The author of some 18
novels over 90 short stories and innumerable essays and articles,
J(ames) G(raham Ballard is perhaps the greatest living British writer.
This 1,200 page collection contains 99.9% of his published short
fiction in one volume.
Early Ballard novels,
such as The Drowned
World and The
Drought are classic Science Fiction; short story
collections such as The
Terminal Beach and The
Disaster Area exemplify the brilliance of the SF shorter
form. Later novels (Super-Cannes)
and collections (Myths
of the Near Future and
War Fever) cemented Ballard’s acceptance into
the British literary establishment, a group that Ballard the outsider
has always politely despised (his fiction was once described as being a
“grenade tossed into the sherry-party of English
fiction”).
Unlike, say, Margaret
Atwood, Ballard has never felt the need to deny that some of his best
work is SF. On the contrary, Ballard once insisted that SF is the
“only true literature of the 20th century.”
Not that Ballard’s SF is the tiresome rockets and rayguns
variety – a wearisome SF sub-genre that Ballard helped to
obliterate. On the contrary, many of his stories that do involve
rockets are set in abandoned and sand-swamped space centres, where
decaying Saturn rockets and launch gantries form a rusting monument to
human entropy.
Of the stories in this
magnificent collection, perhaps only a quarter could be recognized as
SF, and of this one-quarter, only one story (Report On An Unidentified Space
Station) is actually set in space. The remaining
three-quarters are, well, Ballardian; that’s to say, they are
by turns surreal (The
Secret History of World War 3), horrific (Now: Zero),
hilarious (The
Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor
Race), satirical (Report
from an Obscure Planet), dreamlike (The Watch-Towers),
terrifying (The
Concentration City) and poetic (The Garden of Time
– a masterpiece of melancholy).
Ballard was a great
fan of the surrealists, and their influence can be seen in such stories
as the fantastically titled Why
I want To Fuck Ronald Reagan. When this piece first
appeared in the so-called condensed novel The Atrocity Exhibition
(U.S. title Love and
Napalm: Export USA), its title alone led to the first
edition of Atrocity
being pulped by the publisher. In fact, the story was a laugh-aloud
funny and yet highly disturbing satire on focus groups and
research-obsessed laboratory scientists. It also predicated the Great
Communicator’s rise to the White House.
Ballard once said that
“Earth is the only alien planet”, and this phrase
provides one clue to Ballard’s obsessions with the inner
landscape of the mind, and the way in which the environment shapes the
person. His later short stories – Notes Towards A Mental
Breakdown, The Object of the Attack and the sublime The Enormous Space,
for example – are superb examples of a mental withdrawal from
so-called reality. In response to the befuddled opprobrium heaped on
him by some clueless critics (“This author is beyond
psychiatric help” was one particular response to Crash), Ballard
once said: ”People used to come to
this little suburban house expecting a miasma of drug addiction and
perversion of every conceivable kind. Instead they found this
easy-going man playing with his golden retriever and bringing up a
family of happy young children. I used to find this a mystery myself. I
would sit down at my desk and start writing about mutilation and
perversion.”
Dan
McNeil’s
short fiction and reviews have appeared in a
plethora of publications, including: Alien Contact (translation),
Antipodean SF, The Beat, Dusk, Fantastic Metropolis, Fragment, Ink
Magazine, Laura Hird, Mad Hatter's Review, Outsider Ink, The Quarterly
Staple, Redsine, Sein Und Werden, Whispers Of Wickedness, and Zygote In
My Coffee.
