For the next hour Royal continued his search for his wife, descending deeper into the central mass of the high-rise. As he moved from one floor to the next, from one elevator to another, he realized the full extent of its deterioration. The residents’ rebellion against the apartment building was now in full swing. Garbage lay heaped around the jammed disposal chutes. The stairways were littered with broken glass, splintered kitchen chairs and sections of handrail. Even more significant, the pay-phones in the elevator lobbies had been ripped out, as if the tenants, like Anne and himself, had agreed to shut off any contact with the world outside. (Chapter 9, Into the Drop Zone)
This is a brilliant, visionary, compelling and terrifying vision of urban decay, psychological catastrophe mixed with the voyeuristic thrill of watching the reversion of the poshest and snootiest in society to feral barbarism.
High Rise is the third of Ballard’s so-called ‘urban trilogy’, following on from Crash and Concrete Island in being set resolutely in the present day, with realistic characters in realistic settings. Where the Ballard factor comes in is the way that these straight, upper-middle-class white men and women go completely mad.
Plot summary
Dr Robert Laing (if I had a pound for every Ballard protagonist who’s a doctor) is one of the last guests to move into an enormous 40-storey, 1,000-apartment, luxury tower block, complete with not one but two swimming pools (on the 10th and 35th floors), cinema, shopping centres, primary school and so on. The occupants are all well-off professional people, lawyers and doctors and TV producers and publishers and actors and so on, the impeccably bien-pensant, liberal chattering classes.
The book describes in compelling detail how little tiffs and squabbles almost immediately emerge among the 2,000 inhabitants, leading to pushes and shoves, and then acts of violence and revenge and, before anybody understands why, the entire huge complex has descended into violence and barbarism.
It starts with half-playful gestures like the dropping of empty wine bottles from the top floors onto the balconies below. Then, in rapid succession, violence breaks out in the halls and stairways, unruly children are threatened, someone’s Afghan dog is drowned in a swimming pool.
Occupants of the lower floors throw bottles and ice cream off their balconies to damage and deface the cars of the rich occupants which get to park their posh motor closest to the building. For reasons no-one can identify the electricity for entire floors starts simply switching off. The air conditioning becomes sporadic and then, as a result of sabotage by someone, starts spewing out cement dust into everyone’s apartments, forcing a general retreat onto the balconies. The hallways and lobbies of the building become slowly covered with graffiti, indecipherable codes and signs legible only to their authors but full of menace to outsiders. Unknown persons vandalise the schoolrooms, resentful of yapping children. Their parents decide it’s better to keep them in their apartments for the foreseeable future…
A turning point comes when a rich jeweller falls or is thrown to his death from his penthouse – not because of the death as such but because, as TV documentary-maker Richard Wilder discovers to his amazement on returning to the block after a three-day absence, no-one has reported it to the police. The occupants of the building know something is going terribly wrong but… feel compelled to keep it to themselves, to keep up appearances, to wait and see what happens…
We follow all this through the lives of three key occupants of the building:
- Dr Laing, on the rebound from a divorce, with his eye on one or two of the divorced eligible women in the building, who is among the first to realise what is going on, to study the slow spread of the malaise, observing it in himself
- the architect Anthony Royal who designed the building and lives on its top floor, recovering from a serious car accident, but always dresses in a white suit and is accompanied everywhere by his loyal Alsatian dog
- Richard Wilder, a TV producer from the bottom floor who, as the mayhem increases, settles on the increasingly irrational ambition of fighting his way to the top of the building
Laing and Wilder are only some of the many inhabitants who find it increasingly difficult to leave the building and report to their day jobs, which they find increasingly unreal. Only as they return to the block, through the growing piles of garbage bags and broken bottles, do they feel they’re returning to what matters in their lives, to what is important.
So it’s not the events as such, what makes the book so compelling and convincing is the way Ballard gets right under the skin, right inside the slowly dementing minds of these well-educated types as they jostle each other in the crowded lifts, or tell each other’s bloody kids to shut up, or carelessly toss wine bottles off their balconies, or harass anyone from the lower floors who has the temerity to go to the upper floors.
Hence the paradox that they continue with their lives in the world outside as if nothing is amiss, clinging all the while to the hope of making sense of the technological landscape they have helped to create, even as it crumbles around them
Sustained achievement
I think the most impressive thing about the book is the way he manages to sustain what is a one-line idea (‘occupants of a luxury high rise descend into barbarism’) over 200 pages. He does this by:
- very carefully creating incidents which are marker points, stepping stones along the timeline of decline
- and spreading these out between his three main protagonists, giving each of them different but overlapping characters and psychopathologies, so that their individual experiences shed light on the communal plight
A new type
Ballard is not backward in commentating on his own fiction, and here he is quick to editorialise, speculating that in these vast new impersonal high rises a new kind of human being is being forged:
A new social type was being created by the apartment building, a cool, unemotional personality impervious to the psychological pressures of high-rise life, with minimal needs for privacy, who thrived like an advanced species of machine in the neutral atmosphere. This was the sort of resident who was content to do nothing but sit in his over-priced apartment, watch television with the sound turned down, and wait for his neighbours to make a mistake… (Chapter 3, Death of a Resident)
And
These people were the first to master a new kind of late twentieth-century life. They thrived on the rapid turnover of acquaintances, the lack of involvement with others, and the total self-sufficiency of lives which, needing nothing, were never disappointed.
Anomie – “in societies or individuals, a condition of instability resulting from a breakdown of standards and values or from a lack of purpose or ideals.”
The regular Ballard reader is tempted to point out that, far from being a new kind of person, these sound very much like the same kind of person that Ballard had been describing for twenty years, since his first story was published in 1956, alienated urban inhabitants who have lost all feeling and empathy for their neighbours and fellow citizens.
And also, just about everyone who writes about High Rise feels compelled to invoke the example of Lord of the Flies, published back in 1954. The basic idea of posh people going to pieces – or the way that just under the veneer of civilisation lurks the savage – is hardly a new one, it’s a central theme of 20th century fiction.
But in this novel Ballard treats it exceptionally well, with terrifyingly plausible insight, and in a previously neglected setting.
Freud
In my comments on Ballard’s Preface to the French edition of Crash I pointed out Ballard’s touchingly literal and naive interpretation of Freud. Freud is a fascinating teller of stories but a poor guide to actual life and real people. Relying too much on glib psychoanalysis can lead Ballard to give rather shallow backstories and psychologies to his characters.
This is most obvious in the characterisation of the burly TV producer Richard Wilder who, we are told in several pages of digression, was molly-coddled by his mother far beyond the end of childhood, and so acquired his invincible sense of self-confidence. It is then explained how his confidence ran into trouble when he married a smart and sassy TV Production Assistant who wouldn’t slot into the role created by his mother i.e. adoring devotee, and how their marriage foundered. Later there’s some cheapjack psychology explaining why Wilder is ascending the building so steadily and determinedly; it is to have a final confrontation with Anthony Royal who has become a father figure to him.
This feels like psychology-by-numbers. Maybe it’s necessary to use these shallow psychologisations for Ballard to organise and think through his characters and plots, but they’re the bits I tend to skip, in order to enjoy more the uncanny, eerie and weird way he can get inside the minds of his increasingly deranged characters and make their descent into mania seem believable and right.
‘It’s a mistake to imagine that we’re all moving towards a state of happy primitivism. The model here seems to be less the noble savage than our un-innocent post-Freudian selves, outraged by all that over-indulgent toilet-training, dedicated breast-feeding and parental affection — obviously a more dangerous mix than anything our Victorian forebears had to cope with. Our neighbours had happy childhoods to a man and still feel angry. Perhaps they resent never having had a chance to become perverse…’ (Chapter 11, Punitive Expeditions)
Three stages of barbarism
1. Constant parties – the inhabitants have been consumed for months with loud socialising, but with the arrival of the last occupant a new level of hysteria kicks in, drunken shouting, chucking around of bottles and then screams down stairwells which may be from drunken pranks or something darker.
2. Three tribes In the middle phase, as more people start to get beaten up, as a gay man is urinated on by a gang, after Wilder is set upon by a group of men with baseball bats, as the women increasingly cower in their apartments terrified – slowly there emerge three groups divided by floors i.e. a lower, middle, and upper floor tribe, each represented – the reader comes to realise – by the characters Wilder, Laing and Royal. This evolves into a clan system in which warlords or clan chiefs lord it over their serfs, pushing people about, organising harems of women. Our threesome aren’t necessarily the leaders – the leader of the mid-floors is TV newsreader Paul Crosland who – bizarrely – still goes off to work each day, reads the evening news – then returns to the high rise-cum warzone to lead his men in raiding parties on the lower floors.
3. Nomadic cannibalism In time even this much system collapses, giving way to smaller groups based around near neighbours. That’s to say of the survivors or those brave enough to come out of their barricaded apartments. In this final phase society breaks down utterly into solitary individuals achieving mental states of total dissociation and who, like animals, are focused entirely on security, food and sex.
Random details
Laing’s apartment is on the 25th floor. He bought it on the rebound from his divorce.
Like many Ballard stories High Rise starts at the end, with Laing squatting on the balcony of his studio apartment over a fire made from telephone directories roasting the body of a dead dog – in other words, an image of a man reduced to primitive savagery – and from t his beginning then cuts back three months to when he first moved in to the city in the sky, in order to tell the story of that three month descent into the inferno.
The high rise is the first of five planned to be built on derelict dockland. It was designed by architect supremo Anthony Royal. The shells of the other four can be seen slowly being built, the nearest four hundred yards away across the concrete car park.
It’s striking how things go wrong right from the start of the text, right from the word go there are tensions and jostlings, leading quickly to the discovery of a drowned pet dog in one of the swimming pools – because the presence of the dogs, mostly owned by upper floor inhabitants, vexes lower floor inhabitants. A class division was implicit right from the start between uppers, who are regarded as snooty and fair game, and downers – including three recurrent air hostesses – who have loud parties. In other words, we are thrown into the helter-skelter descent almost immediately. It’s one of the factors that makes it so compelling.
In chapter 5 the TV producer Wilder envisions a 60-second camera zoom starting with the entire building in shot and then slowly zooming in till the camera is focusing on just one apartment. This was to be the subject of The Sixty Minute Zoom.
Thoughts
The setting Pre-fabricated concrete high rises weren’t new. Councils had been putting them up to replace demolished slum terracing for at least twenty years (the first tower block in Britain was opened in Harlow, Essex, in 1951) and Ballard mentions some of this along with the way that, as they decayed, tower blocks had become victims of urban blight i.e. vandalism, people pissing in the lifts.
The mutiny of these well-to-do professional people against the building they had collectively purchased was no different from the dozens of well-documented revolts by working-class tenants against municipal tower-blocks that had taken place at frequent intervals during the post-war years… (Chapter 7, Preparations for Departure)
But the idea of luxury apartments, containing all mod cons and inhabited solely by the professional and chattering classes was more of a new thing, as was situating the story in Docklands which was only just beginning its transformation from heart of working class terraces to the playground of international bankers it was to become in the 1980s.
The prose strategy For me High Rise marks Ballard’s turn away from experimental to more traditional bourgeois writing.
1. Backstories One sign of this is the way the narrative drifts away from action to give digressions about each of the characters. Thus:
- When early on Laing is having lunch with a divorcée he fancies, Charlotte Melman, the narrative drifts away, first to give us background about Charlotte and her marriage and divorce, and then to a reminiscence about Laing’s own ill-fated marriage, before the text finally returns to where we are, at lunch in Charlotte’s apartment.
- As mentioned above, before Richard Wilder makes his first attempt to battle through the growing picket lines to the top of the building on a weird, personal, quixotic quest, we are treated to a lengthy explanation of how his strong-willed mother molly-coddled him to produce this burly, self-confident man.
- And, as things become increasingly fraught and Anthony Royal prepares to leave the tower block with his wife, Anne, we are subjected to a lengthy disquisition about her childhood, pampered daughter of a provincial industrialist who raised his family in ‘finicky copy of a Loire chateau’ along with servants and maids (!)
The point is – I don’t care. This fill-in-the-background stuff is the strategy of conventional bourgeois literature which is mostly concerned with people’s lives and family relationships and feelings and so on. In earlier Ballard fiction we didn’t get people’s boring backstories, we got their weird psychic experiences described in the here and now. So it feels like a shift in technique for Ballard to give this much backstory.
2. Posh They’re all so posh! Raised in a copy of a Loire chateau? Then we learn that Royal was himself a champion tennis player. We are entering the world of later Ian McEwan where everyone is a fabulously successful surgeon and a senior civil servant with a brilliant career and a top lawyer with an international reputation blah blah blah.
3. Class Thus the story takes place entirely among the London chattering classes: the narrator makes a point of emphasising how the high rise is inhabited solely by professional classes, lawyers, tax consultants, doctors, TV producers and so on. Somehow in his earlier novels and stories the characters had a kind of 1960s classlessness. It seems to me, reading his stories in sequence, that social class becomes an issue in his stories from about this point onwards.
I know they’re as unlike as chalk and cheese, but this new focus on class and class demarcation reminded me of the cartoon strips of Posy Simmonds, which I summarised in great detail a few months ago. One of the interesting things about her comic strip from the 1970s was the way that a nouveau riche class of self-satisfied professionals keen on fine wine and holidays in France and private school for the kids and buying a nice holiday home in the West Country had appeared in English society before the election of Mrs Thatcher i.e. much earlier than I’d realised.
Mrs T was just encouraging a trend which was already well underway. High Rise is a satire on this new kind of with-it, smug, managerial middle class which didn’t seem to exist in the 1960s. Before this period Ballard’s writing had been about lots of things, weird and wonderful: from about this point onwards, it seems to me, Ballard’s writing becomes more about that great English obsession, class, in both style and content, and becomes less and less sympathetic or interesting.
4. Drunk And the way all these rich privileged people – TV producers and presenters, film critics and theatre designers – are drunk all the time doesn’t feel radical, it just feels corrupt and, worst of all, boring. They are drunk all the time like Kingsley Amis characters are drunk all the time.
Wildly deranged
At least those were my impressions from the first half or so of the book, but they are soon swamped in the violence and savagery which explodes and goes on to give a vivid and relentless portrait of complete psychological and social collapse. As things fall apart the book fills up with unforgettable images.
Behind the barricade a second figure appeared. A young woman of about thirty, probably the daughter, peered over the old woman’s shoulder. Her suede jacket was unbuttoned to reveal a pair of grimy breasts, but her hair was elaborately wound into a mass of rollers, as if she were preparing parts of her body for some formal gala to which the rest of herself had not been invited. (Chapter 17, The Lakeside Pavilion)
He waited as Steele calmly smothered the cat, destroying it under the curtain as if carrying out a complex resuscitation under a hospital blanket. (Chapter 11, Punitive Expeditions)
The gynaecologist was in high excitement, waving the last stragglers up the staircase like a demented courier. From his mouth came a series of peculiar whoops and cries, barely articulated grunts that sounded like some Neanderthal mating call but, in fact, were Pangbourne’s rendering of the recorded birth-cries analysed by his computer. These eerie and unsettling noises Royal had been forced to listen to for weeks as members of his entourage took up the refrain. A few days earlier he had finally banned the making of these noises altogether — sitting in the penthouse and trying to think about the birds, it unnerved him to hear the women in the kitchen next door emitting these clicks and grunts. However, Pangbourne held regular sessions in his own quarters at the opposite end of the roof, where he would play through his library of recorded birth-cries for the benefit of the women crouching in a hushed circle on the floor around him. Together they mimicked these weird noises, an oral emblem of Pangbourne’s growing authority. (Chapter 15, The Evening’s Entertainment)
Cannibalism
Wilder’s long drawn-out quest to reach the top of the building sounds ridiculous but becomes utterly compelling, as his mental state deteriorates, as he takes shelter in various boarded up apartments along the way, dodges attack by armed gangs, all the time carrying the cine-camera with which he initially intended to make a jolly BBC documentary about the high rise and has, by the end, become a meaningless talisman of a forgotten world, strapped to his almost naked body which he has, by this stage, covered in painted bars and stripes denoting his warrior status.
In the climax, Wilder stumbles out onto the roof of the high rise, originally the preserve of the upper classes who held elite cocktail parties here. Then, as the chaos kicked in, it became the private fiefdom of Anthony Royal who tethers all the dogs of the block to the railings around the children’s playground he built there, long since abandoned by any children. And then it becomes the roost of hundreds and hundreds of gulls, savage pecking animals which allow Royal to walk among them but occasionally rise in great flocks and fly down into the building to attack the unwary venturing among the long wide mezzanines.
And now, as a bewildered and considerably psychologically damaged Wilder finally emerges onto the sunlit rooftop, after the long arduous trek which we have followed every step of the way, it is to discover the ground of the children’s playground and the railings around it wet, wet with… he pulls his hand away… blood. He sees little naked children running in and out of the playground, their bodies covered with blood red markings and up ahead a couple of women wearing long medieval gowns building a fire. As he walks towards them he becomes aware of other women dressed identically appearing on all sides of him and slowly converging, and forming a circle. And then they pull out the razor sharp knives from their gowns.
We realise that they are some kind of coven, that they are all of one mindset, that they are bringing up the children communally, and that they are cannibals. What makes it a moment of peculiarly entrancing horror is Wilder’s reaction. He is so far gone, so exhausted, and has travelled so far back into some kind of psychotic pre-zone that he isn’t at all frightened.
In front of him the children in the sculpture-garden were playing with bones. The circle of women drew closer. The first flames lifted from the fire, the varnish of the antique chairs crackling swiftly. From behind their sunglasses the women were looking intently at Wilder, as if reminded that their hard work had given them a strong appetite. Together, each removed something from the deep pocket of her apron. In their bloodied hands they carried knives with narrow blades.
Shy but happy now, Wilder tottered across the roof to meet his new mothers. (Chapter 18, The Blood Garden)
‘To meet his new mothers’. Wow. This sends a genuine frisson of horror down the reader’s spine. It’s the same genuinely demented mood in which we return to that opening scene, of Laing sitting on the balcony of his 25th floor apartment, completing the roasting of the dog over a home-made fire of telephone directories. The dog is Anthony Royal’s. As he had arrived at the penthouse, Wilder had been confronted by his father figure Anthony Royal who threw his silver topped cane at him in fear, prompting Wilder to shoot him in the chest, before stepping over his dying body and out the penthouse door to meet his fate among the sharp-knived mothers.
It was by chance that Laing had met Royal on the 25th floor where he was scavenging for firewood. The architect had staggered all the way down from the 40th floor and Laing goes to help him. There is a terrible stench and Royal points to the former swimming pool which, we now see, is piled high with skulls and bones, a Khmer Rouge swimming pool.
Laing naively thinks they must be the bodies of the older occupants who passed away of natural causes and have been savaged by dogs. But we have just been up on the roof with the mothers. We know these the swimming pool is full of the bones of eaten people. He tries to help him towards the next set of stairs but Royal insists on going and sitting in a cubicle by the pool, and there Laing leaves him, relieving him of his dog which he proceeds t kill and is now roasting over the open fire. He presents the food to the two malnourished women who are now living with him, who bicker and kvetch at him all day long, but whose company Laing now enjoys.
And here’s the Ballard touch: as he sits there, half naked and emaciated, a born again savage living in a kingdom of cannibalism – Laing reflects how now, at last, ‘everything was returning to normal.’ Maybe he’ll go back to the medical school and take up his teaching post again. Only we know how demented that idea is, but it’s testament to Ballard’s brilliant insight to realise that that’s how the mad think, pondering banal and ordinary questions while they try to fly or murder someone.
In the book’s brilliant final paragraph, he looks over at the next of the four remaining high rises to have been completed and to have slowly filled up with occupants while his one went berserk.
Dusk had settled, and the embers of the fire glowed in the darkness. The silhouette of the large dog on the spit resembled the flying figure of a mutilated man, soaring with immense energy across the night sky, embers glowing with the fire of jewels in his skin. Laing looked out at the high-rise four hundred yards away. A temporary power failure had occurred, and on the 7th floor all the lights were out. Already torch-beams were moving about in the darkness, as the residents made their first confused attempts to discover where they were. Laing watched them contentedly, ready to welcome them to their new world. (Chapter 19, Night Games)
Is this science fiction? Or the bleakest of black satire? Or plain horror?
Related links
Reviews of other Ballard books
Novels
- The Drowned World (1962)
- The Drought (1964)
- The Crystal World (1966)
- Some style features of the early novels of J.G. Ballard
- J.G. Ballard’s literary experimentalism
- The Atrocity Exhibition (1970)
- Preface to the French edition of Crash
- Crash (1973)
- Pornography, simile and surrealism in The Atrocity Exhibition and Crash
- Concrete Island (1974)
- High Rise (1975)
- The Unlimited Dream Company (1979)
- Hello America (1982)
Short story collections
- The Voices of Time and Other Stories (1962)
- The Terminal Beach (1964)
- The Disaster Area (1967)
- Vermilion Sands (1971)
- Low-Flying Aircraft and Other Stories (1976)
- The Venus Hunters (1980)
- Myths of the Near Future (1982)
Other science fiction reviews
Late Victorian
1888 Looking Backward 2000-1887 by Edward Bellamy – Julian West wakes up in the year 2000 to discover a peaceful revolution has ushered in a society of state planning, equality and contentment
1890 News from Nowhere by William Morris – waking from a long sleep, William Guest is shown round a London transformed into villages of contented craftsmen
1895 The Time Machine by H.G. Wells – the unnamed inventor and time traveller tells his dinner party guests the story of his adventure among the Eloi and the Morlocks in the year 802,701
1896 The Island of Doctor Moreau by H.G. Wells – Edward Prendick is stranded on a remote island where he discovers the ‘owner’, Dr Gustave Moreau, is experimentally creating human-animal hybrids
1897 The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells – an embittered young scientist, Griffin, makes himself invisible, starting with comic capers in a Sussex village, and ending with demented murders
1899 When The Sleeper Wakes/The Sleeper Wakes by H.G. Wells – Graham awakes in the year 2100 to find himself at the centre of a revolution to overthrow the repressive society of the future
1899 A Story of the Days To Come by H.G. Wells – set in the same future London as The Sleeper Wakes, Denton and Elizabeth defy her wealthy family in order to marry, fall into poverty, and experience life as serfs in the Underground city run by the sinister Labour Corps
1900s
1901 The First Men in the Moon by H.G. Wells – Mr Bedford and Mr Cavor use the invention of ‘Cavorite’ to fly to the moon and discover the underground civilisation of the Selenites
1904 The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth by H.G. Wells – scientists invent a compound which makes plants, animals and humans grow to giant size, prompting giant humans to rebel against the ‘little people’
1905 With the Night Mail by Rudyard Kipling – it is 2000 and the narrator accompanies a GPO airship across the Atlantic
1906 In the Days of the Comet by H.G. Wells – a comet passes through earth’s atmosphere and brings about ‘the Great Change’, inaugurating an era of wisdom and fairness, as told by narrator Willie Leadford
1908 The War in the Air by H.G. Wells – Bert Smallways, a bicycle-repairman from Kent, gets caught up in the outbreak of the war in the air which brings Western civilisation to an end
1909 The Machine Stops by E.M. Foster – people of the future live in underground cells regulated by ‘the Machine’ until one of them rebels
1910s
1912 The Lost World by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – Professor Challenger leads an expedition to a plateau in the Amazon rainforest where prehistoric animals still exist
1912 As Easy as ABC by Rudyard Kipling – set in 2065 in a world characterised by isolation and privacy, forces from the ABC are sent to suppress an outbreak of ‘crowdism’
1913 The Horror of the Heights by Arthur Conan Doyle – airman Captain Joyce-Armstrong flies higher than anyone before him and discovers the upper atmosphere is inhabited by vast jellyfish-like monsters
1914 The World Set Free by H.G. Wells – A history of the future in which the devastation of an atomic war leads to the creation of a World Government, told via a number of characters who are central to the change
1918 The Land That Time Forgot by Edgar Rice Burroughs – a trilogy of pulp novellas in which all-American heroes battle ape-men and dinosaurs on a lost island in the Antarctic
1920s
1921 We by Evgeny Zamyatin – like everyone else in the dystopian future of OneState, D-503 lives life according to the Table of Hours, until I-330 wakens him to the truth
1925 Heart of a Dog by Mikhail Bulgakov – a Moscow scientist transplants the testicles and pituitary gland of a dead tramp into the body of a stray dog, with disastrous consequences
1927 The Maracot Deep by Arthur Conan Doyle – a scientist, engineer and a hero are trying out a new bathysphere when the wire snaps and they hurtle to the bottom of the sea, where they discover…
1930s
1930 Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon – mind-boggling ‘history’ of the future of mankind over the next two billion years – surely the most sweeping vista of any science fiction book
1938 Out of the Silent Planet by C.S. Lewis – baddies Devine and Weston kidnap Oxford academic Ransom and take him in their spherical spaceship to Malacandra, as the natives call the planet Mars
1940s
1943 Perelandra (Voyage to Venus) by C.S. Lewis – Ransom is sent to Perelandra aka Venus, to prevent a second temptation by the Devil and the fall of the planet’s new young inhabitants
1945 That Hideous Strength: A Modern Fairy-Tale for Grown-ups by C.S. Lewis– Ransom assembles a motley crew to combat the rise of an evil corporation which is seeking to overthrow mankind
1949 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell – after a nuclear war, inhabitants of ruined London are divided into the sheep-like ‘proles’ and members of the Party who are kept under unremitting surveillance
1950s
1950 I, Robot by Isaac Asimov – nine short stories about ‘positronic’ robots, which chart their rise from dumb playmates to controllers of humanity’s destiny
1950 The Martian Chronicles – 13 short stories with 13 linking passages loosely describing mankind’s colonisation of Mars, featuring strange, dreamlike encounters with Martians
1951 Foundation by Isaac Asimov – the first five stories telling the rise of the Foundation created by psychohistorian Hari Seldon to preserve civilisation during the collapse of the Galactic Empire
1951 The Illustrated Man – eighteen short stories which use the future, Mars and Venus as settings for what are essentially earth-bound tales of fantasy and horror
1952 Foundation and Empire by Isaac Asimov – two long stories which continue the future history of the Foundation set up by psychohistorian Hari Seldon as it faces attack by an Imperial general, and then the menace of the mysterious mutant known only as ‘the Mule’
1953 Second Foundation by Isaac Asimov – concluding part of the Foundation Trilogy, which describes the attempt to preserve civilisation after the collapse of the Galactic Empire
1953 Earthman, Come Home by James Blish – the adventures of New York City, a self-contained space city which wanders the galaxy 2,000 years hence, powered by ‘spindizzy’ technology
1953 Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury – a masterpiece, a terrifying anticipation of a future when books are banned and professional firemen are paid to track down stashes of forbidden books and burn them until one fireman, Guy Montag, rebels
1953 The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester – a breathless novel set in a 24th century New York populated by telepaths and describing the mental collapse of corporate mogul Ben Reich who starts by murdering his rival Craye D’Courtney and becomes progressively more psychotic as he is pursued by telepathic detective, Lincoln Powell
1953 Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke a thrilling narrative involving the ‘Overlords’ who arrive from space to supervise mankind’s transition to the next stage in its evolution
1954 The Caves of Steel by Isaac Asimov – set 3,000 years in the future when humans have separated into ‘Spacers’ who have colonised 50 other planets, and the overpopulated earth whose inhabitants live in enclosed cities or ‘caves of steel’, and introducing detective Elijah Baley to solve a murder mystery
1956 The Naked Sun by Isaac Asimov – 3,000 years in the future detective Elijah Baley returns, with his robot sidekick, R. Daneel Olivaw, to solve a murder mystery on the remote planet of Solaria
— Some problems with Isaac Asimov’s science fiction
1956 They Shall Have Stars by James Blish – explains the invention, in the near future, of i) the anti-death drugs and ii) the spindizzy technology which allow the human race to colonise the galaxy
1956 The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester – a fast-paced phantasmagoria set in the 25th century where humans can teleport, a terrifying new weapon has been invented, and tattooed hard-man, Gulliver Foyle, is looking for revenge
1959 The Triumph of Time by James Blish – concluding novel of Blish’s ‘Okie’ tetralogy in which mayor of New York John Amalfi and his friends are present at the end of the universe
1959 The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut – Winston Niles Rumfoord builds a space ship to explore the solar system where encounters a chrono-synclastic infundibula, and this is just the start of a bizarre meandering fantasy which includes the Army of Mars attacking earth and the adventures of Boaz and Unk in the caverns of Mercury
1960s
1961 A Fall of Moondust by Arthur C. Clarke a pleasure tourbus on the moon is sucked down into a sink of moondust, sparking a race against time to rescue the trapped crew and passengers
1962 The Drowned World by J.G. Ballard – Dr Kerans is part of a UN mission to map the lost cities of Europe which have been inundated after solar flares melted the worlds ice caps and glaciers, but finds himself and his colleagues’ minds slowly infiltrated by prehistoric memories of the last time the world was like this, complete with tropical forest and giant lizards, and slowly losing their grasp on reality.
1962 The Voices of Time and Other Stories – Eight of Ballard’s most exquisite stories including the title tale about humanity slowly falling asleep even as they discover how to listen to the voices of time radiating from the mountains and distant stars, or The Cage of Sand where a handful of outcasts hide out in the vast dunes of Martian sand brought to earth as ballast which turned out to contain fatal viruses. Really weird and visionary.
1962 A Life For The Stars by James Blish – third in the Okie series about cities which can fly through space, focusing on the coming of age of kidnapped earther, young Crispin DeFord, aboard space-travelling New York
1962 The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick In an alternative future America lost the Second World War and has been partitioned between Japan and Nazi Germany. The narrative follows a motley crew of characters including a dealer in antique Americana, a German spy who warns a Japanese official about a looming surprise German attack, and a woman determined to track down the reclusive author of a hit book which describes an alternative future in which America won the Second World War
1962 Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut – the memoirs of American Howard W. Campbell Jr. who was raised in Germany and has adventures with Nazis and spies
1963 Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut – what starts out as an amiable picaresque as the narrator, John, tracks down the so-called ‘father of the atom bomb’, Felix Hoenniker for an interview turns into a really bleak, haunting nightmare where an alternative form of water, ice-nine, freezes all water in the world, including the water inside people, killing almost everyone and freezing all water forever
1964 The Drought by J.G. Ballard – It stops raining. Everywhere. Fresh water runs out. Society breaks down and people move en masse to the seaside, where fighting breaks out to get near the water and set up stills. In part two, ten years later, the last remnants of humanity scrape a living on the vast salt flats which rim the continents, until the male protagonist decides to venture back inland to see if any life survives
1964 The Terminal Beach by J.G. Ballard – Ballard’s breakthrough collection of 12 short stories which, among more traditional fare, includes mind-blowing descriptions of obsession, hallucination and mental decay set in the present day but exploring what he famously defined as ‘inner space’
1964 Dr. Strangelove, or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb by Peter George – a novelisation of the famous Kubrick film, notable for the prologue written as if by aliens who arrive in the distant future to find an earth utterly destroyed by the events described in the main narrative
1966 Rocannon’s World by Ursula Le Guin – Le Guin’s first novel, a ‘planetary romance’ or ‘science fantasy’ set on Fomalhaut II where ethnographer and ‘starlord’ Gaverel Rocannon rides winged tigers and meets all manner of bizarre foes in his quest to track down the aliens who destroyed his spaceship and killed his colleagues, aided by sword-wielding Lord Mogien and a telepathic Fian
1966 Planet of Exile by Ursula Le Guin – both the ‘farborn’ colonists of planet Werel, and the surrounding tribespeople, the Tevarans, must unite to fight off the marauding Gaal who are migrating south as the planet enters its deep long winter – not a good moment for the farborn leader, Jakob Agat Alterra, to fall in love with Rolery, the beautiful, golden-eyed daughter of the Tevaran chief
1966 – The Crystal World by J.G. Ballard – Dr Sanders journeys up an African river to discover that the jungle is slowly turning into crystals, as does anyone who loiters too long, and becomes enmeshed in the personal psychodramas of a cast of lunatics and obsessives
1967 The Disaster Area by J.G. Ballard – Nine short stories including memorable ones about giant birds, an the man who sees the prehistoric ocean washing over his quite suburb.
1967 City of Illusions by Ursula Le Guin – an unnamed humanoid with yellow cat’s eyes stumbles out of the great Eastern Forest which covers America thousands of years in the future when the human race has been reduced to a pitiful handful of suspicious rednecks or savages living in remote settlements. He is discovered and nursed back to health by a relatively benign commune but then decides he must make his way West in an epic trek across the continent to the fabled city of Es Toch where he will discover his true identity and mankind’s true history
1966 The Anti-Death League by Kingsley Amis –
1968 2001: A Space Odyssey a panoramic narrative which starts with aliens stimulating evolution among the first ape-men and ends with a spaceman being transformed into a galactic consciousness
1968 Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick In 1992 androids are almost indistinguishable from humans except by trained bounty hunters like Rick Deckard who is paid to track down and ‘retire’ escaped ‘andys’ – earning enough to buy mechanical animals, since all real animals died long ago
1969 Ubik by Philip K. Dick In 1992 the world is threatened by mutants with psionic powers who are combated by ‘inertials’. The novel focuses on the weird alternative world experienced by a group of inertials after they are involved in an explosion on the moon
1969 The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Le Guin – an envoy from the Ekumen or federation of advanced planets – Genly Ai – is sent to the planet Gethen to persuade its inhabitants to join the federation, but the focus of the book is a mind-expanding exploration of the hermaphroditism of Gethen’s inhabitants, as Genly is forced to undertake a gruelling trek across the planet’s frozen north with the disgraced native lord, Estraven, during which they develop a cross-species respect and, eventually, a kind of love
1969 Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut – Vonnegut’s breakthrough novel in which he manages to combine his personal memories of being an American POW of the Germans and witnessing the bombing of Dresden in the character of Billy Pilgrim, with a science fiction farrago about Tralfamadorians who kidnap Billy and transport him through time and space – and introduces the catchphrase ‘so it goes’
1970s
1970 Tau Zero by Poul Anderson – spaceship Leonora Christine leaves earth with a crew of fifty to discover if humans can colonise any of the planets orbiting the star Beta Virginis, but when its deceleration engines are damaged, the crew realise they need to exit the galaxy altogether in order to find space with low enough radiation to fix the engines – and then a series of unfortunate events mean they find themselves forced to accelerate faster and faster, effectively travelling forwards through time as well as space until they witness the end of the entire universe – one of the most thrilling sci-fi books I’ve ever read
1970 The Atrocity Exhibition by J.G. Ballard – Ballard’s best book, a collection of fifteen short experimental texts in stripped-down prose bringing together key obsessions like car crashes, mental breakdown, World War III, media images of atrocities and clinical sex
1971 Vermilion Sands by J.G. Ballard – nine short stories including Ballard’s first, from 1956, most of which follow the same shape, describing the arrival of a mysterious, beguiling woman in the fictional desert resort of Vermilion Sands, the setting for extravagantly surreal tales of the glossy, lurid and bizarre
1971 The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula Le Guin – thirty years in the future (in 2002) America is an overpopulated environmental catastrophe zone where meek and unassuming George Orr discovers that is dreams can alter reality, changing history at will. He comes under the control of visionary neuro-scientist, Dr Haber, who sets about using George’s powers to alter the world for the better with unanticipated and disastrous consequences
1971 Mutant 59: The Plastic Eater by Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis – a genetically engineered bacterium starts eating the world’s plastic, leading to harum scarum escapades in disaster-stricken London
1972 The Word for World Is Forest by Ursula Le Guin – novella set on the planet Athshe describing its brutal colonisation by exploitative Terrans (who call it ‘New Tahiti’) and the resistance of the metre-tall, furry, native population of Athsheans, with their culture of dreamtime and singing
1972 The Fifth Head of Cerberus by Gene Wolfe – a mind-boggling trio of novellas set on a pair of planets 20 light years away, the stories revolve around the puzzle of whether the supposedly human colonists are, in fact, the descendants of the planets’ shape-shifting aboriginal inhabitants who murdered the first earth colonists and took their places so effectively that they have forgotten the fact and think themselves genuinely human
1973 Crash by J.G. Ballard – Ballard’s most ‘controversial’ novel, a searingly intense description of its characters’ obsession with the sexuality of car crashes, wounds and disfigurement
1973 Rendezvous With Rama by Arthur C. Clarke – in 2031 a 50-kilometre-long object of alien origin enters the solar system, so the crew of the spaceship Endeavour are sent to explore it in one of the most haunting and evocative novels of this type ever written
1973 Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut – Vonnegut’s longest and most experimental novel with the barest of plots and characters allowing him to sound off about sex, race, America, environmentalism, with the appearance of his alter ego Kilgore Trout and even Vonnegut himself as a character, all enlivened by Vonnegut’s own naive illustrations and the throwaway catchphrase ‘And so on…’
1974 Concrete Island by J.G. Ballard – the short and powerful novella in which an advertising executive crashes his car onto a stretch of wasteland in the juncture of three motorways, finds he can’t get off it, and slowly adapts to life alongside its current, psychologically damaged inhabitants
1974 Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said by Philip K. Dick – America after the Second World War is a police state but the story is about popular TV host Jason Taverner who is plunged into an alternative version of this world where he is no longer a rich entertainer but down on the streets among the ‘ordinaries’ and on the run from the police. Why? And how can he get back to his storyline?
1974 The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin – in the future and 11 light years from earth, the physicist Shevek travels from the barren, communal, anarchist world of Anarres to its consumer capitalist cousin, Urras, with a message of brotherhood and a revolutionary new discovery which will change everything
1974 Inverted World by Christopher Priest – vivid description of a city on a distant planet which must move forwards on railway tracks constructed by the secretive ‘guilds’ in order not to fall behind the mysterious ‘optimum’ and avoid the fate of being obliterated by the planet’s bizarre lateral distorting, a vivid and disturbing narrative right up until the shock revelation of the last few pages
1975 High Rise by J.G. Ballard – an astonishingly intense and brutal vision of how the middle-class occupants of London’s newest and largest luxury, high-rise development spiral down from petty tiffs and jealousies into increasing alcohol-fuelled mayhem, disintegrating into full-blown civil war before regressing to starvation and cannibalism
1976 Slapstick by Kurt Vonnegut – a madly disorientating story about twin freaks, a future dystopia, shrinking Chinese and communication with the afterlife
1979 The Unlimited Dream Company by J.G. Ballard – a strange combination of banality and visionary weirdness as an unhinged young man crashes his stolen plane in suburban Shepperton, and starts performing magical acts like converting the inhabitants into birds, conjuring up exotic foliage, convinced his is on a mission to liberate them
1979 Jailbird by Kurt Vonnegut – the satirical story of Walter F. Starbuck and the RAMJAC Corps run by Mary Kathleen O’Looney, a baglady from Grand Central Station, among other satirical notions including the new that Kilgore Trout, a character who recurs in most of his novels, is one of the pseudonyms of a fellow prison at the gaol where Starbuck serves a two year sentence, one Dr Robert Fender
1980s
1980 Russian Hide and Seek by Kingsley Amis – set in an England of 2035 after a) the oil has run out and b) a left-wing government left NATO and England was promptly invaded by the Russians – ‘the Pacification’, who have settled down to become a ruling class and treat the native English like 19th century serfs
1980 The Venus Hunters by J.G. Ballard – seven very early and often quite cheesy sci-fi short stories, along with a visionary satire on Vietnam (1969), and then two mature stories from the 1970s which show Ballard’s approach sliding into mannerism
1981 The Golden Age of Science Fiction edited by Kingsley Amis – 17 classic sci-fi stories from what Amis considers the ‘Golden Era’ of the genre, basically the 1950s
1981 Hello America by J.G. Ballard – a hundred years from now an environmental catastrophe has turned America into a vast, arid desert, except for west of the Rockies which has become a rainforest of Amazonian opulence, and it is here that a ragtag band of explorers from old Europe discover a psychopath has crowned himself President Manson, has revived an old nuclear power station in order to light up Las Vegas, and plays roulette in Caesar’s Palace to decide which American city to nuke next
1981 The Affirmation by Christopher Priest – an extraordinarily vivid description of a schizophrenic young man living in London who, to protect against the trauma of his actual life (father died, made redundant, girlfriend committed suicide) invents a fantasy world, the Dream Archipelago, and how it takes over his ‘real’ life
1982 Myths of the Near Future by J.G. Ballard – ten short stories showing Ballard’s range of subject matter from Second World War China to the rusting gantries of Cape Kennedy
1982 2010: Odyssey Two by Arthur C. Clarke – Heywood Floyd joins a Russian spaceship on a two-year journey to Jupiter to a) reclaim the abandoned Discovery and b) investigate the monolith on Japetus
1984 Neuromancer by William Gibson – Gibson’s stunning debut novel which establishes the ‘Sprawl’ universe, in which burnt-out cyberspace cowboy, Case, is lured by ex-hooker Molly into a mission led by ex-army colonel Armitage to penetrate the secretive corporation, Tessier-Ashpool, at the bidding of the vast and powerful artificial intelligence, Wintermute
1986 Burning Chrome by William Gibson – ten short stories, three or four set in Gibson’s ‘Sprawl’ universe, the others ranging across sci-fi possibilities, from a kind of horror story to one about a failing Russian space station
1986 Count Zero by William Gibson – second in the ‘Sprawl trilogy’
1987 2061: Odyssey Three by Arthur C. Clarke – Spaceship Galaxy is hijacked and forced to land on Europa, moon of the former Jupiter, in a ‘thriller’ notable for Clarke’s descriptions of the bizarre landscapes of Halley’s Comet and Europa
1988 Mona Lisa Overdrive by William Gibson – third of Gibson’s ‘Sprawl’ trilogy in which street-kid Mona is sold by her pimp to crooks who give her plastic surgery to make her look like global simstim star Angie Marshall, who they plan to kidnap but is herself on a quest to find her missing boyfriend, Bobby Newmark, one-time Count Zero; while the daughter of a Japanese gangster who’s sent her to London for safekeeping is abducted by Molly Millions, a lead character in Neuromancer
1990s
1990 The Difference Engine by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling – in an alternative version of history, Charles Babbage’s early computer, instead of being left as a paper theory, was actually built, drastically changing British society, so that by 1855 it is led by a party of industrialists and scientists who use databases and secret police to keep the population suppressed
Books & Boots 