‘These are the voices of time, and they’re all saying goodbye to you…’
The Voices of Time (1960)
In an interview Ballard said The Voices of Time is his most characteristic short story, not necessarily the best, but the one which ticks off most of his obsessions. It is about entropy, decline and fall, on several levels.
It is set in a dystopian near future. Society is falling to pieces because of a sleeping sickness (‘narcoma syndrome’). One by one people are unavoidably sleeping longer and longer, giving them fewer and fewer hours of consciousness. Some humans have already reached a state of total sleep, never to wake again. These are called ‘the terminals’, and the reader wishes he got a pound for every time Ballard uses the word ‘terminal’. Thus the whole world is lapsing into a state of ‘detached fatalism’.
Some of these terminals (500 or so) are ‘housed’ in sleeping rooms in a research clinic out in a flat desert place like the desert areas of California. (It’s worth noting how many of these short stories take place in American settings. Is this because Ballard realised, in the late-1950s, that America was the society of the future? Or because the readers of the science fiction magazines he sold the stories to expected them to be set in America?)
The lead protagonist is the neurosurgeon, Powers (if I had a pound for every one of Ballard’s protagonists who is a doctor…). Powers was working at the clinic but realises he, also, is declining towards terminal sleep. He keeps a diary direct quotes from which punctuate the text, recording his slowly decreasing hours of consciousness, his mounting fear, and his attempts to make sense of what is happening. Part of this involves listening to tape recordings of interviews with sleepers, and also an interview he made with a biologist colleague, Whitby.
Whitby committed suicide. He had been conducting experiments on plants and animals in the clinic’s laboratory. He claimed to have identified a ‘silent pair’ of genes in plants and animals which, if activated, prompted weird mutations. Whitby had subjected all the animals and plants in the lab to X-rays and triggered their silent pairs of genes, with grotesque results. There are hints in the text that widespread atomic bomb testing might have created the background radiation which is sending humanity to sleep. Certainly animals outside the lab are also mutating, as Powers discovers when he’s out driving and runs over a frog which appears to have developed an inch-thick lead carapace, presumably to protect it from the background radiation.
Before he killed himself, Whitby had carved an elaborate mandala into the bottom of an empty swimming pool and Powers finds himself drawn back to it, as if it contains some hint of the truth, of what is happening. Whitby thought evolution had peaked and now life was rewinding, or winding down.
Powers had carried out experimental surgery on some patients to see if the sleeping sickness could be reversed. One of these patients is a disturbing young man, Kaldren, who lives in a modern house out in the desert which has been cunningly designed to form a labyrinth inside, so that Powers gets hopelessly lost every time he visits it.
Kaldren shows him several sequences of numbers, posts them to Powers, leaves them on his desk. When Powers confronts him about them, Kaldren explains they are numbers arriving from different stars in different quadrants of the sky. All of them are countdowns. To what? asks Powers. To the end of the universe, replies Kaldren.
Kaldren’s girlfriend, who he’s jokingly nicknamed Coma, visits Powers, who shows her round Whitby’s lab and explains the whole theory of the silent pair of genes and the plants and animals’ strange mutations. It’s in this scene that there’s a lot of exposition and we learn about Whitby’s research, Powers’s own theories, and Coma tells Powers that Kaldren is making a collection of ‘terminal documents, a random collection of art and artifacts which somehow symbolise the last days of mankind, an EEG recording of Albert Einstein, psychological tests of the condemned at the Nuremberg trials.
At the climax of the book it seems (it is told in an impressionistic stream-of-consciousness point of view of the lab animals) as if Powers comes to the decision to administer X-ray treatment to himself, thus activating his silent pair of genes. As a result he drives out to an abandoned firing range where he has for some weeks been constructing a vast recreation of Whitby’s mandala. He lies down in the centre of it and feels great waves pouring through his mind, messages from the ancient rocks around him and the distant stars. It seems as if he is actually listening to ‘the voices of time’. The paragraph which describes this is of surpassing beauty.
Coma and Kaldren find Powers’ dead body at the centre of the concrete mandala. Back at Whitby’s lab all the mutated life forms have run riot and died, maybe because in administering the X-rays to himself, Powers gave them all lethal doses.
The Sound-Sweep (1960)
Madame Gioconda is a retired opera singer whose best days are behind her. She has retired in a huff and lives in the ruined sound stage of a radio station which has – high symbol of urban alienation – had an eight-lane highway built over it, while she lives in increasing squalor, dosing herself on cocaine tabs and whiskey.
All day the derelict walls and ceiling of the sound stage had reverberated with the endless din of traffic accelerating across the mid-town flyover which arched fifty feet above the studio’s roof, a frenzied hyper-manic babel of jostling horns, shrilling tyres, plunging brakes and engines that hammered down the empty corridors and stairways to the sound stage on the second floor, making the faded air feel leaden and angry. (p.41)
(In these early stories Ballard is just a wonderfully vivid and sensuous writer.)
What makes it science fiction is that this is all happening in a future where an entire new area of audio technology has been discovered, ultrasonic music. Ultrasonic music is recorded at frequencies too high for human ears to actually hear but has been shown to have a definite impact on the human psyche. Not only this, but research has shown that it can be compressed i.e. an ultrasonic recording of a Beethoven symphony can be experienced in just a few minutes. Thus Madame Gioconda’s profession’s gone, hence her retreat to the shabby sound stage and her immersion in drugs and self pity. (All this is explained on pages 48-49)
Madame Gioconda is attended to every day by a devoted fan, a mute named Mangon. Mangon was an orphan, muted when his mother punched him in the throat as a toddler, who went on to develop extraordinary powers of hearing. This has enabled him to develop a career as a leading sound sweep in the Metropolitan Sonic Disposal Service (p.46).
As the ultrasonic equipment has got more sophisticated, it has been discovered that solid objects retain sound vibrations. As people have become more sensitive, more attuned, to ultra-high frequencies, many have noticed ongoing reverberations from traffic, parties, loud conversations and so on cluttering up their homes and offices. So they call a sound sweep like Mangon who comes along with his sonovac machine and hoovers out the upsetting sonic residues. It’s all hoovered up into storage tanks, then he drives his van out to the dunes to the north of the city, where there are miles and miles of concrete baffles which contain all the discarded babble of the city.
Marvellously weird and surreal idea, isn’t it? The plot, as such, is that Madame Gioconda uses Mangon to get blackmail material on an impresario of the new ultrasound industry, who had an affair with her years ago to further his career, then cruelly dumped her, one Henry LeGrande, and this involves two other characters, Ray Alto, a composer for the new ultrasound music industry, and his arranger-cum-gofer, Paul Merrill.
Briefly, Madame uses Mangon to identify sounds swept from LeGrande’s suite at Video City, and jot down compromising conversations with his PA. She uses these to blackmail LeGrande into letting her sing one evening at 8.30 on the radio, although it is ten years since any radio broadcast has included a human voice.
(In a side plot she has insisted she take this slot because it is when Ray Alto was scheduled to premiere his one and only piece of serious music, an hour long symphony titled Opus Zero.)
To cut a long story short, when she thinks she has triumphed, la Gioconda cruelly snubs and drops Mangon. He in turn decides to get his revenge and sneaks into the prompts box at the front of the orchestra pit of the big live radio broadcast with a sonovac machine, planning to hoover up i.e. mute her voice.
However, the ironic climax of the story is that the orchestra plays the overture and La Gioconda steps up to the stage to reclaim her place in musical history and… all that comes out is a pitiful tuneless squawking. Fifteen years of booze and drugs have ruined her voice. But she doesn’t know it. She squawks and screeches on, blithely unaware, while the audience grows restive then starts booing, while members of the orchestra pack their things and leave.
Mangon didn’t need his sonovac after all, in fact in a final act of revenge he breaks it so no-one else can use it to blot out her voice and spare her humiliation, before Paul Merrill can burst into the prompter’s box desperate to use it to silence the howling banshee. Mangon slips out the building, climbs into his sound truck, and drives away.
As often with a Ballard story, the details of the vision, the way he’s worked out so many aspects and ramifications of his weird dystopia, are a lot more compelling than the human drama he then concocts to fill it which, in this case, feels like one of those 1950s movies about middle-aged, drunk Hollywood movie stars. Compared with which the idea of sound residues which the sensitive can still hear, and which can be hoovered out of inanimate objects, is weird and compelling.
The Overloaded Man (1961)
First sentence: ‘Faulkner was slowly going insane’.
He lives in the new, utterly designed modernist settlement of Menninger Village, built to support a local mental home. Faulkner is a lecturer at the local business school, at least he was till he resigned a couple of weeks ago. He has been experiencing strange dissociative states. He has developed the ability to completely detach himself from what he sees so that the chair and table and room, the TV and sideboard, the french windows out onto the veranda and the swimming pool, all these become simply shapes with no meaning or connotations, ‘disembodied forms’ whose ‘outlines merge and fade’. He can’t wait till his shrill wife goes off to work so he can spend the day in these states.
At one point the narrator makes a comparison with a mescalin trip, under whose influence the folds in a sofa cushion might become the mountains of the moon or contain the secrets of the universe. Having taken LSD as a teenager and student, I know just what Ballard is describing here.
The story is well done but has a rather trite and predictable arc, which is that – despite a wristwatch he’s rigged up and sets in advance to give him electric shocks – so that he pulls himself out of his fugue state – nonetheless he is addicted, and longing to enter the state takes over his life. To the extent that even watching TV with his wife, he puts his fingers in his ears to enter the otherworld – until his shrill wife pokes him and asks him what he’s doing.
The predictability comes from the way that, at the story’s climax, he is an advanced state of dissociation when he becomes aware of something tugging at the pale extension of his consciousness (his arm), is vexed and irritated, and so he rearranges the looming buzzing interruption into a shape which is more reassuring and comforting, despite the sound of high-pitched screaming he can just about detect some way off.
The alert reader realises he has just murdered his wife. Then Faulkner steps down into the pool in the garden, lets himself sink below the surface of the water, and looks up into the shimmering blue above him, waiting to enter the ultimate dissociative state.
So: 1. It is a powerful and convincing description of an acid trip – I’d love to know a bit more of Ballard’s biography and if and when he started experimenting with drugs. 2. The setting of an ultra-modern, experimentally avant-garde housing estate of ‘corporate living units’ for the alienated narrator gives it a lovely dated feeling from the early 1960s which was just beginning to recoil from the impact of brutalist concrete architecture being erected all over Britain (inspiring, for example, Anthony Burgess’s 1962 novel A Clockwork Orange).
3. Once he’s done all this he doesn’t know what to do with the characters, so he has the deranged husband murder his wife then commit suicide. Hard not to feel this is only one step up from ‘then I woke up and it was all a dream’.
Thirteen to Centaurus
A powerful and eerie story about a space ship which is in flight to distant Alpha Centauri. It centres on young Abel, coming up to 16, and slowly let into the secret of what is going on by flight medical officer, Dr Francis (if I had a pound for every Ballard story led by a doctor) which is that the journey will take so very long that entire generations of families are going to be born, live out their entire lives, have children, and die before the descendants finally arrive at the distant star system. The 14 passengers on the ship (‘the Station’) are divided into three families or clans which pass on specialised tasks to their heirs and all this has been going on for fifty years.
That’s shock enough, which takes a fair few pages to explain and for the reader to process.
But there’s another twist which we may have started to suspect – which is that the entire project is a fake. After a man-to-adolescent chat with smart young Abel, Francis retreats to his private office, sets the locks and… exists the space ship, stepping out onto a gantry to reveal the whole thing is a mock-up inside a chilly air hanger somewhere in America, maintained by a grumpy crew of technicians and soldiers.
The project was begun in good faith 50 years earlier, and was funded to do genuine research into the psychological effect of very long-distance space travel. It is only by the application of continuous condition and sub-sonic sleeping drills that the ship’s crew have their normal human reactions (like for space and freedom) utterly suppressed.
Anyway, Dr Francis now attends a meeting with Colonel Chalmers and psychologists monitoring the project, where he learns that the authorities have decided to scrap the project. Society as a whole, and their political masters, have lost interest in space travel ‘since the Mars and Moon colonies failed’ (p.102).
So far, so Tales of the Unexpected. What gives the story its Ballard touch is that Francis argues for the project to be seen through to the bitter end i.e. for another fifty years, during which he himself will grow old and die inside the ship. Francis sneaks back onto the ship against orders, announcing he’s going to leave his private office (where he had the option of popping out, like he’s just done) and going down to C deck to live with the rest of the crew.
In other words, entombing himself in their fate.
There’s a final twist in the tale. For after weeks of spending full time with the crew, and taking part in the increasingly smart and savvy Abel’s projects and tests, Dr Francis is one day doing some basic ‘repairs’, when he hears secretive footsteps. He hides in an alcove and watches clever young Abel pad past, then retraces the young man’s steps and discovers…
That there is a loose plate in the ship’s corridor, which gives on to a loose plate in the outside skin of the station which can be opened and clearly gives onto… the aircraft hanger! It is old and rusty and well-used, going back decades, so chances are that old Peters, Abel’s father, knew, knew the whole space project was an elaborate fake and yet… chose to remain inside the ship, chose not to tell anyone, maybe preferring to be captain of a fake spaceship rather than a nobody outside. The conditioning and hypno-drills so thorough and deep that grown men preferred to stay within their fake but reassuring delusion rather than risk life out in the unknown real world.
Although this psychologically disturbed element has the Ballard feel, it is not ‘classic’ Ballard, it is too plot-driven. The Voices of Time and The Cage of Sand (see below) are canonical Ballard because they are about mood, that mood of decay and entropy and psychic disconnection amid a world gone to ruin.
The Garden of Time (1962)
Count Axel lives in a Palladian villa with his beautiful slender wife. It is not set in the future or another planet, it is not set anywhere. Like an 1890s aesthete he wanders the portico and garden of the villa, sauntering past the exquisite pond, while the enchanting strains of Mozart played on the harpsichord drift among the beautiful flowers.
But on the distant horizon he can see a vast, unstoppable horde of barbarians approaching, huge numbers of them, dressed in rags, heads down, some riding in ramshackle carts, a tide of filthy philistine humanity. And so every evening Count Axel picks one of the rare and previous ‘time flowers’ and, as the petals dissolve and melt, sending out strange shards of light, time is reversed and the horde pushed back over the horizon. But each flower works is less and less effective. The horde is coming relentlessly close. And there are only half a dozen or so time plants left in the garden.
As the horde arrives at the high walls of the villa, Count Axel and his wife forlornly pluck the last and smallest of the buds, delaying events for only a few minutes.
And then in the genuinely beautiful, fairy-tale climax of the story, we watch the horde storm the walls and pour through the garden except that…the entire villa is now ruined and, the wall collapsed, the building tumbled-down, the lake bone dry, the trees fallen across it, and the villa long abandoned. The horde crash through it, unstoppable, smashing and breaking the ruins that remain.
All except for a bower of densely-packed rose briars whose thorns deter the barbarians and in the middle of which stand the silent statues of a tall, noble man and his slender graceful wife.
This is a really beautiful and haunting story. Seems to me there’s a lot of Oscar Wilde’s fairy stories in Ballard’s imaginarium, and a lot of Wilde’s gilded prose in Ballard’s similarly exquisite and purple descriptions. In its haunting echo of parable or fairy story, this story is very like another early story, The Drowned Giant.
The Cage of Sand (1962)
1. We are in Cocoa Beach thirty miles south of Cape Canaveral some fifty years in the future. This resort, like all the others along the Atlantic coast, has been abandoned by humans. Fifty years earlier so many space ships were leaving for Mars carrying equipment and material that it began to be worried that the loss of weight might, everso slightly, affect the earth’s gravity and rotation, possibly eroding the stratosphere. And so over a twenty-year period millions of tons of Mars sand were brought back by the Americans and dumped along the Atlantic shore of Florida and by the Russians and dumped along the Caspian Sea. Unfortunately, the apparently inert sand turned out to contain viruses which proceeded to exterminate pretty much the entire plant life of Florida, turning the once swampy state into a desert. Inhabitants of the coastal resorts were told to abandon their towns in short order and never returned. Meanwhile, the fine Mars sand was whipped by sun and wind into ever deeper drifts and dunes which buried the abandoned resorts and climbed up the sides of the derelict hotels. (pp.138-9)
2. This characteristically Ballardian terminal zone attracted the usual type of damaged loners – the central protagonist Paul Bridgman, was an architect who drew up plans for the first city to be built on Mars but the contract was awarded to a rival company and he’s never recovered. Now he holes out in the shabby rooms of the abandoned hotels, covering the walls with his architect designs and plans, and endlessly listening to memory-tapes of the long-vanished residents, obscurely seeking out ‘complete psychic zero’.
The other two characters are short, stocky Travis who Bridgman has discovered was a trainee astronaut who had a panic attack as he lay in the launch rocket, causing the cancellation of his particular flight at the cost of five million. And Louise Davidson, widow of an astronaut who died in an accident in a space station some fifteen years earlier.
3. A number of space stations or rocket capsules carrying a gruesome cargo of dead astronauts circles the earth, seven in all. Their orbits are separate but twice a month they come into conjunction and fly overhead. On these nights Travis and Louise go up on the roof of the tallest abandoned hotel to pay their silent respects, each in personal grieving for a lost self, a lost identity.
4. What adds dynamism to the setting is that The Wardens are out to get them. For some years the wardens have been trying to lay roads out of prefabricated sections across the sand, which Bridgman and Travis have taken pleasure in sabotaging. The story starts as the wardens have brought in a new breed of wide-wheeled sand trucks. The narrative energy comes from several attempts by the wardens to capture our heroes, which they manage to dodge, escaping out into the remoteness of the pure dunes until the wardens have given up and driven off.
5. The climax of the story comes on the night of the next ‘conjunction’, when all seven capsules carrying dead astronauts fly overhead in a momentarily joined pattern. To the watchers’ surprise one is missing. Bridgman thinks it is the capsule of a defunct astronaut named Merrill and the story comes to a head as the capsule crashes to earth, creating a huge scythe of light across the sky and then a fireball which scorches over the Mars beach, over the tops of the abandoned hotels, crashing with a huge detonation among the red dunes.
Bridgman joins Travis and Louise as they run towards the blast crater, where Travis irrationally picks up a glowing fragment which burns his hands, Louise runs hysterically amid the wreckage, convinced it contains the vaporised body of her dead husband, while Bridgman watches them, stunned and, as the wardens close in with their nets and lassos, finally realises why he came to the infected beach and has never been able to leave – because this is as close to Mars as he will ever get. Because these great shifting dunes of red dust are his Mars. He’s made it, after all.
An abandoned beach resort. Abandoned hotels. Sand piling up everywhere. A handful of deranged or psychologically troubled characters. And space capsules carrying dead astronauts orbiting overhead… Classic Ballard territory.
The Watch Towers (1962)
At some point in the near future people are living in a city much like London, above which countless hundreds of ‘watch towers’ are suspended from the sky!
Behind the glass windows of the towers, shapes come and go and the inhabitants of the city have become convinced they are being spied on day and night by ‘the watchers’ and live in a state of permanent paranoia. The city’s affairs are run by a ‘Council’ which lays down the law, banning public assemblies and taking a strict view of personal morality.
Thus they disapprove of Charles Renthall who lives in an abandoned hotel (I wish I had a pound for every abandoned hotel there is in Ballardland) and is having a half-hearted ‘affair’ with a woman living in a house in a terrace road, Mrs Julia Osmond.
Basically, in the first half Renthall potters round, visiting a small circle of acquaintances (including, of course a doctor, Dr Clifton) fretting about the way everyone is wasting away their lives, passively acquiescing in surveillance from the towers. He decides to rebel against the general passivity and organise a fete! Yes, on the car park of the abandoned cinema owned by a local businessman.
This prompts visits from representatives of the Council asking him – in a very polite English sort of way – to calm down. And yet…
In the last few pages, Renthall has encounters with three or four of the same individuals (including Dr Clifton and Mrs Ormond) and all of them, to his great distress, refuse to acknowledge that the watch towers are there!
Disheartened, worried about his own sanity, Renthall wanders off into a derelict, bombed-out, abandoned part of the city as the sky clears and he sees the watchtowers in their serried ranks stretching off in every direction.
Is he mad? Or are they really there and everyone else is colluding to ignore them?
Chronopolis (1960)
Conrad Newman is a schoolboy in a future dystopia where all timepieces have been banned. His mother tells him not to ask about the public clockfaces which have had their hands removed. His father tells him not to ask silly questions about clocks because of the Time Police.
But his teacher, a Mr Stacey, is more relaxed and when he discovers Conrad is using a watch he took off the wrist of a man who had a heart attack next to him in a cinema, he isn’t cross. He gives it back to him. This isn’t a totalitarian society, just one which has agreed to live without time.
To show him why Stacy takes him for a drive into the abandoned centre of the city where they live, a city which was once inhabited by thirty million people, and now houses two million and still declining. As they mount onto a motorway flyover and drive past taller and taller buildings Conrad sees more and more huge clocks hanging from the skyscrapers.
Stacey tells him they were all turned off 37 years ago. He explains in great detail how the city of thirty million divided the citizens into classes and groups and then micro-managed their timetables. Eventually there was a revolt against a totally scheduled existence, a revolution which overthrew the tyranny of time.
The story takes a turn when Conrad notices a clock whose hand moves. He breaks away from Stacey who turns nasty, driving after him in the car, nearly running him over an then taking pot shots with a gun as Conrad legs up a fire escape and through upper floors of ruined buildings. Eventually Stacey gives up and drives off. Conrad falls asleep.
Next day the old man of the clocks is standing over him, his pockets full of keys, a shotgun under his arm. When Conrad shows him his wristwatch, the old man softens and shows him around. His name is Marshall. He used to work in Central Time Control, had survived the revolution and the Time Police. Now lives in a hidden den, cycles out to the suburbs to collect his pension and food, then quietly returns to the city.
Marshall shows Conrad his workshop, a former typing pool which is utterly covered with dismantled clocks and their workings. He’s got some 278 up and working again. For the next three months Conrad helps him with his work, but grows more and more fascinated by the one, huge master-clock which used to dominate the central plaza of the city. For months he works creating a new action, rewiring it and fixing the chimes. Finally he makes it work again and its huge chimes carry the tens of miles out to the distant suburbs where old-timers hear and remember their childhoods, some of them going to the police stations and asking for their watches back…
The story ends abruptly with Newman being taken into court. He has been tracked down by the Time Police and is sentenced to five years for his crimes against time, but for a further twenty for the murder of Stacey. He didn’t kill him. Stacey’s body was found in his car with a crushed skull, as if he’d fallen from a height. Newman thinks Marshall probably did it but takes the fall for him.
And in his cell he is delighted to discover… a working clock. Until after a few short weeks into his 20 year sentence, he begins to realise it has an infuriatingly loud tick!
— Like Billennium this is in a way a surprisingly conventional science fiction story, in which people act and talk pretty normally – albeit in a weird future – and it has a rather mundane conclusion – unlike the ‘classic’ Ballard story where characters are weirdly disconnected and the story doesn’t really end.
Thoughts
Taken together, this is a brilliant collection of pleasingly dated and reassuring science fiction. Reassuring in the sense that, although most of them are meant to be about mental illness, mental collapse, alienation and psychosis, it’s all done in a gentlemanly, sometimes a rather Dad’s Army-style of English decency.
None of the characters are savage and brutal as they are in modern science fiction movies. When a member of the Council remonstrates with Renthall he says: ‘Look, my dear fellow’ (p.160).
Five of the eight stories are clearly set in America, but the two final ones buck the trend by having a very strong English vibe about them. More than that, there was something about the scruffiness of the settings which reminded me of Nineteen-Eighty-Four with its shabby London and even shabbier prole district.
He had entered a poorer quarter of the town, where the narrow empty streets were separated by large waste dumps, and tilting wooden fences sagged between ruined houses. (The Watch Towers p.172)
They crossed the main street, cut down into a long tree-lined avenue of semi-detached houses. Half of them were empty, windows wrecked and roofs sagging. Even the inhabited houses had a makeshift appearance, crude water towers on home-made scaffolding lashed to their chimneys, piles of logs dumped in over-grown gardens. (Chronopolis p.182)
Mind you, they also remind me of the final passages of H.G. Wells’s War In the Air, whose second half describes the wasteland of an utterly ruined London, too.
It feeds a very deep psychological appetite, doesn’t it, science fiction’s obsession with portraying our civilisation as smashed and abandoned. The plots may vary, but the underlying appetite remains the same.
Here the streets had died twenty or thirty years earlier; plate-glass shopfronts had slipped and smashed into the roadway, old neon signs, window frames and overhead wires hung down from every cornice, trailing a ragged webwork of disintegrating metal across the pavements. (p.182)
Related links
Reviews of other Ballard books
Novels
Short story collections
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 