‘To get out of time we first need to learn to fly’
(Hinton in Memories of the Space Age)
Eight short stories spanning the 20 most productive years of Ballard’s career, presented in simple chronological order and linked by the theme of space travel and astronauts.
Six of them had been published in earlier collections and what is striking, really striking, is the extent to which the stories repeat the same ideas, are all variations on a handful of obsessively reiterated themes.
- The Cage of Sand (1962)
- A Question of Re-entry (1963)
- The Dead Astronaut (1967)
- My Dream of Flying to Wake Island (1974)
- News from the Sun (1981)
- Memories of the Space Age (1982)
- Myths of the Near Future (1982)
- The Man Who Walked on the Moon (1985)
1. 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.
2. A Question of Re-entry (1963)
This is a wonderfully slow, lazy, atmospheric evocation of the steamy, dank, rotting atmosphere of the Amazon jungle, which is a sensual pleasure to read and reread, and which has justifiably drawn comparisons with Joseph Conrad’s early stories of isolated white men going to seed in the tropics.
A strange atmosphere of emptiness hung over the inland lagoon, a flat pall of dead air that in a curious way was as menacing as any overt signs of hostility, as if the crudity and violence of all the Amazonian jungles met here in a momentary balance which some untoward movement might upset, unleashing appalling forces. Way in the distance, down-shore, the great trees leaned like corpses into the glazed air, and the haze over the water embalmed the jungle and the late afternoon in an uneasy stillness… (p.15)
The tale is set in the near future. Lieutenant Connolly works for the Space Department, Reclamation Division of the United Nations. Five years earlier a space capsule, the Goliath 7, carrying astronaut Captain Francis Spender returning from a moon mission, lost contact with mission control and is estimated to have crashed somewhere in the vast Amazon jungle. Hundreds of UN inspectors have been deployed to try and locate the lost capsule which was equipped with radio and sonar beacons. Connolly spent some time working at Lake Maracaibo on the dredging project there. Now he’s been redeployed to go deep into the jungle and contact native tribes to find out if any of them have seen anything.
The story opens with rich descriptions of the rotting swamps of the Amazon tributary Connolly is puttering up in a patrol launch skippered by Captain Pereira of the Native Protection Missions. They are heading up to the squalid camp of the Nambikwara tribe. This – it just so happens – is where a 40-something high-profile white man, Ryker, the former journalist and ‘man of action’ (sounds a bit like Ernest Hemingway) decided to flee when he got sick of Western civilisation.
Thus the scene is set for Connolly to arrive at the scrappy squalid camp of ‘the Nambis’ and find Ryker a tall, imposing, cynical and mysterious man. Why was he so insistent that Pereira bring him a clock, of all things, from faraway civilisation? Why was the tribe’s one-time medicine man dislodged from his position, and how does Ryker maintain his hold over the natives?
Briefly, it turns out that Ryker has a set of NASA tables which show the orbiting times of massive new ECHO satellite which periodically crosses the sky as a bright stars in the sky. That’s why he needs an accurate clock – in order to predict the arrival of the stars; just before it appear, Ryker leads the tribe off on whooping hollaring jaunts into the forest. It is much stronger juju than the old medicine man could ever manage. (Incidentally, glancing at the tables Connolly notes ‘today’s’ date, March 17 1978 – must have seemed a long way in the future when Ballard wrote this story.)
That’s Connolly’s first discovery. His second is when the shy, ill stunted son of the rejected witch doctor makes a swap with him, Connolly’s watch for some kind of shiny orb he’s holding. On close examination it turns out to be the lunar altimeter of the Goliath 7, crudely prised out of its control panel.
So the space capsule did land somewhere near by! Disgusted, Connolly shows the altimeter to Pereira and lets the captain deal with Ryker. He comes back to say Ryker admits it all. Spender was still alive when they pulled him out of the capsule, but didn’t last long, but making it clear that he didn’t intervene to save him.
The story ends with Pereira explaining that a man who fell to earth in a shiny capsule would have been greeted as a god by the Nambis, confirming all their beliefs in cargo cults, and… the Nambikwara eat their gods!
Thus the story brings together a number of Ballard’s early obsessions in a winning combination: the journey up a tropical river; a (sort of) scientist protagonist; the image of dead astronauts trapped in their burning capsules; the eeriness of the entire space programme itself seen for the first time by Connolly as not reflecting a healthy urge to explore but rather a projection of the inner neuroses of the technocratic West; and the central but obscure important of time… the scientifically accurate time needed to predict the capsules’ orbits overlaying or superimposed on the native tribe’s complete lack of time awareness, and behind it all the image of outer space itself which, at one point, Connolly poetically speculates, might itself be a vast unconscious symbol of time and eternity.
3. The Dead Astronaut (1967)
Now this has the true Ballard vibe. It reads like an anthology of early-period obsessions and is a prime example of the strange, wintry beauty of his prose.
Cape Kennedy has gone now, its gantries rising from the deserted dunes. Sand has come in across the Banana River, filling the creeks and turning the old space complex into a wilderness of swamps and broken concrete. In the summer, hunters build their blinds in the wrecked staff cars; but by early November, when Judith and I arrived, the entire area was abandoned. Beyond Cocoa Beach, where I stopped the car, the ruined motels were half hidden in the saw grass. The launching towers rose into the evening air like the rusting ciphers of some forgotten algebra of the sky.
It’s set in the future, 20 years since the last rockets left the gantries at Cape Kennedy. Now the entire area is abandoned and rusting. The narrator is Philip. Twenty years earlier he had been a senior flight programmer at NASA, at the time when the whole space programme was moved to New Mexico. He seems to have been an ‘item’ with a fellow NASA employee named Judith, but soon after the move to New Mexico she fell in love with one of the trainee astronauts, the albino Robert Hamilton. They played tennis etc in the all-American way.
A year later Hamilton was dead, his space capsule hit by a meteorite. For all those years his derelict space capsule has circled the earth, one of twelve capsules carrying dead astronauts who’d died in various mishaps. One by one they fall back to earth, attracted by the homing beacon left active at Cape Kennedy.
Now Philip has driven with Judith down to the Cape because it is time for Robert Hamilton’s space capsule to fall to earth. The entire area is a) utterly derelict and abandoned and covered with drifts of sand b) policed by wardens c) haunted by the relic hunters, who scavenge the crashed capsules, selling mementos illegally on the black market.
Philip and Judith have come well prepared and in the knowledge that they have to a) break through the wire perimeter fence and b) make contact with one of the scavengers, hard-eyed, beak-faced, scarred-handed Sam Quinton. They give him five thousand dollars. He shows them to a ruined but habitable motel room, and promises to bring them Hamilton’s remains.
In the days they spend waiting, there is unusual activity by the authorities. The army appear, driving half-tracks, roaming around the abandoned concrete aprons, Quinton says it’s unusual, but they’ll get to the wreck before the army. Then the capsule descends, roaring past in a giant blade of light followed by a loud crash and explosion. Judith runs to the crash site, staggering dazed among the flaming flecks of metal embedded all over the sand. Ballard’s writing is brilliantly vivid.
Shortly after midnight, at an elevation of 42 degrees in the northwest, between Lyra and Hercules, Robert Hamilton appeared for the last time. As Judith stood up and shouted into the night air, an immense blade of light cleft the sky. The expanding corona sped toward earth like a gigantic signal flare, illuminating every fragment of the landscape.
Quinton and his two fellow scavengers hustle Judith and Philip back to the motel and soon return with various souvenirs including a box containing the dead astronaut’s remains. Judith and Philip remain in the motel room on Quinton’s suggestion, the army are roaming everywhere, any movement will be detected, they’ll all be arrested. Judith pores over the pathetic bundle of sticks and grey ash which is all that’s left of Robert Hamilton.
After a few days, Philip and Judith fall ill. They feel weak, can’t keep food down, vomit, hair starts falling out, skin blistering. Army half-tracks come closer as they continue their search of the area. Philip hears the message they’ve been broadcasting over loudspeakers for days, something about radioactivity.
In a flash he realises they both have radiation poisoning. Hamilton’s capsule was carrying a bomb, an atom bomb. Philip is well aware that all this time Judith has carried an obsessive torch for her one-time lover. Now it has killed both of them.
4. My Dream of Flying to Wake Island (1974)
A beautifully poised and tragic story. Set in an abandoned resort (much like the abandoned resort in Low-Flying Aircraft and the abandoned sand dunes of Cape Kennedy in The Dead Astronaut) Melville discovers a crashed Second World War bomber buried in the sand.
The migraines are coming back, reminders of the ECT shocks which were themselves part of the treatment for the severe head injuries he suffered, we are told, as an RAF pilot who was in a plane crash. Metal plates had to be inserted in his head.
When he is lowered into the cockpit of a Messerchmitt which another plane hunter is excavating further down the coast he has his first ‘fugue’, defined as: ‘a loss of awareness of one’s identity, often coupled with flight from one’s usual environment, associated with certain forms of hysteria and epilepsy.’
During his recovery he became obsessed with Wake Island, a refuelling site on a small island in the middle of the Pacific, barely more than a collection of concrete runways and shacks. Its utter isolation and complete psychological reduction to a basic function for some reason has gripped Melville’s imagination.
He is being supervised by a Dr Laing (same name as one of the protagonists of High Rise) who asks him why he needs to fly to Wake Island, and about the B-17 he’s spending all his time excavating from the sand. Laing introduces him to an amateur pilot who incessantly flies her Cessna over the dunes. She is Helen Winthrop. Melville drives over to the small airfield and introduces himself. He is knowledgable about planes. Helen explains that she’s planning to break the record for flying the length of Africa to Cape Town. Melville can help her fit long-distance fuel tanks. She is attracted by his intensity and they have a short-lived affair. But, it is revealed in a throwaway detail, she can’t cope with his constant nervous vomiting.
Only now, in the final pages of this brief but fantastically concentrated story, do we learn that Melville wasn’t a pilot who had a crash – he was an astronaut, and the first astronaut to have a nervous breakdown in space, his nightmare ramblings disturbing the millions of viewers watching the space flight on TV. Hence the ECT and attempts at therapy.
He takes it for granted that Helen will abandon her plans and fly with him to Wake. He assures her they’re going to do it, no matter how many times she tells him she has spent too much time preparing for her Africa flight. One day she takes off without warning him. The sound of the engines tells him her plane is fully loaded. Within an hour or so he’s completely forgotten about her as he works away, continuing to excavate the ruined B-17 from the sand. With part of his mind he knows it will never fly, that he’ll never in fact finish excavating it since the wind is constantly blowing the sand dunes back over it. But with the happy part of his mind he knows that if he works hard enough, he’ll soon be flying to Wake Island.
Some of the details, in fact the entire plot can be accused of being overwrought. But the beauty is in the care with which Ballard deploys the details so as to slowly reveal the true reason for Melville’s exile to the abandoned resort, the tremendous lightness of touch with which he paints in the handful of brief conversations the troubled young man has with Dr Laing, and the daintiness with which he sketches the brief failed relationship with Helen.
It’s this handling of the content, as much as the content itself, which makes this short story feel like a masterpiece.
5. News from the Sun (1981)
The longest story in the collection at 41 pages, and another reprise of well-established Ballard motifs.
It’s set twenty or so years in the future when the world is coming down with some kind of sleeping sickness. Everyone is slipping into ‘fugue’ states, at first for only a few moments, building up to hours at a time, then leaving only minutes of consciousness left and then – boom! – you are in a trance forever.
The fugues came so swiftly, time poured in a torrent from the cracked glass of their lives.
Those who enter this final phase are, inevitably, referred to as ‘terminal patients’.
Former NASA psychiatrist Dr Robert Franklin (if I had a pound for every Ballard protagonist who is a doctor) works at a clinic for victims and was one of the first to identify the new ‘time-sickness’. He takes a special interest in Trippett, who happens to be the last astronaut to have walked on the moon. He is visited by his daughter, Ursula, a dumpy member of a nearby hippy commune which has taken over the abandoned site of a solar-based nearby town, Soleri II (‘the concrete towers and domes of the solar city’) named after their architect, Paolo Soleri.
It’s an orgy of Ballard motifs: a doctor running a clinic for people who are conscious less and less of the time is the central narrative of his classic short story The Voices of Time. Franklin drives Trippett out into the desert, as the doctor protagonist of The Voices of Time does. And what do they find? Ballardland:
He had taken a touching pleasure in the derelict landscape, in the abandoned motels and weed-choked swimming pools of the small town near the air base, in the silent runways with their dusty jets sitting on their flattened tyres, in the over-bright hills waiting with the infinite guile of the geological kingdom for the organic world to end and a more vivid mineral realm to begin.
And the Antagonist, there’s always an Antagonist, since at least The Illuminated Man of 1963, there’s always an irrational Opponent. In Myths of the Near Future it’s Dr Martensen, here it’s Slade, former air-force pilot and would-be astronaut, who dive bombs Franklin, Ursula and Trippett as they wander among the fields of derelict solar panels. And this antagonist, like all the others, is trying to seduce and/or kidnap the protagonist’s wife, in this case Marion.
Slade is, of course, flying a microlight, the man-sized flying machine which is the obsessive central image of The Ultimate City and Myths of the Near Future and Hello America. Endless dreams of flying. All the microlight pilots in these stories wear old-fashioned aviator goggles.
Slade had arrived at the clinic seven months earlier and charmed the director, Dr Rachel Vaisey (a feminist thought: it is noticeable that many of the characters in these stories of the 1970s are professional women: the psychiatrist Anne Godwin, the therapist in the Cinderella story is a woman named Dr Valentina Gabor, and now the clinic is headed up by a woman). He starts creating ‘shrines’ to the future from bric-a-brac, the final one being a characteristic assemblage of random elements, exactly the same ‘terminal documents’ which appear in The Voices of Time (1967) and The Atrocity Exhibition (1966-69) and Myths of the Near Future. It consists of:
- a labelled fragment of lunar rock stolen from the NASA museum
- a photograph taken with a zoom lens of Marion in a hotel bedroom
- a reproduction of Dali’s The Persistence of Memory
- a set of leucotomes whose points were masked by metal peas
- an organ donor card giving permission for his brain to be transplanted
Vaisey slipped into an affair with Slade which she quickly realised was a mistake and tried to extricate herself. At their last meeting, in her office, Franklin was present and watched while Slade took his penis out, masturbated, then insisted on examining his semen under a microscope.
Franklin feels guilty over his complicity in the space programme which seems to have triggered the epidemic.
As a member of the medical support team, he had helped to put the last astronauts into space, made possible the year-long flights that had set off the whole time-plague, cracked the cosmic hour-glass…
One by one every astronaut involved in the space programme had slipped off into a private reverie, many of them weeping in their sleep, as if the space programme had committed some cosmic crime. And all humanity has been damaged by it:
The brute force ejection of themselves from their planet had been an act of evolutionary piracy, for which they were now being expelled from the world of time.
As regular Ballard readers know, his imagination was liberated by discovering the Surrealist painters as a young man and he often makes reference to them, as Dali above. In this story he twice references the nude women paintings of Paul Delvaux.
Not far away a strong-hipped young woman stood among the dusty pool-furniture, her statuesque figure transformed by the fugue into that of a Delvaux muse.
The Great Sirens by Paul Delvaux (1947)
On the car journey back from the desert, Trippett momentarily comes out of his fugue and speaks for 30 seconds before reverting into trance. This gives Franklin hope. Back at the office he is reprimanded by his boss, Dr Vaisey. He drives back to the abandoned motel with a drained swimming pool which he’s made his base. His wife, Marion, has left cigarette burns and used dresses all over the floor. Franklin drives off and finds her being persuaded by Slade to get into his parked microlight. Franklin’s arrival frightens Slade off, and Marion goes running among the abandoned cars.
At the story’s climax Franklin manages to make it, through the ever-increasing blizzard of blackouts and after crashing his car in a fugue, out to the futuristic solar city. Here he discovers Ursula looking after her father, Trippett and the last four or so pages describe in more detail than any previous Ballard story has, what he’s on about, what the fugues mean – that primeval man lived in a continuous present – that the invention of time was the meaning of The Biblical Fall, a fall into time consciousness which parcels everything out into arid, waste moments – but all the characters’ efforts, no matter how crackpot they may seem, are towards reintegrating all of time past and time future into one multi-faceted permanent moment of transcendental perception.
As the fugues increase in duration, as Franklin and Ursula are reduced to only moments of consciousness per day, they learn to navigate the fugue time, permanent time, with its incandescent light. In other words, in many of the other time-stories you are left with the sense that the characters are mad; but this one gives the most persuasive case yet that they are not, that there really is something to their hallucinations and delusions, and that there really is a way out of time, out of the time psychosis most of us are trapped in and regard as ‘normal’.
Thoughts
Well, it’s a reprise and a rehash of extremely familiar motifs from Ballard’s stories of the 1960s, but as I’ve just said, it takes these ideas and makes a substantial progression on them, shedding new and interesting light onto Ballard’s eerie otherworld.
It adds an extra layer of eeriness to the text that it is made up of so many fragments from previous stories, like a collage, like one of the experimental collage texts Ballard made back in the late 1950s.
So you can either see stories like this as Ballard rehashing old material, or as him using each story to approach the same central insight or tackle the same neurotic symptoms, from different angles, using the same methods and materials, but each time rearranged in a new pattern; rather as the first ten chapters of The Atrocity Exhibition approach the same outline of events, using different characters and incidents, but with the continual sense that you are approaching some huge and overwhelming secret.
This is Core Ballard and even rehashed Core Ballard is a better, more absorbing and more uncanny read than his more straightforward Hammer Horror stories like A Host of Furious Fancies or Having a Wonderful Time. It tends to show them up for the cheesy magazine-fillers that they are.
6. Memories of the Space Age (1982)
To an extraordinary extent this is a rewrite of the preceding story, News From The Sun and is like a draft or alternate version of the contemporaneous story Myths of the Near Future, from the premise of the story, through the narrative structure right down to the use of the name Anne for key figures in both stories.
Here again we meet a former NASA physician, Dr Edward Mallory (if I had a pound for every Ballard protagonist who is a doctor) who has travelled to the abandoned zone of Cape Kennedy from Canada where he specialised in treated Downs Syndrome and autistic children. He has come with his wife, Anne. They are both afflicted with the ‘space sickness’ which has been slowly spreading out from the old NASA launching centre. The space sickness is a disease of time; the victim experiences fugues or largos when their time completely stops and they’re stuck stationary.
So for the usual obscure reasons, Mallory has come to live amid the abandoned hotels and shopping precincts of the beach resorts opposite the old launch site, squatting in a derelict room on the firth floor of an abandoned hotel, and foraging for food in the dusty abandoned supermarkets.
And of course, as usual, there is an Antagonist – Hinton, a former astronaut and in fact, the first astronaut to commit a murder in space, when he locked his co-pilot Alan Shepley into the docking module and evacuated its air, live, in front of a global viewing audience of one billion viewers.
On landing, Hinton was sent to prison, to Alcatraz to be precise. Some twenty years later, as the space sickness slowly spread across America, Hinton escaped from Alcatraz using a home-made glider. Now Mallory discovers he is restoring and flying the vintage planes from a nearby airplane museum, very much as Olds restores defunct cars in The Ultimate City.
The same obsession with man-powered gliders, in this case a pedal-powered microlight with a huge wingspan is being flown by a woman, Gale (short for Nightingale) Shepley, who swoops over him one day on one of his forays from the hotel room while his wife sleeps.
She lands and introduces herself, a young blonde who is the daughter of the murdered astronaut, Shepley. She has come to the ruined zone because she is expecting her father’s space capsule to finally re-enter orbit and crash down here – just like all those other Ballard women who wait for their dead husbands or fathers to re-enter the atmosphere and crash land beside the ruined gantries e.g. Judith waiting for her dead lover’s capsule to crash back to earth in The Dead Astronaut.
Mallory has even brought a collection of ‘terminal documents’ like so many of these characters cart around, in his case:
- a tape machine on which to record his steady decline
- nude Polaroid photos of a woman doctor he had an affair with in Vancouver
- his student copy of Gray’s Anatomy
- a selection of Muybridge’s stop-frame photos
- a psychoanalytic study of Simon Magus
Ballard’s gives a fuller, more explicit explanation of what exactly the space sickness is. It is the result of a crime against evolution. Human evolution has created a psychological aptitude to see Time as a stream with a past, present and future, a defence or coping mechanism which situates us within a dynamic timeframe.
The manned space flights cracked this continuum and time is leaking away. Our perception of time is returning to its primeval one, an experience of all time in one moment, when Time – in the current sense – stops.
Mallory has a couple of encounters with Hinton who explains that the birds know about Time, they have never lost the primeval, reptile sense of Time. Which is why he’s trying to teach himself to fly by learning to fly each of the planes in the aviation museum in reverse chronological order, acclimatising his body to flight until, eventually, he can fly without machinery, and without wings.
In this context, Hinton’s ‘murder’ of Shelpley was Hinton’s way of ‘freeing’ him from the tyranny of Time (exactly as the lunatic Sheppard in Myths of the Near Future appears to ‘free’ the birds by crushing them to death).
His wife is entering the end stage. Her fugues last nearly all day. In her few waking moments she begs to be taken up to the roof. She wants to see Hinton. She feels close to him because he is close to the secret. Eventually Hinton successfully kidnaps his wife. Mallory sees smoke coming from the old Space Shuttle gantry and takes a motorbike to ride there. He wakes up lying athwart it with his leg burning against the red hot engine. He had a fugue.
Gale arrives in her micro-glider to rescue Mallory and they travel on to the Space Shuttle gantry. Hinton has set fire to all the airplanes gathered at the bottom, and, as Mallory watches, Hinton and Mallory’s wife step off the platform and into thin air over the flames.
Maybe all shamans and primitive rituals, maybe all religions have been an attempt to escape from the prisonhouse of Time. Maybe the space sickness sheds light on why the Christian image of an afterlife isn’t an action-packed adventure holiday, but an eternal moment, an eternity of worship, stuck in stasis.
Gale keeps a menagerie by the swimming pool of the motel she’s camped in. Cheetahs, exotic birds and a tiger. As Mallory’s time winds down he hallucinates the tiger as a wall of flame. Gale is looking after him but, as always, there is a vast distance between Ballard characters and she is growing bored of him. She is only interested in the pending arrival of her father’s corpse as his space capsule finally re-enters earth’s orbit and comes streaming over their heads towards the space centre. One day soon Mallory will open the tiger’s cage and enter his wall of flame.
7. Myths of the Near Future (1982)
If you’d never read any Ballard before, this 35-page-long story would blow your mind. If, on the other hand, you were familiar with Ballard’s earlier writing, the most striking thing is the repetition and recapitulation of some very familiar images and themes. It’s like a medley of greatest hits.
It’s set in the near future. Some kind of space sickness is afflicting mankind. More and more people experience the same symptoms, avoiding exposure to the sunlight and falling prey to obsessive behaviour. In their final days they become convinced that they were astronauts.
Sheppard was a successful architect. His wife, Elaine, comes down with the illness and is bed-bound in hospital under the supervision of a short, intense physician, Philip Martensen.
Next thing he knows, Martensen has absconded to Florida with his wife, who wants to be near the rusting gantries of the old space centre at Cape Kennedy. She writes him letters describing visions of the wonderful jewelled tropical forest which has reclaimed the abandoned towns surrounding the derelict space centre, the empty motels and drained swimming pools.
Sheppard, who had been showing less and less interest in his architecture practice, abruptly closes it, fires everyone, packs a psychic ‘survival kit’ and travels from Toronto down to Miami to try and find Elaine. Here he goes mad. He finds a room in an abandoned motel with – of course – an empty swimming pool littered with broken sunglasses.
But Sheppard is not alone. He is approached by a government psychiatrist, one of a team who’ve been sent by the government to cope with the increasing numbers of deluded folk who think they’re astronauts and who are flocking to the area, Anne Godwin.
She becomes increasingly drawn into his intense and damaged psychic world, eventually posing naked for his pornographic movies, which are more interested in discovering the weird geometries underlying the female body than sex, as such. At night they watch these avant-garde porno movies projected on the bedroom wall.
He explains to Anne that the suitcase of bric-a-brac he’s brought with him is a machine, a time machine, and how it runs on power from the drained swimming pool out front of the motel room. As he climbs down into it, Sheppard explains that the drained pool has a door which opens into another dimension of time, if only he can find it.
At the climax of their relationship he appears to strangle her. All he wants is to set her body free from its constraints of space and time. We are told she fights him off, kicking and biting, and runs off to fetch the police. Later, we are not so sure.
By day Sheppard rents a Cessna light aircraft and skims low over the abandoned territory surrounding the Cape Kennedy space centre which has been completely repopulated by tropical forest. Finally he discovers a strange modernistic nightclub in a clearing and is about to investigate when a man-made glider rears up in front of him, putting him off his flying so he nearly crashes into a tree and only just makes it back to a nearby beach.
This is where the story begins, with Sheppard sitting in a trance state in the cockpit of the wrecked plane and the incoming tide slowly laps at its wheels and then starts rising. He is only saved by Anne Godwin who followed out to the beach in a government Land Rover.
Next day Sheppard sets off by car along the remains of roads through the forest, until he’s forced to abandon the car and continue on foot, in search of the nightclub he saw from the air where he’s convinced that Martensen is keeping Elaine. Here he discovers a submarine world where each twig and branch hangs weightlessly, where light flashes from every leaf in some kind of process of ‘time-fusion’.
The luminosity of everything – the trees, the animals, the plants – seems to derive from the simultaneous existences of multiple moments of time. Everything has become a vision of itself at all moments of its existence.
He could feel the time-winds playing on his skin, annealing his other selves on to his arms and shoulders…
He discovers the forest is covered with man-sized traps Martensen has made. He trips one and Martensen comes running out of the jungle wearing a bird suit, complete with feathered head-dress and wide feathered wings attached to his arms.
Sheppard finally reaches the nightclub and in a dingy room out the back discovers his wife lying in a cage made of polished brass rods. She is extremely malnourished, wasted away, virtually a skeleton. Sheppard knows she is dead, yet she opens her eyes and her skeleton-hand reaches out to seize his arm.
As he unlocks the cage and touches her time floods back into her withered body and she becomes young and beautiful again.
Already her arms and shoulders were sheathed in light, that electric plumage which he now wore himself, winged lover of this winged woman.
Next thing, young Elaine is running along the surface of the river which has frozen solid because of the accumulation of all its moments in time into one concentrated moment, the time-fusion. She is learning to fly. She beckons him.
Sheppard walks towards her through the forest, stopping to pluck birds frozen in time out of the air. One by one he sets them free, then embraces Martensen and sets him free. By this stage the reader strongly suspects that ‘setting free’ means strangling to death. In this life. In this realm. In Sheppard’s realm, he is liberating these time-bound creatures so they can fly free into the multi-dimensional realm of fused space and time which is created by the abandoned space gantries.
Thoughts
Feels like a medley of greatest hits: the bejewelled forest come straight from The Crystal World, the intensity of light-filled hallucinations is the central theme of The Unlimited Dream Company, man-sized gliders appear in The Ultimate City and Hello America, the abandoned gantries of Cape Kennedy appear in numerous stories such as The Dead Astronaut, drained swimming pools appear in countless stories, and the psychic survival kit – a list of five disparate items which includes on Surrealist picture, is a direct repeat of the collection of ‘terminal documents’ which appear in The Voices of Time (1967) and The Atrocity Exhibition (1966-69).
The interesting question is: What purpose does this repetition serve? Does it matter that Ballard was repeating himself, writing the same obsessive sort of story, using the same peculiar imagery? Is it in some ways a plus, an interesting artistic strategy to repeat himself so narrowly and so exactly? Does it give the reader the eerie impression of really becoming caught up in a demented world which extends outwards from Ballard’s texts into the real world?
8. The Man Who Walked on the Moon (1985)
An eerie story. Part of what’s eerie is how totally Ballard realised the Space Age was over and done by the 1980s. There were six crewed U.S. Apollo landings on the moon between 1969 and 1972, and then that was it.
This story is set in Brazil. It’s a first person narrative. The narrator is a failed journalist, kicked off a succession of ever-smaller papers and forced into giving foreign language tuition. His wife and his mother, who lives with them, despise him, and virtually kick him out the house each morning to go and get a proper job.
Hanging round the cafes he get to learn about a sad, wasted figure, a certain Mr Scranton, who is introduced to tourists as ‘the astronaut’. He isn’t an astronaut and the waiters laugh at him, the American tourists have their photos taken by him in a jokey kind of way. Our narrator does some background research into him and discovers Scranton was a crop-dusting pilot in Miami during the moon landing era, but was never anywhere near NASA.
The story recounts the way our narrator is slowly, slowly drawn into this impoverished, thin, wasted man’s weird delusory world. He jokily introduces himself and says he’s writing a piece about sci-fi movies and would like ‘the astronaut’s’ opinion. But slowly, over their next few encounters, he becomes haunted by Scranton’s faraway stare, his gaze through the people and buildings of this world, his other-planetary loneliness.
The narrator asks whether Scranton has proof of his experiences on the moon and Scranton nods slowly. He needs to be helped back to his squalid flat above a fleapit cinema, the Luxor. Here he shows the narrator his ‘photographs’, his ‘evidence’. It consists of pictures torn out of Life and Newsweek magazine. He’s mad, delusional, and yet…
He has known the loneliness of utter separation from all other people. He has gazed at the empty perspectives of the planets. He sees through pedestrians and traffic as if they were fleeting tricks of the sun.
Sick and ill, Scranton, like so many Ballard figures, wastes away and dies. And hands on his mantle. The narrator takes his place at the seedy café. Without any effort he finds himself slowly erasing the memories of his family life, his wife and mother and failed career in journalism slowly disappear, to be slowly replaced by an alternative past, one in which he trained hard as an astronaut, in which he remembers the coastline of Florida falling away beneath the giant rocket. A past in which he genuinely did walk on the moon.
Thoughts
These stories are weird beyond belief. And reading them all together makes you feel drunk with visions.
On a practical level, it makes you realise why the compilers of previous Ballard collections deliberately mixed these hard-core Ballard texts in with the shorter, sometimes more obvious, cheesy, Gothic, boom-boom short stories. Because a set of really pure, hard-core Ballard makes you the reader feel like they’ve gone quite mad.
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)
- Empire of the Sun (1984)
- The Day of Creation (1987)
Books & Boots 