother's house (the mother is taking a cruise). He sees mysterious scenes in the darkness behind his bandages. They become realer to him than his wife or the house. He does something about it.
The final story, "The Lost Leonardo" is, to my mind, one of the strongest. A (fictional) da Vinci Crucifixion is stolen from the Louvre. This appears impossible, given the size and weight of the painting, and its essential unsellability. The narrator, an art specialist for "Northeby's" auction house, and a French colleague set out to find the painting and the thief. They discover along the way that a certain person, recognizable from painting to painting, appears in Crucifixion paintings across nations and centuries -- and that all of these paintings have, over decades, been stolen and returned with that figure's visage changed. The identification of the figure suggests the identity of the thief.
J.G. Ballard once remarked that "Earth is the only alien planet." In many of these stories, it is easy to see what he meant by that.
May 25, 2008
Ballard's first major collection of short stories are a veritable feast of a new and emerging talent, a brave voice filled with conviction, style and courage. Some of the stories are insular and personal, and somewhat like sketches, but others are vast and broad-based, set against the largest backdrop of all - society itself. Questions of the nature of art itself, pure mathematics and statistics, morality and life and death itself are explored through a selective, yet all-encompassing painter's eye. Overall, the stories are so filled with intellectual, poetic and philosophical energy that one simply sits back in awe and gratitude at such a vast display. A great book for the neophyte Ballard reader.
December 24, 2021
A lot of deep and moving language here. Some of the better line by line writing I’ve read in a while. (A positive check for “Science Fiction: Stories and Contexts”).
January 10, 2021
J.M.Ballard was, like Bradbury and Orwell, way ahead of his time and certainly knew which way the winds of society were blowing. The Subliminal Man was brilliant. The takeover of the 24-7 media world coupled with a disposable society. In 1964 these things were unheard of and passed off as nutcase conspiracy theories. But here we are. Media bias, media lies, media manipulation and censorship, telling me what is right and what is wrong, attempting to control my life and provide me with high end items with low shelf life that I can use to further their influence over my decisions. Telling me I am nothing without the next Big Thing.
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