Ballard’s Abandoned Landscapes
If you set reality at noon on an analog clock, most science fiction would range from about 4:30 to 6. Philip K. Dick might ring in at 7:30. J.G. Ballard? 9 pm or your personal bedtime.
I’m talking about early, ‘60s Ballard, simply because that’s what hit me first and still hits me hardest. I recently bought (downloaded to my Kindle – interesting to think where that might fit into the Ballard world) his complete stories, but I’ve stopped dead, for now, at “Terminal Beach,” one of the finest short stories in the English language. So that’s the era I’m going to talk about. I’m an old fart and entitled.
It’s hard to pin down what defines any writer, what sets him apart from any other writer. In Ballard’s case, beyond the bizarre settings and sprung mental framework, I think it’s the unique uniting of personal isolation and claustrophobia with a sense of unbordered physical and internal space.
Many of the stories are set in deserts or uninhabited/disinhabited, windswept nowheres. He seldom introduces more than two or three characters, who often interact like cyborgs hurling dogturds at a target close to each others’ heads. Things happen without explanation and often without resolution.
Several of the stories deal with Vermillion Sands, an artistic community of the future where the world of art has run aesthetically and conceptually amok. Statues move and crawl, poetry drifts on the winds, ideas (and ideals) that were set up to evolve across the landscape peter out like grandpa in his dotage. But if you look at the impetus behind the individual elements, most of them have been realized, in one form or another, in the half century since Ballard wrote these stories.
At the uber-level, he knew. He saw. He envisioned. Many writers of SF’s “Golden Age” pictured isolated developments surprisingly well. They understood how technology would (or might) unfold. What Ballard saw was the human drive and how, in a technological society, it could be revealed. He was like Bradbury that way, and it may be the universe’s quiet salute that they died so temporally near each other.
I might have made it sound like Ballard was dreary or empty, a drum beaten in a deserted warehouse. Sometimes he was. Not every story is a resonant gem. But at his (often) best, he brought together characters, or a character and an environment, with such understated intensity that they caught fire without oxygen. People you would never want to know, never want to meet, never want to think about sizzle and sparkle in their own personal skies. I don’t know if that gives any kind of useful image, but it’s as close as I can come to pinning them against Ballard’s backdrop.
So let’s look at a few of those stories from the late '50s, early '60s.
Along with the sense of abandonment, there is often a dissolution of personal experience. In “The Last World of Mr. Goddard,” an unexceptional man living in a closely locked house keeps a miniature world alive in crate. How real is this tiny world and how connected to his? We find out to his and our chagrin. (It might make you think of Theodore Sturgeon’s “Microcosmic God,” but it goes in an entirely different direction.)
“The Watch-Towers” presents the landscape overseen by an evenly-spaced grid of floating towers, obviously peopled, but no one knows by whom, from where or why. Nor, like the inhabitants below, are we allowed to find out. The towers simply are. But there are repercussions for ignoring or disdaining them.
The completely isolated characters of “Manhole 69” are subjects of an experiment that has removed the need for sleep. They live and interact without mental pause 24 hours a day. What happens to their unrelieved minds? And can they tell how much of the crushing claustrophobia is outside, how much in?
“Mr. F. is Mr. F.” merges two of Ballard’s obsessions: isolation/dissolution, and time as an inexorable enemy. Mr. F., confined to his bed and managed by his overbearing wife, is becoming younger by the day but not internally stronger. The cycle he goes through is especially terrifying for being, in that confined bedroom, absurdly mundane.
The battle with time in “The Garden of Time” is even more isolated, as a couple keep the depredations of an advancing war rabble at bay by picking a time flower each evening – while the flowers, which refuse to bud anew, ever dwindle in number: Time can be held at bay, but it will be the victor at ages’ end.
“Chronopolis” is a deserted city, the result of an edict which forbid clocks, watches and all observance of time’s passage. We follow the underground progress of renegade isolates driven by the need to know when.
Again, from these descriptions it may seem that Ballard ignores character for theme and textured absurdity. Actually, almost all of Ballard’s early stories are driven by character, fully realized human beings set in skewed or inverted situations and let go to wend their way, accepting the impossible even while battling against it.
Mangon, “The Sound-Sweep,” operates a sonovac. Like your Hoover or Electrolux, it ingests the unwanted and untidy, but in this case the refuse is sound, suctioned with exquisite care. Mangon can remove the harsh overlays of a cathedral’s yattering tourists while leaving intact the chant-soak of the stones. But what most defines him is his love for the over-the-hill opera singer, Madame Gioconda, and his sad, resigned response to her gift of derision.
Ballard for the most part ignores humor. It simply doesn’t fit into his dense, choking worlds. But he lets loose a volley of exuberant howlers in “Passport to Eternity.” A couple with all the solar system at their disposal for a vacation attempt to plan the perfect getaway. This leads them to investigate a scattering of underground firms offering … what they outline in half a dozen pages would fill an entire Philip K. Dick novel. Ballard slaps one bizarre and tortured idea after another onto the page, held in place by Laurel and Hardy glue.
And, of course, there’s “The Terminal Beach.” Wandering alone among the concrete ruins of Eniwetok, the island staging grounds for atomic and hydrogen bomb tests, Traven (B. Traven?) loses himself inside the maze of pseudo-buildings erected to examine the effects of mankind’s most unrestrained energy on its most vulnerable structures.
He talks with his lost family and to the skeletal remains of a Japanese flier tied to a porch chair. He is visited by a scientific team who cannot coax him to leave his vigil, because he is trying to find – what? Justification? The past? A sense of why he has no future? Afterwards, you might think Borges, or in some sense Nabokov. But while you’re reading it, you won’t think of anything else.
by Derek Davis