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The Crystal World
Librarian's Note: alternative cover edition of ISBN13: 9780586024195
From J. G. Ballard, author of Crash and Cocaine Nights comes his extraordinary vision of an African forest that turns all in its path to crystal.
Through a ‘leaking’ of time, the West African jungle starts to crystallize. Trees metamorphose into enormous jewels. Crocodiles encased in second glittering skins lurch down the river. Pythons with huge blind gemstone eyes rear in heraldic poses. Most flee the area in terror, afraid to face a catastrophe they cannot understand.
But some, dazzled and strangely entranced, remain to drift through this dreamworld forest: a doctor in pursuit of his ex-mistress, an enigmatic Jesuit wielding a crystal cross and a tribe of lepers searching for Paradise.
In this tour de force of the imagination, Ballard transports the reader into one of his most unforgettable landscapes.
This edition is part of a new commemorative series of Ballard’s works, featuring introductions from a number of his admirers (including James Lever, Ali Smith, Hari Kunzru and Martin Amis) and brand-new cover designs.
From J. G. Ballard, author of Crash and Cocaine Nights comes his extraordinary vision of an African forest that turns all in its path to crystal.
Through a ‘leaking’ of time, the West African jungle starts to crystallize. Trees metamorphose into enormous jewels. Crocodiles encased in second glittering skins lurch down the river. Pythons with huge blind gemstone eyes rear in heraldic poses. Most flee the area in terror, afraid to face a catastrophe they cannot understand.
But some, dazzled and strangely entranced, remain to drift through this dreamworld forest: a doctor in pursuit of his ex-mistress, an enigmatic Jesuit wielding a crystal cross and a tribe of lepers searching for Paradise.
In this tour de force of the imagination, Ballard transports the reader into one of his most unforgettable landscapes.
This edition is part of a new commemorative series of Ballard’s works, featuring introductions from a number of his admirers (including James Lever, Ali Smith, Hari Kunzru and Martin Amis) and brand-new cover designs.
176 pages, Paperback
First published May 1, 1966
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6426 people want to read
About the author
J.G. Ballard
469 books4,089 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 - 30 of 372 reviews
November 10, 2021
”What most attracted his attention, however, like that of the rest of the watching group, was the man’s right arm. From the elbow to the fingertips it was enclosed by--or more precisely had effloresced into--a mass of translucent crystals, through which the prismatic outlines of the hand and fingers could be seen in a dozen multi-colored reflections. This huge jeweled gauntlet, like the coronation armor of a Spanish conquistador, was drying in the sun, its crystals beginning to emit a hard vivid light.”
Dr. Edward Sanders accepts an invitation to visit his friends Dr. and Mrs. Clair in a remote area of Africa. The moment he lands in Port Matarre, he is struck by the ”pervading auroral gloom, broken by sudden inward shifts of light.” The travellers are kept from continuing their journey further upriver by the authorities for reasons that are vague and unconvincing. Sanders specializes in leprosy, so there is very little that scares him. He is determined to continue onward to see his friends, thus he hires a boat to take him upriver.
Queue Heart of Darkness soundtrack.
The forest is turning into something potentially sinister, but it is so lovely, like looking at stained glass lit by dazzling light. It is the most beautiful, post-apocalyptic world that could ever be imagined. ”The sky was clear and motionless, the sunlight shining uninterruptedly upon this magnetic shore, but now and then a stir of wind crossed the water and the scene erupted into cascades of color that rippled away into the air around them. Then the coruscation subsided, and the images of the individual trees reappeared, each sheathed in its armor of light, foliage glowing as if loaded with deliquescing jewels.”
The scientist in Dr. Sanders is intrigued by the spectacle and the need to understand it, but the more time he spends in this new glittering world, the less interested he becomes in the science as he becomes enamored with the spiritual. He meets a priest whose church in the forest is slowly becoming bejeweled. Fortunately, the Christian elements are fairly muted in this tale, allowing me to ignore their insertion without losing my enjoyment of the much larger themes of the story. It is evident that this transformation of the forest is advancing quickly enough that the whole world is in danger of being glitterfied by this unfathomable invasion.
Not only is the foliage being altered, but so are the animals and even those humans who spend too much time under this sparkling canopy. ”His clothes had begun to glow in the dark, the frost that covered his suit spangled by the starlight. Spurs of crystal grew from the dial of his wrist-watch, imprisoning the hands within a medallion of moonstone.”
As we learn more about Dr. Sanders, we discover that his reasons to travel to this remote part of Africa are not exactly as expected. There are other concerns to be considered, and those further compromise his objectivity regarding of what is really going on. Should he really care if the world ends from this dazzling display of glittering beauty? If only the advancing decay of our own bodies was so beautifully rendered.
The descriptions of this world by Ballard are phenomenally enticing. I’m not sure what psychedelic drugs he was tripping on at the time, but they certainly put kaleidoscopes in his eyes. We are so used to mayhem and destruction appearing so bleak and scary, but what if it is something that glimmers and shimmers? What if it is something so seductive that we want to submit and be part of its bejeweled landscape?
Everytime I read a J. G. Ballard, I always think to myself...why has it taken me so long to get back to reading him? He writes these highly inventive, strangely conceived, intellectual novels that alway shake me out of my perceptions of what I believe reality to be. Kudos to the jacket designer who used Eye of Silence by Max Ernst to convey perfectly the strange world the reader is about to venture into.
If you wish to see more of my most recent book and movie reviews, visit http://www.jeffreykeeten.com
I also have a Facebook blogger page at:https://www.facebook.com/JeffreyKeeten
Dr. Edward Sanders accepts an invitation to visit his friends Dr. and Mrs. Clair in a remote area of Africa. The moment he lands in Port Matarre, he is struck by the ”pervading auroral gloom, broken by sudden inward shifts of light.” The travellers are kept from continuing their journey further upriver by the authorities for reasons that are vague and unconvincing. Sanders specializes in leprosy, so there is very little that scares him. He is determined to continue onward to see his friends, thus he hires a boat to take him upriver.
Queue Heart of Darkness soundtrack.
The forest is turning into something potentially sinister, but it is so lovely, like looking at stained glass lit by dazzling light. It is the most beautiful, post-apocalyptic world that could ever be imagined. ”The sky was clear and motionless, the sunlight shining uninterruptedly upon this magnetic shore, but now and then a stir of wind crossed the water and the scene erupted into cascades of color that rippled away into the air around them. Then the coruscation subsided, and the images of the individual trees reappeared, each sheathed in its armor of light, foliage glowing as if loaded with deliquescing jewels.”
The scientist in Dr. Sanders is intrigued by the spectacle and the need to understand it, but the more time he spends in this new glittering world, the less interested he becomes in the science as he becomes enamored with the spiritual. He meets a priest whose church in the forest is slowly becoming bejeweled. Fortunately, the Christian elements are fairly muted in this tale, allowing me to ignore their insertion without losing my enjoyment of the much larger themes of the story. It is evident that this transformation of the forest is advancing quickly enough that the whole world is in danger of being glitterfied by this unfathomable invasion.
Not only is the foliage being altered, but so are the animals and even those humans who spend too much time under this sparkling canopy. ”His clothes had begun to glow in the dark, the frost that covered his suit spangled by the starlight. Spurs of crystal grew from the dial of his wrist-watch, imprisoning the hands within a medallion of moonstone.”
As we learn more about Dr. Sanders, we discover that his reasons to travel to this remote part of Africa are not exactly as expected. There are other concerns to be considered, and those further compromise his objectivity regarding of what is really going on. Should he really care if the world ends from this dazzling display of glittering beauty? If only the advancing decay of our own bodies was so beautifully rendered.
The descriptions of this world by Ballard are phenomenally enticing. I’m not sure what psychedelic drugs he was tripping on at the time, but they certainly put kaleidoscopes in his eyes. We are so used to mayhem and destruction appearing so bleak and scary, but what if it is something that glimmers and shimmers? What if it is something so seductive that we want to submit and be part of its bejeweled landscape?
Everytime I read a J. G. Ballard, I always think to myself...why has it taken me so long to get back to reading him? He writes these highly inventive, strangely conceived, intellectual novels that alway shake me out of my perceptions of what I believe reality to be. Kudos to the jacket designer who used Eye of Silence by Max Ernst to convey perfectly the strange world the reader is about to venture into.
If you wish to see more of my most recent book and movie reviews, visit http://www.jeffreykeeten.com
I also have a Facebook blogger page at:https://www.facebook.com/JeffreyKeeten
June 28, 2023
This book totally crashes the already-ridiculous-for-me GR 5-star-rating system because honestly this is an awful, awful book, ridiculously awful, and I loved it completely. This writing. Wow. there are weird unlikely dependent clauses all over the place, and there are so many bizarre—actually what I meant to write just then is “freakishly bizarre”—descriptions of characters and of their behaviors. There is the story itself—for some inexplicable reason the world is going to pot in a very beautiful way, in this particular apocalypse, where organic growing things are becoming crystalline structures. When people start to turn spiky, they kind of like it. It doesn't hurt and they get to merge with everything else in a kind of eternal not-death.
To top it off there is a bit of a Heart of Darkness feel to this novel, including of course a big dark river, and an odd jungle, and most unfortunate references to “natives” behaving in suspiciously uncivilized ways.
So what can I say. Why did I love it. For its absolute excess, for the purple shade of prose, for the way people arrive on ships called “steamers” and for the way they smoke: incessantly, elegantly, and with more gesture and meaning given to each puff than the cigarettes in the movie “Now, Voyager,’ here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-CrT...
Also the audacity of it, and the way Ballard vivifies a very weird world indeed.
To top it off there is a bit of a Heart of Darkness feel to this novel, including of course a big dark river, and an odd jungle, and most unfortunate references to “natives” behaving in suspiciously uncivilized ways.
So what can I say. Why did I love it. For its absolute excess, for the purple shade of prose, for the way people arrive on ships called “steamers” and for the way they smoke: incessantly, elegantly, and with more gesture and meaning given to each puff than the cigarettes in the movie “Now, Voyager,’ here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-CrT...
Also the audacity of it, and the way Ballard vivifies a very weird world indeed.
September 1, 2021
The glittering forest of The Crystal World is more beautiful than the swamps of The Drowned World or the deserts of The Drought. Nevertheless it is my least favorite of Ballard’s apocalyptic worlds.
The Drowned World draws me in with its heat and torpor and somnolent atmosphere. The Drought draws me in with its marginal community of misfit loners. But The Crystal World fails to draw me in despite its beauty.
The book has much to recommend it. But it is not a book I wish to die in. And I do believe that is my chief criticism. I find the crystalization process to be gruesome. Not that I particularly want to die of heat in The Drowned World or thirst in The Drought, but there is something downright creepy to me about crystalization.
My secondary criticism regards the storytelling. I think Ballard boxed himself in by trying to reproduce the structure of his previous apocalyptic novels. The result is storytelling that feels formulaic.
The Crystal World has all the themes I’ve come to expect from a Ballard novel. Sanders is estranged from the world around him. Like his predecessors in The Drowned World and The Drought, he intentionally isolates himself. His alienation is expressed in his career choice and he even recognizes that his reasons for working at a leper hospital are probably psychological.
“For some time he had suspected that his reasons for serving at the leper hospital were not altogether humanitarian, and that he might be more attracted by the idea of leprosy, and whatever it unconsciously represented” (13).
There is the usual association of the inner world and outer world, psyche and landscape, with the pull of the outer world on the inner world intensifying until there is no longer a distinction between the two. In The Drowned World and The Drought, Ballard does this gradually. But in The Crystal World he just announces that Sanders “already identified himself with the forest” (69). As if to say, ‘you’ve read the other books so you know where this is going.’
Like The Drowned World, the first half of The Crystal World is better than the second. The action sequence with Ventress and Thorensen is as unnecessary as the action sequence with Strangman and his crew in The Drowned World. Father Balthus also serves little purpose. These secondary characters appear to exist solely for Ballard’s motif of light and dark and to inject action into a story that doesn’t need action.
Nevertheless there is much that is good in the book, such as Ballard’s beautifully descriptive writing. In The Crystal World he creates a “jeweled twilight world” (111), an “illuminated forest” (93) of crystals that “glistened like wedding cakes” (84), an enchanting world of “fairy towers” (89) and “exotic minarets and baroque domes” (84) where rainbows of light look like “opalescent candy” (98).
I also like the idea of cosmic phenomena affecting time on Earth. Ballard unites science and poetry in his exploration of immortality. This elevated the novel for me.
The crystalline forest may be “the paradisal world when everything seemed illuminated by that prismatic light described so exactly by Wordsworth in his recollections of childhood” (77).
What Wordsworth intimates, Shelley states categorically:
“Life, like a dome of many-colored glass,
Stains the white radiance of eternity” (148).
The transformation in The Crystal World is not just homo sapiens reverting to a pre-conscious state like in The Drowned World. This is reversion to a timeless state, a primordial and prelapsarian state where there was neither animate nor inanimate. This is eternity. The opposite of time. It is perfect. It is the sum of all things, just as white is the sum of all colors. Life may be myriad and beautiful, but it is imperfect, a “stain” on eternity. And everything seeks perfection.
We think we want more time when in fact what we want is eternity. We just forget that eternity is timelessness. The end of time, not time without end.
The Drowned World draws me in with its heat and torpor and somnolent atmosphere. The Drought draws me in with its marginal community of misfit loners. But The Crystal World fails to draw me in despite its beauty.
The book has much to recommend it. But it is not a book I wish to die in. And I do believe that is my chief criticism. I find the crystalization process to be gruesome. Not that I particularly want to die of heat in The Drowned World or thirst in The Drought, but there is something downright creepy to me about crystalization.
My secondary criticism regards the storytelling. I think Ballard boxed himself in by trying to reproduce the structure of his previous apocalyptic novels. The result is storytelling that feels formulaic.
The Crystal World has all the themes I’ve come to expect from a Ballard novel. Sanders is estranged from the world around him. Like his predecessors in The Drowned World and The Drought, he intentionally isolates himself. His alienation is expressed in his career choice and he even recognizes that his reasons for working at a leper hospital are probably psychological.
“For some time he had suspected that his reasons for serving at the leper hospital were not altogether humanitarian, and that he might be more attracted by the idea of leprosy, and whatever it unconsciously represented” (13).
There is the usual association of the inner world and outer world, psyche and landscape, with the pull of the outer world on the inner world intensifying until there is no longer a distinction between the two. In The Drowned World and The Drought, Ballard does this gradually. But in The Crystal World he just announces that Sanders “already identified himself with the forest” (69). As if to say, ‘you’ve read the other books so you know where this is going.’
Like The Drowned World, the first half of The Crystal World is better than the second. The action sequence with Ventress and Thorensen is as unnecessary as the action sequence with Strangman and his crew in The Drowned World. Father Balthus also serves little purpose. These secondary characters appear to exist solely for Ballard’s motif of light and dark and to inject action into a story that doesn’t need action.
Nevertheless there is much that is good in the book, such as Ballard’s beautifully descriptive writing. In The Crystal World he creates a “jeweled twilight world” (111), an “illuminated forest” (93) of crystals that “glistened like wedding cakes” (84), an enchanting world of “fairy towers” (89) and “exotic minarets and baroque domes” (84) where rainbows of light look like “opalescent candy” (98).
I also like the idea of cosmic phenomena affecting time on Earth. Ballard unites science and poetry in his exploration of immortality. This elevated the novel for me.
The crystalline forest may be “the paradisal world when everything seemed illuminated by that prismatic light described so exactly by Wordsworth in his recollections of childhood” (77).
What Wordsworth intimates, Shelley states categorically:
“Life, like a dome of many-colored glass,
Stains the white radiance of eternity” (148).
The transformation in The Crystal World is not just homo sapiens reverting to a pre-conscious state like in The Drowned World. This is reversion to a timeless state, a primordial and prelapsarian state where there was neither animate nor inanimate. This is eternity. The opposite of time. It is perfect. It is the sum of all things, just as white is the sum of all colors. Life may be myriad and beautiful, but it is imperfect, a “stain” on eternity. And everything seeks perfection.
We think we want more time when in fact what we want is eternity. We just forget that eternity is timelessness. The end of time, not time without end.
November 11, 2015
Kind of a wild mix between Joseph Conrad and Erich Maria Remarque, with a nod to Malcolm Lowry and with the edgy other worldliness of Philip K. Dick. The comparisons to Vonnegut’s Ice nine from Cat's Cradle will be inevitable, but the distinction is one of procedure rather than substance.
Vonnegut used Ice nine as a plot device, whereas Ballard’s crystals are a metaphor for our unavoidable demise, our inescapable mortality. The novel’s protagonist Dr. Sanders’ specializes in the treatment of leprosy patients in rural Africa, and several connections are made between the spread of leprosy and the strange crystallization. Also evident, though somewhat muted, is Ballard’s search for faith and questions about the crystallization as a symbol for Christianity.
Visually, this is impressive and mesmerizing. The world Ballard creates, his pulsating description of the crystals and jewels in the jungle sunlight and making strange silhouettes of the characters is dazzling, as if he had painted a portrait.
First published in 1966, a reader may ask of what sort is this speculative fiction? Science Fiction, fantasy, magical realism? Was Ballard stoned out of his mind? Do crystals look cool in the glow of a lava lamp? And of what importance does Ballard make to the diamond mines trapped in irony amongst the crystal jungles?
Ballard answers many questions, but leaves many unanswered in this hypnotic but puzzling tale. Ultimately satisfying and demonstrating the author’s great imagination and ability, this nonetheless has locked up in its basement the muffled howling of the absurd. Samuel Beckett and Eugène Ionesco fans take note, there are crystals in the forest.
Vonnegut used Ice nine as a plot device, whereas Ballard’s crystals are a metaphor for our unavoidable demise, our inescapable mortality. The novel’s protagonist Dr. Sanders’ specializes in the treatment of leprosy patients in rural Africa, and several connections are made between the spread of leprosy and the strange crystallization. Also evident, though somewhat muted, is Ballard’s search for faith and questions about the crystallization as a symbol for Christianity.
Visually, this is impressive and mesmerizing. The world Ballard creates, his pulsating description of the crystals and jewels in the jungle sunlight and making strange silhouettes of the characters is dazzling, as if he had painted a portrait.
First published in 1966, a reader may ask of what sort is this speculative fiction? Science Fiction, fantasy, magical realism? Was Ballard stoned out of his mind? Do crystals look cool in the glow of a lava lamp? And of what importance does Ballard make to the diamond mines trapped in irony amongst the crystal jungles?
Ballard answers many questions, but leaves many unanswered in this hypnotic but puzzling tale. Ultimately satisfying and demonstrating the author’s great imagination and ability, this nonetheless has locked up in its basement the muffled howling of the absurd. Samuel Beckett and Eugène Ionesco fans take note, there are crystals in the forest.
February 7, 2016
a physician in africa; a world of disease. decay takes strange shape! a move into the unknown; the inexplicable finds its form and renovates, reconfigures: a new, dead life! figures in a landscape become one with that landscape... stylized characters form a comic tableau, fighting and fucking and dying, always dying... a journey up-river into the heart of an exterminating whiteness... leprosy and crystallization, two sides of one coin. this cartoon world ends - not with a bang - but with stasis; an alien landscape that will subsume us all. what is Self, what is Society, what are compassion & greed & ambition, what is Life itself, in the face of such things? our ultimate heritage - to be insects trapped in crystalline amber?
May 14, 2014
Ballard novel: subject, end time. Crystal, metaphor. Verbs? Inappropriateness. Nouns, exclusivity. Technique: problems. Action-omission. Review: inanity, boredom. Book: impossibility. Author-choices, comprehension. Ballard: uniqueness, praise.
OULIPO? Disagreement.
LSD? Certainty.
OULIPO? Disagreement.
LSD? Certainty.
September 24, 2015
What do I think of this novel? I already got a glimpse of it amidst several of the first half of the complete short stories of Ballard, so I knew what to expect before sinking my teeth in it. Time flowers leads to these crystals. The Illuminated Man himself was drawn into the theme of the Crystal World. There's a lot of great imagery going on, and surprisingly, it isn't just the descriptions of the the world being consumed by a time-reversed (or rather, collided time with anti-time) semi-liquid crystals that shine with their own internal light. There's a dialog about religion and survivalism, an undercurrent of revenge and guilt, acceptance and futility.
People do say it's a sci-fi equivalent of Heart of Darkness, but I think it's more than that.
I like to digest some of the deeper currents in the work. Discover how it truly applies to the crystallizing world. After all, the tortured priest discovered that God is inside everything that has been transformed. The world is becoming eternal and obviously much more gorgeous than it had ever been.
The very images are showing us that things are not dark, but the exact opposite. Yes, the world is dying, somewhat, or at least becoming something that normal people cannot touch without becoming a part of it, but it is definitely not clear that those who'd succumbed are now unhappy or dead.
This isn't just a thoroughly exacting tribute. I think it's more of a refutation.
People do say it's a sci-fi equivalent of Heart of Darkness, but I think it's more than that.
I like to digest some of the deeper currents in the work. Discover how it truly applies to the crystallizing world. After all, the tortured priest discovered that God is inside everything that has been transformed. The world is becoming eternal and obviously much more gorgeous than it had ever been.
The very images are showing us that things are not dark, but the exact opposite. Yes, the world is dying, somewhat, or at least becoming something that normal people cannot touch without becoming a part of it, but it is definitely not clear that those who'd succumbed are now unhappy or dead.
This isn't just a thoroughly exacting tribute. I think it's more of a refutation.
March 7, 2019
Welcome to another J.G Ballard Weird Environmental Apocalypse!™
See! The listless male protagonist, mired in ennui and sleepwalking towards his fate!
Watch! As environmental forces beyond his control reinforce his powerlessness!
Feel! Depressed at the inescapable sense of doom that hangs over beautiful descriptions of ruined landscapes, lyrical depictions of environmental catastrophe and all-too-plausible scenes of petty interpersonal violence that continue even while human extinction looms!
J.G Ballard loved writing about the end of the world - a theme he explored in The Drowned World, the Drought and here in his novel The Crystal World. While the themes and characters all seem pretty similar the first of these novels is a great work, the second is pretty good, and the one under review here- The Crystal World - is… well… its not as good.
Actually, I found it a little dull.
The story focuses on Edward Sanders, a British doctor in Africa who works in a local hospital and runs a leper colony. Like most of the Ballard protagonists I’ve encountered he’s an ennui-stricken guy, lost and seemingly passionless, mulling over a failed affair with a friend’s wife who has moved on to another African town.
Taking a period of Leave Sanders decides to visit his former lover, and takes a long journey upriver that had me hearing echoes of Colonel Kurtz’s mutterings in the distance. Once he arrive in the desired town he begins to notice that not all is well – there are strange happenings afoot, a strange atmosphere that seems to warp the light all around the settlement.
He encounters some strange characters and a young French journalist, soon uncovering that the nearby forest has begun to exhibit strange phenomena, producing crystallized plant sculptures of exquisite beauty.
He and the journalist (who is now another lover for him to generally feel listless and uncommitted about) travel further upriver (“The Horro….” Wrong novel - shut up, Kurtz!) to a mining site where Sanders friends are based.
On arrival they learn that the forest is slowly crystallizing – turning everything in it into a living crystal sculpture, and spreading rapidly, along with several other similar areas around the globe.
The process seems inexorable, and it becomes clear early on that it is very likely that the whole earth will eventually be crystallized, and that our protagonist, if anything, is going to be relieved by the prospect of his imminent end.
And so it goes from here. There’s more to it, of course. The spread of the forest is revealed and Ballard elegantly describes its beautiful horror. There’s conflict, and some crazy people fighting over a woman among the crystal trees.
Overall though, despite Ballard’s ability to make his world real, to evoke the African town and its people, to show us the fear and the lure of the crystal world, the feeling of unavoidable doom made this novel a little dull. There’s never any real question as to whether Sanders is even going to try to survive, or that his zest for living will be rekindled. He pinballs from scene to scene with his ultimate destiny always clear and always unchanging.
The explanation for the crystallizing also left me cold - something to do with time being a finite resource, and as it is used elsewhere it runs out here, causing our galaxy to become static and frozen. There’s a leprosy analogy in here somewhere as that disease comes up a few times, but I wasn’t engaged enough with the novel to really work at spotting it. I simply pressed on towards my my own dull fate – plodding forward and finishing The Crystal World without really feeling any spark of enjoyment, unconsciously mimicking Edward Sanders’ fictional trajectory.
Despite its faults this book (published in 1966) may have later inspired more interesting works. The films Monsters and Annihilation, both of which feature an alien ‘zone’ spreading across the earth with terrifying consequences, play with similar ideas more effectively. And of course the Strutgaskys’ ‘Roadside Picnic’ - where strange alien zones filled with weird effects are dotted around the world - is a Science Fiction classic.
Overall though, this is not a standout book. Perhaps The Crystal World would have had more of an impact if I hadn’t already read The Drowned World and The Drought, but having done so this story felt like an all-too-similar, but inferior work.
Two gasps of ‘The Horror, The Horror’ out of five.
See! The listless male protagonist, mired in ennui and sleepwalking towards his fate!
Watch! As environmental forces beyond his control reinforce his powerlessness!
Feel! Depressed at the inescapable sense of doom that hangs over beautiful descriptions of ruined landscapes, lyrical depictions of environmental catastrophe and all-too-plausible scenes of petty interpersonal violence that continue even while human extinction looms!
J.G Ballard loved writing about the end of the world - a theme he explored in The Drowned World, the Drought and here in his novel The Crystal World. While the themes and characters all seem pretty similar the first of these novels is a great work, the second is pretty good, and the one under review here- The Crystal World - is… well… its not as good.
Actually, I found it a little dull.
The story focuses on Edward Sanders, a British doctor in Africa who works in a local hospital and runs a leper colony. Like most of the Ballard protagonists I’ve encountered he’s an ennui-stricken guy, lost and seemingly passionless, mulling over a failed affair with a friend’s wife who has moved on to another African town.
Taking a period of Leave Sanders decides to visit his former lover, and takes a long journey upriver that had me hearing echoes of Colonel Kurtz’s mutterings in the distance. Once he arrive in the desired town he begins to notice that not all is well – there are strange happenings afoot, a strange atmosphere that seems to warp the light all around the settlement.
He encounters some strange characters and a young French journalist, soon uncovering that the nearby forest has begun to exhibit strange phenomena, producing crystallized plant sculptures of exquisite beauty.
He and the journalist (who is now another lover for him to generally feel listless and uncommitted about) travel further upriver (“The Horro….” Wrong novel - shut up, Kurtz!) to a mining site where Sanders friends are based.
On arrival they learn that the forest is slowly crystallizing – turning everything in it into a living crystal sculpture, and spreading rapidly, along with several other similar areas around the globe.
The process seems inexorable, and it becomes clear early on that it is very likely that the whole earth will eventually be crystallized, and that our protagonist, if anything, is going to be relieved by the prospect of his imminent end.
And so it goes from here. There’s more to it, of course. The spread of the forest is revealed and Ballard elegantly describes its beautiful horror. There’s conflict, and some crazy people fighting over a woman among the crystal trees.
Overall though, despite Ballard’s ability to make his world real, to evoke the African town and its people, to show us the fear and the lure of the crystal world, the feeling of unavoidable doom made this novel a little dull. There’s never any real question as to whether Sanders is even going to try to survive, or that his zest for living will be rekindled. He pinballs from scene to scene with his ultimate destiny always clear and always unchanging.
The explanation for the crystallizing also left me cold - something to do with time being a finite resource, and as it is used elsewhere it runs out here, causing our galaxy to become static and frozen. There’s a leprosy analogy in here somewhere as that disease comes up a few times, but I wasn’t engaged enough with the novel to really work at spotting it. I simply pressed on towards my my own dull fate – plodding forward and finishing The Crystal World without really feeling any spark of enjoyment, unconsciously mimicking Edward Sanders’ fictional trajectory.
Despite its faults this book (published in 1966) may have later inspired more interesting works. The films Monsters and Annihilation, both of which feature an alien ‘zone’ spreading across the earth with terrifying consequences, play with similar ideas more effectively. And of course the Strutgaskys’ ‘Roadside Picnic’ - where strange alien zones filled with weird effects are dotted around the world - is a Science Fiction classic.
Overall though, this is not a standout book. Perhaps The Crystal World would have had more of an impact if I hadn’t already read The Drowned World and The Drought, but having done so this story felt like an all-too-similar, but inferior work.
Two gasps of ‘The Horror, The Horror’ out of five.
June 23, 2020
Later in his career, J.G. Ballard advised that a writer shouldn't write too many books. I took this to mean that a person can expend their reserve of creativity and end up becoming a pale imitation of themselves. I also gathered that this advice came from Ballard's personal experience.
I haven't read most of his material, but I have dipped into examples from numerous points in his career, and while I agree that his later offerings were rather flat, the problem of diminishing returns can be seen as early as his third apocalyptic novel, The Crystal World, wherein the very Earth around us begins to turn to glass.
The concept of our planet spontaneously transforming to crystal is potentially compelling. The decadent morbidity of it is enough to inspire any writer stuck behind a typewriter. However, Ballard was in the position of having already imagined two other kinds of apocalypses - one brilliantly rendered, the other less so, but both pulsing with lived experience and a perverse desire to journey into the dark.
With The Crystal World, he seems to have exhausted his insight into the threat of human extinction. That leaves him with the surreal imagery of his Daliesque catastrophe to keep the reader interested. Ultimately, it felt like a bit of a superficial affair, with not enough drive behind the characters actions to keep me interested.
Can a writer write too many books? I know that Ballard bounced back from this misfire. Maybe if he lived another decade he would have found another spurt of inspiration.
I haven't read most of his material, but I have dipped into examples from numerous points in his career, and while I agree that his later offerings were rather flat, the problem of diminishing returns can be seen as early as his third apocalyptic novel, The Crystal World, wherein the very Earth around us begins to turn to glass.
The concept of our planet spontaneously transforming to crystal is potentially compelling. The decadent morbidity of it is enough to inspire any writer stuck behind a typewriter. However, Ballard was in the position of having already imagined two other kinds of apocalypses - one brilliantly rendered, the other less so, but both pulsing with lived experience and a perverse desire to journey into the dark.
With The Crystal World, he seems to have exhausted his insight into the threat of human extinction. That leaves him with the surreal imagery of his Daliesque catastrophe to keep the reader interested. Ultimately, it felt like a bit of a superficial affair, with not enough drive behind the characters actions to keep me interested.
Can a writer write too many books? I know that Ballard bounced back from this misfire. Maybe if he lived another decade he would have found another spurt of inspiration.
October 9, 2015
The Crystal World: Time and death are defeated as crystallization takes over
Originally posted at Fantasy Literature
The Crystal World (1966) is J.G. Ballard’s third apocalyptic work in which he destroys civilization, the other two being The Burning World (1964) and The Drowned World (1962). It seems he likes the elements, having employed floods, draughts, and now crystallization. The process somewhat resembles Ice-9 in Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle (1963), but there is no ironic humor to be found in this book as far I could tell. In The Drowned World, the flooding of the world was used as a metaphor for diving deep into the collective racial memories of the Triassic-age, when dinosaurs ruled the Earth. This time, Ballard posits a mysterious crystallization process in the forests of Gabon, which slowly transforms everything around it into organic crystals, including plants, minerals, and living creatures.
The crystal trees among them were hung with glass-like trellises of moss. The air was markedly cooler, as if everything was sheathed in ice, but a ceaseless play of light poured through the canopy overhead. The process of crystallization was more advanced. The fences along the road were so encrusted that they formed a continuous palisade, a white frost at least six inches thick on either side of the palings. The few houses between the trees glistened like wedding cakes, white roofs and chimneys transformed into exotic minarets and baroque domes. On a lawn of green glass spurs, a child’s tricycle gleamed like a Faberge gem, the wheels starred into brilliant jasper crowns.
He had entered an endless subterranean cavern, where jeweled rocks loomed out of the spectral gloom like marine plants, the sprays of glass forming white fountains. Several times he crossed and recrossed the road. The spurs were almost waist-high, and he was forced to climb over the brittle stems. Once, as he rested against the trunk of a bifurcated oak, an immense multi-colored bird erupted from a bough over his head, and flew off with a wild screech, aureoles of light cascading from its red and yellow wings. At last the storm subsided, and a pale light filtered through the stained-glass canopy. Again, the forest was a place of rainbows, a deep, iridescent light glowing from within.
The main character is Edward Sanders, a British doctor trying to reach a leprosy facility deep in the jungles of Africa. Surprise surprise, he takes a journey upriver and encounters various dark natives as well as some corrupt white men intent on pursuing their own agendas. Does this sound at all familiar? It’s an overt tribute to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899), but unfortunately The Crystal World does not add anything to that seminal symbolic journey. Dr. Sanders repeatedly questions his own motivations to join his friends at the leprosy facility, wondering whether his intentions are truly altruistic, or whether he is strangely drawn to the disease.
As he encounters parts of the forest that are starting to crystallize, he sees that some of the lepers are drawn to it as a way to slow the progress of the disease and to cheat death. Other characters, even though outwardly healthy, seem to also embrace this process due to their repressed emotional lives. Ballard juxtaposes the opposing forces of leprosy (representing decay and entropy) and crystallization (stopping time and death, a symbol of eternity and perfection). He then expounds on a mind-bending and probably incoherent description of time, matter, anti-matter, and distant universes to explain the mysterious crystallization process:
But it is still only a year since the Mt. Palomar astronomers discovered the first double-galaxy in the Andromeda galaxy, the great oblate diadem that is probably the most beautiful object in the physical universe, the island galaxy M-31. Without doubt, these random transfigurations throughout the world are a reflection of distant cosmic processes of enormous scope and dimensions first glimpsed in the Andromeda spiral. We now know that it is time, time with a Midas touch, which is responsible for the transformation. The recent discovery of anti-matter in the universe inevitably involves the conception of anti-time as the fourth side of this negatively-charged continuum. Where anti-particle and particle collide, they not only destroy their own physical identities, but their opposing time values eliminate each other, subtracting from the universe another quantum from its total share of time.
It is random discharges of this type, set off by the creation of anti-galaxies in space, which have led to the depletion of the time store available to the materials of our own solar system. Just as a super-saturated solution will discharge itself into a crystalline mass, so the super-saturation of our solar system leads to its appearance in a parallel spatial matrix. As more and more time leaks away, the process of super-saturation continues, the original atoms and molecules producing spatial replicas of themselves, substance without mass, in an attempt to increase their foothold upon existence. The process is theoretically without end, and it may be possible for a single atom to produce an infinite number of duplicates of itself, and so fill the entire universe, from which simultaneously all time is expired, an ultimate macrocosmic zero beyond the wildest dreams of Plato and Democritus.
Despite the languid, hallucinatory descriptions of crystallization, time, and space, the events that occur to Dr. Sanders as he journeys up the river have a curiously flat, empty quality to them. Because Ballard’s stories are not filled with excitement or sympathetic characters, it is difficult to become engaged unless you allow the imagery and limpid storytelling to creep into your unconscious mind. That’s why, when I first listened to both The Drowned World and The Crystal World on audiobook, I was somewhat disappointed. But because they are both under 6 hours, and because David Pringle praised both profusely and selected them for his Science Fiction: The 100 Best Novels (1985), I listened a second time to give them my full attention. I found The Drowned World to be much better, and I was duly impressed.
On the other hand, even after a second listen, The Crystal World left me cold and detached. Although his descriptive writing was still impressive at times, Ballard spent far too much time on the pointless interactions of the main characters. It’s interesting to note that in Ballard’s personal life, between the publication of The Drowned World in 1962 and The Crystal World in 1966, he suffered the tragedy of suddenly losing his wife to pneumonia in 1964. It’s impossible to know exactly what affect that had on his writing, but it must have impacted his life profoundly, since he was then left to raise their three children on his own. It’s always tricky to speculate how an author’s life is reflected in their work, but I certainly detected an emotional detachment in the character of Dr. Sanders, and his involvement with other people.
Notably, Ballard began to write the experimental ‘condensed novels’ in 1965 that were collected as The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), a book that was so controversial that Nelson Doubleday had the entire first US printing destroyed out of concerns for legal action, since stories had titles like “Plans for the Assassination of Jacqueline Kennedy,” “Love and Napalm: Export USA,” and “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan.” Suffice to say he was working through some major issues through his writing, but I suspect that it was more the events of the time, namely the assassination of JFK and the Vietnam War, that were foremost on his mind.
Nonetheless, The Crystal World remains an interesting read if you are interested in New Wave SF from the 1960s, but for my money I preferred The Drowned World. Since it seems somewhat fitting, I’ll end with Robert Frost’s famous poem Fire and Ice:
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
Originally posted at Fantasy Literature
The Crystal World (1966) is J.G. Ballard’s third apocalyptic work in which he destroys civilization, the other two being The Burning World (1964) and The Drowned World (1962). It seems he likes the elements, having employed floods, draughts, and now crystallization. The process somewhat resembles Ice-9 in Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle (1963), but there is no ironic humor to be found in this book as far I could tell. In The Drowned World, the flooding of the world was used as a metaphor for diving deep into the collective racial memories of the Triassic-age, when dinosaurs ruled the Earth. This time, Ballard posits a mysterious crystallization process in the forests of Gabon, which slowly transforms everything around it into organic crystals, including plants, minerals, and living creatures.
The crystal trees among them were hung with glass-like trellises of moss. The air was markedly cooler, as if everything was sheathed in ice, but a ceaseless play of light poured through the canopy overhead. The process of crystallization was more advanced. The fences along the road were so encrusted that they formed a continuous palisade, a white frost at least six inches thick on either side of the palings. The few houses between the trees glistened like wedding cakes, white roofs and chimneys transformed into exotic minarets and baroque domes. On a lawn of green glass spurs, a child’s tricycle gleamed like a Faberge gem, the wheels starred into brilliant jasper crowns.
He had entered an endless subterranean cavern, where jeweled rocks loomed out of the spectral gloom like marine plants, the sprays of glass forming white fountains. Several times he crossed and recrossed the road. The spurs were almost waist-high, and he was forced to climb over the brittle stems. Once, as he rested against the trunk of a bifurcated oak, an immense multi-colored bird erupted from a bough over his head, and flew off with a wild screech, aureoles of light cascading from its red and yellow wings. At last the storm subsided, and a pale light filtered through the stained-glass canopy. Again, the forest was a place of rainbows, a deep, iridescent light glowing from within.
The main character is Edward Sanders, a British doctor trying to reach a leprosy facility deep in the jungles of Africa. Surprise surprise, he takes a journey upriver and encounters various dark natives as well as some corrupt white men intent on pursuing their own agendas. Does this sound at all familiar? It’s an overt tribute to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899), but unfortunately The Crystal World does not add anything to that seminal symbolic journey. Dr. Sanders repeatedly questions his own motivations to join his friends at the leprosy facility, wondering whether his intentions are truly altruistic, or whether he is strangely drawn to the disease.
As he encounters parts of the forest that are starting to crystallize, he sees that some of the lepers are drawn to it as a way to slow the progress of the disease and to cheat death. Other characters, even though outwardly healthy, seem to also embrace this process due to their repressed emotional lives. Ballard juxtaposes the opposing forces of leprosy (representing decay and entropy) and crystallization (stopping time and death, a symbol of eternity and perfection). He then expounds on a mind-bending and probably incoherent description of time, matter, anti-matter, and distant universes to explain the mysterious crystallization process:
But it is still only a year since the Mt. Palomar astronomers discovered the first double-galaxy in the Andromeda galaxy, the great oblate diadem that is probably the most beautiful object in the physical universe, the island galaxy M-31. Without doubt, these random transfigurations throughout the world are a reflection of distant cosmic processes of enormous scope and dimensions first glimpsed in the Andromeda spiral. We now know that it is time, time with a Midas touch, which is responsible for the transformation. The recent discovery of anti-matter in the universe inevitably involves the conception of anti-time as the fourth side of this negatively-charged continuum. Where anti-particle and particle collide, they not only destroy their own physical identities, but their opposing time values eliminate each other, subtracting from the universe another quantum from its total share of time.
It is random discharges of this type, set off by the creation of anti-galaxies in space, which have led to the depletion of the time store available to the materials of our own solar system. Just as a super-saturated solution will discharge itself into a crystalline mass, so the super-saturation of our solar system leads to its appearance in a parallel spatial matrix. As more and more time leaks away, the process of super-saturation continues, the original atoms and molecules producing spatial replicas of themselves, substance without mass, in an attempt to increase their foothold upon existence. The process is theoretically without end, and it may be possible for a single atom to produce an infinite number of duplicates of itself, and so fill the entire universe, from which simultaneously all time is expired, an ultimate macrocosmic zero beyond the wildest dreams of Plato and Democritus.
Despite the languid, hallucinatory descriptions of crystallization, time, and space, the events that occur to Dr. Sanders as he journeys up the river have a curiously flat, empty quality to them. Because Ballard’s stories are not filled with excitement or sympathetic characters, it is difficult to become engaged unless you allow the imagery and limpid storytelling to creep into your unconscious mind. That’s why, when I first listened to both The Drowned World and The Crystal World on audiobook, I was somewhat disappointed. But because they are both under 6 hours, and because David Pringle praised both profusely and selected them for his Science Fiction: The 100 Best Novels (1985), I listened a second time to give them my full attention. I found The Drowned World to be much better, and I was duly impressed.
On the other hand, even after a second listen, The Crystal World left me cold and detached. Although his descriptive writing was still impressive at times, Ballard spent far too much time on the pointless interactions of the main characters. It’s interesting to note that in Ballard’s personal life, between the publication of The Drowned World in 1962 and The Crystal World in 1966, he suffered the tragedy of suddenly losing his wife to pneumonia in 1964. It’s impossible to know exactly what affect that had on his writing, but it must have impacted his life profoundly, since he was then left to raise their three children on his own. It’s always tricky to speculate how an author’s life is reflected in their work, but I certainly detected an emotional detachment in the character of Dr. Sanders, and his involvement with other people.
Notably, Ballard began to write the experimental ‘condensed novels’ in 1965 that were collected as The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), a book that was so controversial that Nelson Doubleday had the entire first US printing destroyed out of concerns for legal action, since stories had titles like “Plans for the Assassination of Jacqueline Kennedy,” “Love and Napalm: Export USA,” and “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan.” Suffice to say he was working through some major issues through his writing, but I suspect that it was more the events of the time, namely the assassination of JFK and the Vietnam War, that were foremost on his mind.
Nonetheless, The Crystal World remains an interesting read if you are interested in New Wave SF from the 1960s, but for my money I preferred The Drowned World. Since it seems somewhat fitting, I’ll end with Robert Frost’s famous poem Fire and Ice:
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
December 29, 2009
JG Ballard’s The Crystal World is a mindbending book that, by the last page, I was glad to end.
The premise is fascinating; out of nowhere jungles across the globe begin to crystallize. The crystallization slowly spreads, enveloping everything in its path, including animals, buildings, and people. Ballard is enamored with describing the silent, alien landscape inherent in the crystal zone, definitely to the point where the jungle becomes a character and possibly to the point of overkill. The novel focuses on a doctor from a leprosy clinic searching for his former lover who may or may not be caught in the crystal zone. He meets a journalist, a strange priest, and, uh, an adventurer-type (not sure what else to call him) just outside the forest and connects and disconnects with each as he delves deeper into the jungle.
The Crystal World reads like Ballard’s version of Heart of Darkness except the jungle appears to balance on the cusp between crepuscule* and blinding light. Characters dwell in the same regions (symbolically too, of course) and can get lost in either area. My main problem with the book was the fact the crystal jungle is so overwhelming the characters can seem stock and half-drawn. At one point a couple characters just…fuck. I would probably not have noticed if they didn’t reference the act later. I could see why Ballard wanted them to fuck but the sex seemed more like a plot device than anything authentic. Oh, and Ballard includes cool space/time metaphysics that flew way over my head.
I can see why people like Neil Gaiman and William Gibson love Ballard. He writes tight, detached prose that fits his subject matter. I’ll read more of his material, probably Crash, this spring. Tadpole says The Crystal World isn’t one of Ballard’s major works and I’m curious enough to delve into his other books. This novel will stick with me but I didn’t love it.
* Thanks, thesaurus.com!
The premise is fascinating; out of nowhere jungles across the globe begin to crystallize. The crystallization slowly spreads, enveloping everything in its path, including animals, buildings, and people. Ballard is enamored with describing the silent, alien landscape inherent in the crystal zone, definitely to the point where the jungle becomes a character and possibly to the point of overkill. The novel focuses on a doctor from a leprosy clinic searching for his former lover who may or may not be caught in the crystal zone. He meets a journalist, a strange priest, and, uh, an adventurer-type (not sure what else to call him) just outside the forest and connects and disconnects with each as he delves deeper into the jungle.
The Crystal World reads like Ballard’s version of Heart of Darkness except the jungle appears to balance on the cusp between crepuscule* and blinding light. Characters dwell in the same regions (symbolically too, of course) and can get lost in either area. My main problem with the book was the fact the crystal jungle is so overwhelming the characters can seem stock and half-drawn. At one point a couple characters just…fuck. I would probably not have noticed if they didn’t reference the act later. I could see why Ballard wanted them to fuck but the sex seemed more like a plot device than anything authentic. Oh, and Ballard includes cool space/time metaphysics that flew way over my head.
I can see why people like Neil Gaiman and William Gibson love Ballard. He writes tight, detached prose that fits his subject matter. I’ll read more of his material, probably Crash, this spring. Tadpole says The Crystal World isn’t one of Ballard’s major works and I’m curious enough to delve into his other books. This novel will stick with me but I didn’t love it.
* Thanks, thesaurus.com!
April 19, 2023
"As it faded the dark canopy of the jungle flickered with a million points of light. Beside him Louise’s white body glittered in a sheath of diamonds, the black surface of the river below spangled like the back of a sleeping snake."
It reads a bit like proto-Ballard (which makes sense).. it doesn't quite go fully over the top as his later writing does. There are several points in the story where I expected Ballard to get caught, and drill down on the madness, but he never really does. The monomania I associate with his writing sort of pops up in the last chapter, and I think later Ballard maybe would've shifted the story to what is described there.
I think Ballard had a fascination with jewels - one of the short stories in Vermillion Sands creates the striking image of (living) insects (scorpions etc) with small jewels glued on them. This book is, of course, full of such beautifully described and striking images.
It reads a bit like proto-Ballard (which makes sense).. it doesn't quite go fully over the top as his later writing does. There are several points in the story where I expected Ballard to get caught, and drill down on the madness, but he never really does. The monomania I associate with his writing sort of pops up in the last chapter, and I think later Ballard maybe would've shifted the story to what is described there.
I think Ballard had a fascination with jewels - one of the short stories in Vermillion Sands creates the striking image of (living) insects (scorpions etc) with small jewels glued on them. This book is, of course, full of such beautifully described and striking images.
April 10, 2022
Either I have an oversaturation problem with Ballard, or this early mineral-based adventure novel is supreme cobblers. Either that, or I kept picturing the protagonist Sanders as everyone’s favourite angry and thwarted socialist presidential candidate, which rather distracted me from the uninteresting story. Either way, this is the worst J.G. in existence.
November 23, 2016
Ο Ballard είναι περίεργη υπόθεση, το ίδιο και το βιβλίο του αυτό.
Υπερσυμπιεσμένη πλοκή, αντιπαθητικοί χαρακτήρες, περίεργη ανάπτυξη της ιστορίας, αντικλιματικές σκηνές δράσης.
Και όμως, όπως και τα κρύσταλλα του δάσους, υπάρχει στο έργο μία σουρεαλιστική θα έλεγα ομορφιά καθώς ο χρόνος τεντώνεται και σβήνει και καθώς όλα χάνονται σε μία πραγματικότητα έξω από τη δικιά μας, έτσι και η γραφή σου μεταδίδει αυτή την αποκάλυχη που έρχεται αργά, σαν παγετώνας για να καλύψει τα πάντα.
Υπερσυμπιεσμένη πλοκή, αντιπαθητικοί χαρακτήρες, περίεργη ανάπτυξη της ιστορίας, αντικλιματικές σκηνές δράσης.
Και όμως, όπως και τα κρύσταλλα του δάσους, υπάρχει στο έργο μία σουρεαλιστική θα έλεγα ομορφιά καθώς ο χρόνος τεντώνεται και σβήνει και καθώς όλα χάνονται σε μία πραγματικότητα έξω από τη δικιά μας, έτσι και η γραφή σου μεταδίδει αυτή την αποκάλυχη που έρχεται αργά, σαν παγετώνας για να καλύψει τα πάντα.
March 6, 2019
Will review later. Reminds me of several other of Ballard's environmental disaster/transformation novels with a bit of Conrad's Heart of Darkness overlayed for good measure.
October 12, 2007
I found a fossilized chiffon cake in a cave. Ballard popped out of it and I fired at him with my shotgun, setting off a storm of falling stalactites. The sound of them exploding against the cave floor was deafening, but that's not what stunned me. It was the efflorescence of the fractured crystals releasing trapped light and time. I wondered if this was all a metaphor for wanting to fuck one of my literary heroes.
"You know, overall, you're not really that great of a writer."
"Yes," he said, "But I can describe like a motherfucker. No one can even piss near one of my inventions without turning into a crystal-warted crocodile."
"True," I admitted.
"You know, overall, you're not really that great of a writer."
"Yes," he said, "But I can describe like a motherfucker. No one can even piss near one of my inventions without turning into a crystal-warted crocodile."
"True," I admitted.
February 26, 2015
60s adventure pulp trash. So many things are wrong with this book. In it, you'll find the sexism and racism you'd expect from this era and this genre. The main character is a dull block of wood with no personality, almost a complete lack of motivation, and no visible character arc. The supporting cast are all one-dimensional.
It even fails as science fiction: the main idea is that somehow (?) some kind of time crystals are forming in a jungle somewhere, the author waves his hands about this representing some primordial something or other, and the whole things ends with almost no purpose except to make the main character say some "poetic" things. As science fiction, this reads like a rejected Star Trek script.
That's the final straw: the main draw for this book seems to be its prose and the poetry in the description of the "crystal world", and I'm here to tell you that it's not any good. I never thought being led through a forest made of crystal and jewels could be so boring.
At some point the author drops any attempt to convey theme through the events of the book and has our main character make a half-hearted attempt at finding a vague theme of duality in the events of the book. It's clunky and awkward.
In summary: incompetently created characters meets third-rate science fiction meets the worst habits of early 20th century literature.
It even fails as science fiction: the main idea is that somehow (?) some kind of time crystals are forming in a jungle somewhere, the author waves his hands about this representing some primordial something or other, and the whole things ends with almost no purpose except to make the main character say some "poetic" things. As science fiction, this reads like a rejected Star Trek script.
That's the final straw: the main draw for this book seems to be its prose and the poetry in the description of the "crystal world", and I'm here to tell you that it's not any good. I never thought being led through a forest made of crystal and jewels could be so boring.
At some point the author drops any attempt to convey theme through the events of the book and has our main character make a half-hearted attempt at finding a vague theme of duality in the events of the book. It's clunky and awkward.
In summary: incompetently created characters meets third-rate science fiction meets the worst habits of early 20th century literature.
August 4, 2022
Definitely a much more easy going Ballard book, so I'm certain it must be one of his earliest works. Certainly very enjoyable but feels less uniquely like an art piece and more like just a decent concept.
October 9, 2016
Perhaps my favorite Ballard novel so far, the most impressive element being the endless variety of descriptions of this crystallizing jungle in the heart of Africa. Ballard is one of the few writers I've encountered who can utilize descriptive language to its full effect, without sounding like he wrote with the thesaurus open on his lap, and without sounding kitschy. The prose mesmerizes.
Like his other novels, Ballard is concerned with the effects of modernization on humanity, and how it dehumanizes society by driving us toward our most base, anti-social instincts. The Crystal World illustrates a world where individuals separate themselves from time and each other, through the slow, replicative process of crystallization, and, of course, the individuals of this novel (cardboard cutouts mostly, as that is Ballard's way, in order to exaggerate the anti-social consequences) are drawn even deeper into the jungle and their own crystallized solace, most often exemplified in the wearing of sunglasses, the push-pull nature of relationships, and the twinned relationships of some of the characters.
Much like Conrad's Heart of Darkness, this novel is uncomfortable in the way it uses Africa as a setting to demonstrate the inhumane nature of imperialistic culture, which is never signaled or winked at to demonstrate awareness, so, without prior exposure to Heart of Darkness, some readers might not realize what he's doing. That said, it is fair to criticize Ballard's tendency to use Africa (and race relations) in this way, especially when it often feels like he is both reaffirming stereotypes, and othering/dehumanizing the primary population of the setting.
Like his other novels, Ballard is concerned with the effects of modernization on humanity, and how it dehumanizes society by driving us toward our most base, anti-social instincts. The Crystal World illustrates a world where individuals separate themselves from time and each other, through the slow, replicative process of crystallization, and, of course, the individuals of this novel (cardboard cutouts mostly, as that is Ballard's way, in order to exaggerate the anti-social consequences) are drawn even deeper into the jungle and their own crystallized solace, most often exemplified in the wearing of sunglasses, the push-pull nature of relationships, and the twinned relationships of some of the characters.
Much like Conrad's Heart of Darkness, this novel is uncomfortable in the way it uses Africa as a setting to demonstrate the inhumane nature of imperialistic culture, which is never signaled or winked at to demonstrate awareness, so, without prior exposure to Heart of Darkness, some readers might not realize what he's doing. That said, it is fair to criticize Ballard's tendency to use Africa (and race relations) in this way, especially when it often feels like he is both reaffirming stereotypes, and othering/dehumanizing the primary population of the setting.
July 27, 2019
El doctor Edward Sanders trabaja en la leprosería de Fort Isabelle, en África. Se ha tomado unos días para visitar a sus amigos Max y Suzanne Claire, también doctores. Sobre todo quiere ver a esta última, con la que tuvo una relación. Pero para llegar a Port Royale, donde residen, tendrá que pasar por un fenómeno que está afectando a la selva y sus habitantes: todo se está cristalizando. Resulta fascinante cómo describe Ballard este paisaje, bello pero al mismo tiempo de pesadilla. Y es que el autor se centra más bien en los personajes y cómo se enfrentan al fenómeno, de manera que descubrimos en entorno con ellos. No es una novela de acción, sino de personajes.
‘El mundo de cristal’ (The Crystal World, 1966), del británico J.G. Ballard, es una muy buena novela de ciencia ficción catastrófica, por calificarla de alguna manera. Sin embargo, como había leído previamente el relato El hombre iluminado, escrito en 1964, y que sirve de germen de la presente novela, no me ha sorprendido tanto.
‘El mundo de cristal’ (The Crystal World, 1966), del británico J.G. Ballard, es una muy buena novela de ciencia ficción catastrófica, por calificarla de alguna manera. Sin embargo, como había leído previamente el relato El hombre iluminado, escrito en 1964, y que sirve de germen de la presente novela, no me ha sorprendido tanto.
March 25, 2016
Legendarily inspired by a boat ride through the Everglades on hallucinogens, this is a novel driven primarily by the crystalline clarity of its images. Plot and character wind through the annealed alien formations with the cold delineation and pre-determination of icons in a symbolist frieze. This makes for a rather distanced reading, but the sheer descriptive imagination and conceptual grandeur -- yes, this is a novel about the crystallization of the the entire universe, perhaps a phase shift in the entire organization of matter -- carry it through quite grippingly.
April 6, 2025
Jesus, Mary and the disciples floated on the liquid ultramarine of the refracted sky
We become apostles of the prismatic sun
We become apostles of the prismatic sun
October 27, 2011
Probably the best of the Ballard "elemental apocalypse" quartet (or it ties with The Drowned World at least). Once again, it's Ballard taking apart Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and reassembling it as a post-modern tale of apocalypse and humanity's failings - a journey up river through an African jungle slowly being encroached on, and transformed into, crystal. Time itself is the cause - like a dissolved material reaching maximum load in a solution, it begins to precipitate out into spacetime, slowing the world in stasis and accretion. Ballard's dry, surgical/psychological take on characters is here (too distanced for some, seemingly), as well as some visionary, surrealistic sights strongly conveyed. Worth your time.
January 6, 2024
With this novel Ballard completed his "disaster trilogy" investigating the interaction between landscape and the psyche. Starting with the limpid lagoons of The Drowned World on to the arid sandscapes of The Drought and, here, completed by the bejewelled jungles of The Crystal World.
His next novel is probably his most experimental, The Atrocity Exhibition.
His next novel is probably his most experimental, The Atrocity Exhibition.
September 9, 2025
Check out my full, spoiler free, video review HERE.
A doctor heads back to a jungle in Africa to rejoin some friends who are tending to a leper colony. The locals are hesitant to give him passage back to this particular area of the jungle due to a strange crystallization that is occurring. This is a fantastic adventure novel mixed with surreal and descriptive passages of this strange phenomenon. It’s a short novel so Ballard doesn’t dive deep into the characters but I was still engaged and entertained the whole way through.
A doctor heads back to a jungle in Africa to rejoin some friends who are tending to a leper colony. The locals are hesitant to give him passage back to this particular area of the jungle due to a strange crystallization that is occurring. This is a fantastic adventure novel mixed with surreal and descriptive passages of this strange phenomenon. It’s a short novel so Ballard doesn’t dive deep into the characters but I was still engaged and entertained the whole way through.
August 24, 2024
Surreal like PKD. Mysterious like Cussler. Dark like Lovecraft.
September 17, 2021
"It's as if a sequence of displaced but identical images of the same object were being produced by refraction through a prism, but with the element of time replacing the role of light."
Ballard's first few novels all share the theme of various kinds of apocalypses and how people cope with them. The Drought has an obvious theme, desertification, and The Drowned World a very familiar one: ocean level rise. The Crystal World is a little less familiar, but is actually the more horrifying of the three: a crystalline eruption taking over all matter of life on Earth. What this actually means is never very clear, but can perhaps be best summarized by the quote above, a character's attempt to describe the theory behind the outbreak. It has something to do with time and time and space being compressed together in a way that it refracts itself and basically covers every atom around it in self-perpetuating crystal forms. The way Ballard describes this is horrifying in a way that shocks for its startling weirdness. The frame of the story is a doctor from a leper colony trying to reach his friends (one of them his mistress) who are trapped in the African jungle. The crystal takeover is at the apex since the mistress has become obsessed with the crystal's ability to basically erase time and meaning for you. People lay down voluntarily in its path to become cocooned in wondrous crystalline sleep. Birds and crocodiles are enmeshed in its quiet disease. Succumbing to the prismatic coma gives a whole new meaning to 'enlightenment' and is at the heart of Ballard's horror story as the doctor tries to flee the crystalline epidemic and help his friends. Very weird, I loved it!
Ballard's first few novels all share the theme of various kinds of apocalypses and how people cope with them. The Drought has an obvious theme, desertification, and The Drowned World a very familiar one: ocean level rise. The Crystal World is a little less familiar, but is actually the more horrifying of the three: a crystalline eruption taking over all matter of life on Earth. What this actually means is never very clear, but can perhaps be best summarized by the quote above, a character's attempt to describe the theory behind the outbreak. It has something to do with time and time and space being compressed together in a way that it refracts itself and basically covers every atom around it in self-perpetuating crystal forms. The way Ballard describes this is horrifying in a way that shocks for its startling weirdness. The frame of the story is a doctor from a leper colony trying to reach his friends (one of them his mistress) who are trapped in the African jungle. The crystal takeover is at the apex since the mistress has become obsessed with the crystal's ability to basically erase time and meaning for you. People lay down voluntarily in its path to become cocooned in wondrous crystalline sleep. Birds and crocodiles are enmeshed in its quiet disease. Succumbing to the prismatic coma gives a whole new meaning to 'enlightenment' and is at the heart of Ballard's horror story as the doctor tries to flee the crystalline epidemic and help his friends. Very weird, I loved it!
July 7, 2025
This book follows a doctor travelling into the deep jungles of Cameroon to seek out a former colleague and his wife, who he had a secret affair with. When arriving at the port town on the outskirts of the forest, he discovers that there is some sort of spreading affliction within an ambiguous 'zone'. With his destination lying within this area and the bridges to it closed, he charters a boat along the river. You're immediately put in mind of Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness', which Ballard is playing on throughout this novel.
The affliction in question is a crystallisation of all things within the zone, including the plants, the animals, the soil and the water. Ballard uses this premise to construct an extremely atmospheric and otherworldly sense of place, with glittering structures that seem to absorb and emit light in strange ways.
I didn't expect this book to be as action-packed as it was, which I think hurts it in the end. These sequences are well-described, but they get a little repetitive. That also extends to the copious descriptions of this crystalline world, which Ballard exhausts by the end of the book. This is the second book that I've read from him after 'The Drowned World', which I think I preferred overall. If I could give it a 3.5*, I would.
The affliction in question is a crystallisation of all things within the zone, including the plants, the animals, the soil and the water. Ballard uses this premise to construct an extremely atmospheric and otherworldly sense of place, with glittering structures that seem to absorb and emit light in strange ways.
I didn't expect this book to be as action-packed as it was, which I think hurts it in the end. These sequences are well-described, but they get a little repetitive. That also extends to the copious descriptions of this crystalline world, which Ballard exhausts by the end of the book. This is the second book that I've read from him after 'The Drowned World', which I think I preferred overall. If I could give it a 3.5*, I would.
January 11, 2025
Найкраще тут - це пара листів із роздумами героя, які мають ледь не лавкрафтіанський присмак. Решта - цікава ідея, але не чіпляє.
May 3, 2021
Ballard is still difficult for me. I find the background idea in this book interesting, even if the explanation for why it's happening comes across as complete bullshit, that can be fine for SF, and in this case it's... fine. The characters in this book are not the compete assholes that I've become accustom to in his novels. As usual, Ballard is way more concerned about the intricate details of their lives and interactions with each other but the world does have a substantial impact on events, and the characters are forced to respond to the bizarre events. I had lots of questions about what was really going on with the crystallization, and the spreading thereof, and the connection to astronomical changes, but as usual Ballard likes to leave all that as vague as possible.
Of course Ballard is an excellent writer, with a rich vocabulary and is skilled at nuanced descriptions.
So I give this one 4 for the writing, and 3 for how much I enjoyed it, and I round up.
Of course Ballard is an excellent writer, with a rich vocabulary and is skilled at nuanced descriptions.
So I give this one 4 for the writing, and 3 for how much I enjoyed it, and I round up.
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