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The Venus Hunters
J.G. Ballard. The Venus Hunters. London: Gollancz, 1986. First hardcover edition, first printing. Octavo. 142 pages.
144 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1980
About the author
J.G. Ballard
498 books4,261 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 - 13 of 13 reviews
March 20, 2022
'Now: Zero' is a story reminiscent of Phillip K. Dick, in which a low-ranking company man discovers his power to kill people, starting with his career superiors, by writing down the nature of their death. The narrator is my favorite kind of Ballard protagonist, unreliable due to his own lack of insight, socially and psychologically impotent with delusions of self-importance. A decent story with a great, fatalistic twist ending.
'The Time Tombs' is Ballard at his brilliant best, a surrealist landscape voluminously rendered as to never feel implausible. Set in a vast sand-sea where thousands of generations lie buried in the form of digitally coded holograms in a cryonic-necropolis, a group of outcasts raid the dunes for the valuable spools of tape on which these corpses consciousnesses are encoded, hoping to strike big and sell enough tape to get out of this endless desert while evading the 'time wardens' who guard the tombs. The protagonist discovers tombs of hitherto unknown antiquity and becomes enthralled by one in particular, the hologram of a winged woman with an indelible, uncanny visage. The themes which run through every story of this collection, time, mortality and a meaningless universe, crystallize here without explication, like a dream. Ballards optimistic nihilism, here as in his later story 'The Deep End', suggests that we should believe in something and stick to it at all costs, even if we know it not to be true.
'Track 12' is a short, bitter little story about infidelity revenged. It reminds me strongly of H.G. Wells' 'The Cone.' Like that story there's not much to chew on here intellectually, it's the vividness and lucidity of the descriptive writing that make it a banger.
'Passport to Eternity' is a dud, one of Ballard's early works where his style is looser and less refined, with lots of "quirky" writing at odds with the sterile tone of his best work, as well as ordinary sci-fi genre trappings like aliens and other planets which his mature work does away with entirely. Skippable.
'Escapement' is about a man discovering he is a time loop which is shortening in duration with each repeat. A clever story with strong writing, although like the loop itself the narrative seems to go nowhere and ends up running a few pages too long.
'Time of Passage' is a Benjamin Button style conceit where people begin life being dug out of their graves, withered and elderly, go through retirement years, then fatten into comfortable middle age, before graduating into vigorous career-hood, messy college years, back to school and finally retreating to the womb. From a synopsis alone this sounds like a contrived, sentimental story that I would usually skip (like 'Benjamin Button' itself, actually) but the writing never hits a false note in its effortless equivocation of birth and death, time and mortality. By any other author this would be pure cliche, and it is testament to Ballards unique insight that he makes something so fresh and genuinely unsettling out of the premise.
'The Venus Hunters' is the best written work of serious fiction on the subject of UFOs and the people that study them. Granted I haven't read much fiction on the topic but of what I have it stands far above the closest competition, Ian Watsons 'Miracle Visitors,' covering the same territory as that full-length novel in a sprightly 30 pages, and with a lingering poignancy that this 'low-brow' subject matter might not immediately suggest.
If you saw something impossible, something which you knew couldn't possibly exist yet was sitting right in front of you, what would you do? Moreover, what could you do, living with the knowledge of the impossible, with first-hand experience of the non-existent? Certainly you couldn't expect to convince anyone, outside of the patently delusional, and doing so would be to mark yourself out from normal society, from real life itself in a way. Such as the predicament faced by the stories protagonist Dr. Ward and by Charles Kandinski, the sincere, lucid man whose chance encounter with a flying saucer has revealed depths of cosmic insight which he can scarcely comprehend. Ward and his colleagues at the Vernon Observatory initially tolerate the outsider science practiced by Kandinski and his UFOlogist followers, but as Ward becomes increasingly alert to the genuine nature of Kandinski's sighting his reality, too, is thrown into disarray. This is less a work of science fiction in the sense most UFO scholars would like (the UFO in question remains indeterminate, identifiable neither as a real nuts-and-bolt Venusian spaceship nor a psycho-social visionary experience) but an existential work of social fiction which works thanks to the grounded empathy and consideration Ballard has for his characters in their impossible situation - as, to paraphrase Bill Ayers, "every reality is impossible until it is inevitable."
'The Killing Ground' is one of several stories Ballard wrote in which the Vietnam war spills over into WW3, with American military occupation in the 'backwater isles' of the U.K. challenged only by ragtag British guerillas and ineffectual American activists. Reading this story in the wake of the ongoing Russia-Ukraine situation, with the blatantly biased media reportage emphasizing how these people are "just like us" - that is, white and blue eyed, more or less approximate to Western 'middle-class' cultural standards - in stark contrast to the equivocal attitude shown when the Kurdish, Syrians, Iraqis, Afghans, Venezuelans, Palestinians (and so on) are at the receiving end of brutal military occupations, demonstrates how relevant this scathing story remains. Ballard's war stories are among the best in the genre, with his formative experience growing up in a Shanghai prisoner of war camp during WW2 informing a wealth of detailed little observations about wartime which a writer drawing purely from the news and imagination would be unlikely to hit upon.
'One Afternoon at Utah Beach' is a low-key effort hinging on a twist ending which most readers will see coming a mile away. Ballard on autopilot.
'The 60 Minute Zoom' is a rightly acclaimed classic which anticipates the style which would come to define Ballards later work. The science fiction element here is actually existing technology in the form of a micro-lens camera rig, just as 'Crash' and 'Concrete Island' make sci-fi out of cars, motorways and traffic islands. Just as those novels reduce the subject entirely before the primacy of the object, this story of a voyeuristic husband slowly zooming in on his unfaithful wife as he prepares to film her murder, effortlessly blurs the lines so that we can hardly recognize the agency of either human as any more free-willed than that of the automated camera itself. Excellent story to cap off a solid collection.
'The Time Tombs' is Ballard at his brilliant best, a surrealist landscape voluminously rendered as to never feel implausible. Set in a vast sand-sea where thousands of generations lie buried in the form of digitally coded holograms in a cryonic-necropolis, a group of outcasts raid the dunes for the valuable spools of tape on which these corpses consciousnesses are encoded, hoping to strike big and sell enough tape to get out of this endless desert while evading the 'time wardens' who guard the tombs. The protagonist discovers tombs of hitherto unknown antiquity and becomes enthralled by one in particular, the hologram of a winged woman with an indelible, uncanny visage. The themes which run through every story of this collection, time, mortality and a meaningless universe, crystallize here without explication, like a dream. Ballards optimistic nihilism, here as in his later story 'The Deep End', suggests that we should believe in something and stick to it at all costs, even if we know it not to be true.
'Track 12' is a short, bitter little story about infidelity revenged. It reminds me strongly of H.G. Wells' 'The Cone.' Like that story there's not much to chew on here intellectually, it's the vividness and lucidity of the descriptive writing that make it a banger.
'Passport to Eternity' is a dud, one of Ballard's early works where his style is looser and less refined, with lots of "quirky" writing at odds with the sterile tone of his best work, as well as ordinary sci-fi genre trappings like aliens and other planets which his mature work does away with entirely. Skippable.
'Escapement' is about a man discovering he is a time loop which is shortening in duration with each repeat. A clever story with strong writing, although like the loop itself the narrative seems to go nowhere and ends up running a few pages too long.
'Time of Passage' is a Benjamin Button style conceit where people begin life being dug out of their graves, withered and elderly, go through retirement years, then fatten into comfortable middle age, before graduating into vigorous career-hood, messy college years, back to school and finally retreating to the womb. From a synopsis alone this sounds like a contrived, sentimental story that I would usually skip (like 'Benjamin Button' itself, actually) but the writing never hits a false note in its effortless equivocation of birth and death, time and mortality. By any other author this would be pure cliche, and it is testament to Ballards unique insight that he makes something so fresh and genuinely unsettling out of the premise.
'The Venus Hunters' is the best written work of serious fiction on the subject of UFOs and the people that study them. Granted I haven't read much fiction on the topic but of what I have it stands far above the closest competition, Ian Watsons 'Miracle Visitors,' covering the same territory as that full-length novel in a sprightly 30 pages, and with a lingering poignancy that this 'low-brow' subject matter might not immediately suggest.
If you saw something impossible, something which you knew couldn't possibly exist yet was sitting right in front of you, what would you do? Moreover, what could you do, living with the knowledge of the impossible, with first-hand experience of the non-existent? Certainly you couldn't expect to convince anyone, outside of the patently delusional, and doing so would be to mark yourself out from normal society, from real life itself in a way. Such as the predicament faced by the stories protagonist Dr. Ward and by Charles Kandinski, the sincere, lucid man whose chance encounter with a flying saucer has revealed depths of cosmic insight which he can scarcely comprehend. Ward and his colleagues at the Vernon Observatory initially tolerate the outsider science practiced by Kandinski and his UFOlogist followers, but as Ward becomes increasingly alert to the genuine nature of Kandinski's sighting his reality, too, is thrown into disarray. This is less a work of science fiction in the sense most UFO scholars would like (the UFO in question remains indeterminate, identifiable neither as a real nuts-and-bolt Venusian spaceship nor a psycho-social visionary experience) but an existential work of social fiction which works thanks to the grounded empathy and consideration Ballard has for his characters in their impossible situation - as, to paraphrase Bill Ayers, "every reality is impossible until it is inevitable."
'The Killing Ground' is one of several stories Ballard wrote in which the Vietnam war spills over into WW3, with American military occupation in the 'backwater isles' of the U.K. challenged only by ragtag British guerillas and ineffectual American activists. Reading this story in the wake of the ongoing Russia-Ukraine situation, with the blatantly biased media reportage emphasizing how these people are "just like us" - that is, white and blue eyed, more or less approximate to Western 'middle-class' cultural standards - in stark contrast to the equivocal attitude shown when the Kurdish, Syrians, Iraqis, Afghans, Venezuelans, Palestinians (and so on) are at the receiving end of brutal military occupations, demonstrates how relevant this scathing story remains. Ballard's war stories are among the best in the genre, with his formative experience growing up in a Shanghai prisoner of war camp during WW2 informing a wealth of detailed little observations about wartime which a writer drawing purely from the news and imagination would be unlikely to hit upon.
'One Afternoon at Utah Beach' is a low-key effort hinging on a twist ending which most readers will see coming a mile away. Ballard on autopilot.
'The 60 Minute Zoom' is a rightly acclaimed classic which anticipates the style which would come to define Ballards later work. The science fiction element here is actually existing technology in the form of a micro-lens camera rig, just as 'Crash' and 'Concrete Island' make sci-fi out of cars, motorways and traffic islands. Just as those novels reduce the subject entirely before the primacy of the object, this story of a voyeuristic husband slowly zooming in on his unfaithful wife as he prepares to film her murder, effortlessly blurs the lines so that we can hardly recognize the agency of either human as any more free-willed than that of the automated camera itself. Excellent story to cap off a solid collection.
January 8, 2025
The Venus Hunters, published in 1980, is not one of J. G. Ballard's earliest collections of short stories, though many of the ten stories gathered therein are among his earliest. The Venus Hunters contains several Ballardian gems reprinted from The Terminal Beach (1964), The Overloaded Man (1967), and The Day of Forever (1971). Only the last two stories, "One Afternoon at Utah Beach" and "The 60 Minute Zone," were not pulled from previous books.
One commonality among several of the stories is Ballard's manipulation of time: "The Time-Tombs" is about tomb-robbers on an alien planet; "Escapement" is about a man caught in a time-loop; in "Time of Passage," people age backwards; and in "One Afternoon at Utah Beach," the protagonist takes on the persona of a long-dead German soldier. I liked all of these, particularly the last.
The title story, "The Venus Hunters" is one of the best. Are the Venusians real or not? We are left guessing. Reality in Ballard's worlds is strangely uncertain. "Passport to Eternity" is another great story, a tongue-in-cheek humourous tale, which is a rarity for Ballard.
The Venus Hunters is classic Ballard, and highly recommended.
One commonality among several of the stories is Ballard's manipulation of time: "The Time-Tombs" is about tomb-robbers on an alien planet; "Escapement" is about a man caught in a time-loop; in "Time of Passage," people age backwards; and in "One Afternoon at Utah Beach," the protagonist takes on the persona of a long-dead German soldier. I liked all of these, particularly the last.
The title story, "The Venus Hunters" is one of the best. Are the Venusians real or not? We are left guessing. Reality in Ballard's worlds is strangely uncertain. "Passport to Eternity" is another great story, a tongue-in-cheek humourous tale, which is a rarity for Ballard.
The Venus Hunters is classic Ballard, and highly recommended.
February 5, 2025
"Do you read science fiction?"
"Not as a rule. Perhaps I'm too sceptical, but I can't take it seriously."
"No one suggests you should. What you mean is that you take it too seriously."
The Venus Hunters collects ten science fiction stories by J.G. Ballard, in which time is of the essence. Time loops into a trap ("Escapement"), runs backwards ("Time of Passage"), confuses past and present ("One Afternoon at Utah Beach"), slows down ("The 60 Minute Zoom") or simply freezes ("The Time-Tombs"), with results in the bizarre range of ironic, bittersweet and macabre.
There's a grim, humorous pettiness to a lot of these stories, many of which share themes of envy and adultery and revenge. De Palma meets Nolan. The "science" is loose and often a gimmick at their service. The best one is probably the title story, which levels science fiction to faith and the need for mystery and belief. Also I'm pretty sure Ballard essentially invented Death Note with "Now: Zero".
"Not as a rule. Perhaps I'm too sceptical, but I can't take it seriously."
"No one suggests you should. What you mean is that you take it too seriously."
The Venus Hunters collects ten science fiction stories by J.G. Ballard, in which time is of the essence. Time loops into a trap ("Escapement"), runs backwards ("Time of Passage"), confuses past and present ("One Afternoon at Utah Beach"), slows down ("The 60 Minute Zoom") or simply freezes ("The Time-Tombs"), with results in the bizarre range of ironic, bittersweet and macabre.
There's a grim, humorous pettiness to a lot of these stories, many of which share themes of envy and adultery and revenge. De Palma meets Nolan. The "science" is loose and often a gimmick at their service. The best one is probably the title story, which levels science fiction to faith and the need for mystery and belief. Also I'm pretty sure Ballard essentially invented Death Note with "Now: Zero".
February 6, 2025
This short story collection is full of a bunch of great reads, although they’ve all been published in other collections and so you may well have come across them before. I particularly liked the first one, which was basically just Death Note but written fifty years earlier.
Ballard is a master of speculative fiction, and that’s the best way to describe what we have here. There’s a decent smattering of science fiction, but to call this a sci-fi book would be to do it a disservice because it’s much more than that. Instead, it’s an intellectual exercise and an excellent examination of what makes people tick but with some unusual plots thrown in for good measure. Lots to like!
Ballard is a master of speculative fiction, and that’s the best way to describe what we have here. There’s a decent smattering of science fiction, but to call this a sci-fi book would be to do it a disservice because it’s much more than that. Instead, it’s an intellectual exercise and an excellent examination of what makes people tick but with some unusual plots thrown in for good measure. Lots to like!
February 2, 2021
Apart from the last story these were all pretty compelling. I think my favourite from the bunch would probably be escapement. My least favourite was definitely the last one though. The book reads like normal science fiction esc short stories and then the last one is literally just an erotica story and it felt very out of place. Still very enjoyable though from start to finish.
October 5, 2022
MIND=BLOWN
I picked it up thinking it was a novel, was fairly surprised when I realized that it was a collection of short-stories. Having said that, you cannot but be in awe of the perverse genius of this writer.
Loved how he plays with time in "Escapement" and "Time of Passage"
I picked it up thinking it was a novel, was fairly surprised when I realized that it was a collection of short-stories. Having said that, you cannot but be in awe of the perverse genius of this writer.
Loved how he plays with time in "Escapement" and "Time of Passage"
October 12, 2022
Perhaps the weakest of Ballard's short story collections, since it's basically a compilation of odds and ends which hadn't been deemed worthy of space in prior collections. Full review: https://fakegeekboy.wordpress.com/202...
August 17, 2019
There are a couple of duds in this short story collection that take it down from 5 stars but there are also a couple of perfect stories that make it more than worth reading.
March 31, 2020
not his best
March 11, 2008
The Venus Hunters is the kind of thing I like from Ballard: science fiction / fantasy stories about obsession, with vivid imagery, surrealistic details and sparkling language, the kind of thing one finds in his The Voices Of Time and Vermilion Sands (and a couple of references in the stories here to things that were first mentioned in those earlier books may be Ballard advertising those works, but I read them as a kind of fan service).
Acquired Aug 2002
City Lights, London, Ontario
Acquired Aug 2002
City Lights, London, Ontario
July 22, 2007
Another buyback from the bronze age.
August 31, 2015
Yet another masterclass in esoteric, mind-expanding sf!
July 2, 2025
A varied collection of short stories, with a blend of early era si-fi and the paranormal as in "Tales of the Unxepected".
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews