Ballard wrote over a hundred short stories. Nowadays they’re gathered in the two massive volumes of Collected Short Stories, but they were originally published in various science fiction magazines and then brought together into occasional book collections, of which about nine were published in the 1960s alone (although the situation is confused because 1. there are UK and US editions of most of the collections, each with slightly different contents, and 2. these occasional collections didn’t gather the stories in chronological order, but more randomly).

The Terminal Beach is often cited as the best single collection of Ballard’s short stories, and marked a commercial and critical breakthrough. I bought a paperback copy in 1973 and some of the stories in it have haunted me ever since. The UK edition contains the following stories:

• A Question of Re-entry (1963)
• The Drowned Giant (1964)
• End-Game (1963)
• The Illuminated Man (1964)
• The Reptile Enclosure (1963)
• The Delta at Sunset
• The Terminal Beach (1964)
• Deep End (1961)
• The Volcano Dances
• Billennium
• The Gioconda of the Twilight Noon
• The Lost Leonardo (1964)

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.

The Drowned Giant (1964)

A pessimistic fable or fairy tale.

A giant is washed up on the beach. Over the succeeding days and weeks the unnamed narrator visits and revisits the beach and watches the amazement of the huge crowds soon give away to bored vandalism, then the dismemberment of the huge body to be used for fertiliser and the enormous bones re-used as archways into scrap yards or even houses.

End-Game (1963)

In what seems to be a communist east European country, a discredited member of the Politburo – Constantin – has been tried, found guilty, and is now confined to a villa with his executioner – Malek – with whom he plays chess and has tantalising conversations, as he tries to find out… when he is scheduled to be executed. It’s quite a long story as Constantin pathetically persuades himself that Malek understands, or can be made to understand that he, Constantin, is in fact innocent, that the circumstances of the trial were invalid etc etc.

This is the kind of story which undermines any claim that Ballard is a world class literary writer because, although made up of familiar tropes and settings it is, ultimately, neither as clever nor as subtle as Ballard wants his readers to think it is.

The Illuminated Man (1964)

The visionary short story which he quickly turned into the full-blown ‘novel’, The Crystal World, this is an extraordinarily vivid account of a trip by journalists up the river Opotoka into the Florida Everglades, to the quickly emptying town of Maynard, to see for themselves the new phenomenon whereby the natural world is becoming crystallised. Told in retrospect by the narrator (one James B———) who says that ‘now’, a few months later, as he recuperates in Puerto Rico, the entire Florida peninsula has been abandoned and three million people displaced i.e. the phenomenon is spreading and will, in time, possibly make the entire planet uninhabitable.

If there’s any plot it’s that, as a wave of new crystallisation breaks over the forest B—– gets separated from the soldiers who took him into the danger zone and then quickly lost becoming a) caught up in a weird feud between the local chief of police, Captain Shelley, who has abducted the unhappy wife of an architect who’s gone round the bend, Marquand, with the result that they are creeping up on each other and taking potshots, either in the ruined city of Maynard or in the remote crystallising summer house where Shelley has spirited away young and sickly Mrs Marquand, first name Emerelda.

And b) having fallen asleep and become half crystallised, B—– runs for hours, maybe days, because movement is the only thing which holds back the crystallising process, until he comes across a clearing in the crystal forest, location of a church and of the Reverend Thomas, who continues to play his organ even as the jungle around crystallises, its canopy overhead forming a vast lattice of glass, with narrower and narrower alleys of escape. With this visionary man B—– stays as long as a week until it is clear the forest is going to swamp them at which point he thrusts the huge jewel-encrusted altar cross into B——‘s arms and pushes him out into the crystal forest, protected by the jewels, to blunder towards the frozen river and make his way slowly through the weirdly bejewelled landscape, finally emerging into reality, the army, and hospital.

But writing now, some months later in Puerto Rico, he finds reality bland and boring. And tells us that he knows he is fated, doomed and destined to return to the forest, at the earliest possible opportunity, in order to find his destiny among the jewelled tropical forest.

This story exemplifies Ballard’s ability to imagine something unlike anyone else, to root it in the workaday world of the present day, to give rein to his extraordinarily lush and purple prose and yet, at the same time, to be somehow completely unconvincing at a human level about any of the characters.

The Reptile Enclosure (1963)

Ballard creates an over-intellectual, frustratedly verbose academic, Roger Pelham, who has taken his dim unintellectual wife to the beach which is packed out, with spotty bodies and blaring transistor radios. A report on the radio that a new satellite is being launched from Cape Canaverel prompts him to half-heartedly try to explain the theory of a colleague of his, Sherrington, that orbiting satellites emit infrared light which our unconscious minds can detect – and that the colleague, Sherrington, thinks it might trigger innate releasing mechanisms or IRMs. And that there might be connections with mass graves of Cro-Magnon Man which have been found under what were in his day lakes.

He’s still trying to explain it when a strange mood comes over the beach, silence descends, people begin to stand, some walk down to the sea and form an orderly line along the surfline, Pelham seems to be the only one not affected as people in the cafe where they’re sitting lurch to their feet and make their way to the shore. Pelham calculates that the new satellite is in fact orbiting right over them and… at that moment the lines of silent zombie people begin to walk quietly into the sea.

This is a shilling shocker, short and sharp and lurid, and all the better for it.

The Delta at Sunset (1964)

Charles Gifford is the senior archaeologist leading a small archaeological expedition to a ruined Toltec site presumably somewhere in Central America. He is accompanied by his long-suffering wife, Louise, and  a young academic assistant, Dr Richard Lowry, and a number of native Indian bearers and servants.

A few weeks earlier Gifford had some kind of bad accident at the excavation site which crushed his ankle. Now he is confined to a kind of stretcher-chair (p.127) with the sheets propped up so as not to touch his bandaged ankle. The ankle is starting to smell (presumably gangrene) and Gifford – not a nice man to begin with – has become deliberately provoking and vicious to Louise and Lowry alike, passing in and out of increasingly intense fevers, with dreams and visions.

Above all he is obsessed with the great mass of writhing snakes which emerges out into the dried-up delta they can see from their camp on a bluff. Every night they come out at the same time and wriggle and writhe across the dry mud flats

The story drops heavy hints about time – pondering the inscrutable faces of the native Indians, Gifford reflects that they are more in tune with the millennial-old forest than the average American with their obsessive time-consciousness, trying to cram ‘significant’ experiences into their lives.

At one point he turns lyrical about the snakes writhing down in the delta, speculating that they must carry in their DNA ancestral memories of ‘a coded internal landscape, a picture of the Paleocene’. As he sinks into fever he conceives of the delta as a zone of timelessness, where all time co-exists, and hallucinate the Toltec ruins reverting to some primeval level, being reassimilated into the jungle as they’re covered with moss and creepers.

So the reader is fairly prepared for the bombshell at the climax of the story when, listening yet again to her husband’s feverish descriptions of the snakes, Louise bursts out in exasperation that there are no snakes – the dry delta is bare as a bone!

So the obvious question is, Is Gifford feverishly hallucinating? Or is he he having a genuine experience and, psychologically, travelling back in time to the Paleocene era? Exactly as in the 1963 story Now Wakes The Sea when a white collar American, recovering from an illness, begins to hallucinate the deep ocean of the Triassic Era is washing over his suburb although it is a thousand miles from the nearest sea.

(Although it’s titled ‘The Delta’ Gifford increasingly visualises it as a beach, or beaches, ‘the white beaches of the delta’, and the last words describe ‘the snakes on the beaches‘. Beaches,Ballard’s primal location.)

The Terminal Beach (1964)

Traven used to be a military pilot. Then his wife and six-year-old son were killed in a car crash. He’s spent six months travelling across the Pacific and on the last leg borrowed a boat from an Australia which has now finally brought him to the abandoned island of Eniwetok where the Americans carried out their atom bomb tests.

The small atoll is littered with rows of concrete bunkers, a network of concrete blocks, sunken lakes, figures of mannequins left out exposed to the blast and half melted. In this psychic zero zone he intends to stay and starve and die. He forages for the emergency rations left in the wrecks of the Superfortress bombers. There’s a strip of shops and bars where the Americans used to do R&R. Everything is abandoned. No people are there.

In a premonition of the technique of The Atrocity Exhibition the text is divided into short passages of a few paragraphs each with a heading, such as The Corpses, the Blocks, The Terminal Bunker. He is seeking to escape from time. Time ceases to be linear. Time becomes quantised, passing in sudden discrete jumps. His wife and son appear to him, standing perfectly still and expressionless. He makes a bed out of dried-up American magazines from the derelict shops. One of them has a photo of a six-year-old girl in it and he cuts it out and pastes it to the wall of the squalid concrete bunker where he sleeps as time disintegrates.

A pair of biologists arrive on the island in a light aircraft. They have a temporary office and lab there where they carry out tests on the irradiated fauna. the old biologist, Osbourne, is tetchy with Traven for nicking their food. The young woman assistant (and pilot) sympathises with him when she hears about his dead wife and son. She warns him a naval party has been sent to catch and repatriate him. Traven easily eludes them and they give up, get drunk, and detonate one of the old petrol dumps.

At the ‘climax’ of the story Traven comes across the mummified corpse of a dead Japanese and after holding a Sam Beckett-style conversation with the dead man, hauls it on a makeshift sledge back to his bunker and ties it to a chair where it sits in the moonlight like a tutelary deity.

Deep End (1961)

Earth is populated by the elderly, at least those who haven’t yet died from its terminal pollution. Holliday, aged 22, is one of the few people left under the age of 50, everyone else has migrated to the colonies on Mars. The story is set in an abandoned seaside resort with its characteristically empty hotels. Holliday is holed up in the penthouse room of an abandoned hotel but he knows the foundations are rotting and it’s sinking and also the sand is drifting up against it; soon he’ll have to move (very like Paul Bridgman, the protagonist of the 1962 story, The Cage of Sand, who is holed up in a ruined hotel in a deserted holiday resort which is buried by slowly drifting Martian sand, but has to keep moving on.)

An emigration officer, Buller, is making his last rounds of Earth’s few remaining occupied places, and is encouraging Holliday to leave the planet. The oceans have long retreated, consumed by mining processes that generated oxygen to terraform the colonised planets, leaving a residue of hydrogen which makes the former continents uninhabitable. Only in the former ocean depths can the last few humans survive (p.171).

Thus the old Atlantic Ocean has now shrunk to a remnant named Lake Atlantic, ten miles long and one mile wide, and thus it is that Holliday walks across what was once the ocean floor looking up at the hills which were once the Bahama islands. He feels some obscure compulsion to remain behind and ‘keep watch over a forgotten earth’.

The huge launching platforms on which people transferred to the long-haul ships to Mars are mostly abandoned and hundreds of them are due to fall back into the atmosphere and to earth. Only two are left functional. It’s now or never if he wants to leave.

As he chats to Granger in the Bar Neptune a launching platform crashes nearby and they decide to go and see it. It’s smashed into one of the pools close to Lake Atlantic. The mere fact of being drained holds a powerful psychological hold on Ballard’s imagination – puddles and pools where lakes and seas had been recur again and again, as in the drained lake at the start of The Drought.

It was here that Holliday and Granger discovered the fish, a two-foot-long dogfish (it’s handy that Granger used to be a marine biologist with a memory of thirty years back, when the oceans had only been half drained). It’s flopping as the water in its shallow lake drains away (water is always draining away) and so Holliday work hard for a couple of hours not only to shore the leaks but use their car to press the mud in closer to raise the water level to two feet deep so the fish can cruise around in style.

Tired and dirty, they drive back to the town, take showers, have a rest. Holliday is inspired, now, to stay on earth, he has something to live for, the fish is a symbol of the new life that can be created here. Which makes it all the more crushing when they drive back out to the ruined space platform and the pond the next morning and find three of the town’s remaining teenagers (due to leave on the last spaceship out of town) have kicked breaches in the wall, emptied the pond of its water (water is always draining away) and amused themselves by stoning the dogfish to death.

Holliday had that very morning told Bullen he was not leaving on the last ships from earth, but was staying to guard its wildlife and its future, and now… Such is Homo sapiens – Homo interfector more like.

The Volcano Dances (1964)

A short short story, only 6 pages long. Charles Vandervell has rented a house on the side of a smouldering volcano, which he shares with his girlfriend Miss Gloria Watson. At night the fires illuminate the sky, during the day he pays a ragged shaman – the ‘devil sticks man – who lives in caves across the road to dance to keep the volcano’s might at bay. For a reason we never find out, Vandervell is obsessed that a friend or acquaintance or colleague named Springman has been here, and he asks the estate manager who comes to tell him to leave and the car hire men who come to reclaim the rented car, whether they’ve seen him.

Over the course of a few days Vandervell refuses all the pleas for him to leave, obsessing about this Springman, while the volcano becomes more and more active. One afternoon Gloria wakes to find him gone – up into the cone? She waits till five, then takes the cash from his jacket and drives down the mountain.

Billennium (1961)

In the future the world is horribly overcrowded. Not a square foot of countryside remains, it is all factory farming, while every metre of space in every building in the vast sprawling cities is carefully measured and allotted out. Ward and Rossiter club together to rent a poky little one room apartment when they make an amazing discovery – they can get access to a long-sealed-off whole attic space!

At first they frolic in the kind of open space no-one anywhere on the planet enjoys any more. Then one of the girls they fancy asks if she can move in, so they say yes and the two girls move in and they set up a partition. The girls would feel more comfortable if Judith’s aunt could move in, too, as a sort of chaperone. Which she does.

Then they learn that Helen’s mother is ill and Helen would really like her to move in, too, so she can look after her. Then Helen’s father. All of them wanting partitions. At which point, right at the end of the story, Ward realises they now have less room per person than people renting the same space downstairs.

The moral of the story – that wherever people go and whatever they do, they will, through a hopeless, helpless kind of logic, screw up, poison and wreck whatever good they have – has stuck with me for the last forty years.

The Gioconda of the Twilight Noon (1964)

The Virgin of the Rocks by Leonardo da Vinci

A Gothic horror. After a minor eye injury became infected, Richard Maitland required surgery and bandages over his eyes for a month. His wife Judith accompanies him to his mother’s house high on the banks of a river estuary leading down to the sea. Blindfolded, he is plagued by the sound of the thousands of gulls but even more by an increasingly urgent vision, of a walled house high on cliffs, which reminds him of the mysterious grotto behind the Virgin in the Leonardo painting. In his daydream he enters the caves at the foot of the cliffs and climbs stairs up through the eerie caverns, towards a tall, green-robed figure… the lamia.

Over the next few days he reverts to this image, he can’t wait for his wife to stop fussing so he can return to it again and again, exploring the blue grottos down by the surf-wracked cliffs, and taking his time walking up those steps to confront that face.

When Dr Phillips tells him his bandages can come off in a few days and shoves a pencil flashlight in his face, it takes Maitland a few days to recover from the all-blotting daylight and retreat back into the blue grottos which emerge from the utter darkness of the blind.

And thus it is, that utterly transfixed by the power of the grottos and their Lady, when Dr Phillips finally removes the bandages and leaves Maitland with only a pair of sunglasses to protect his eyes… next morning Maitland makes a tour of his mother’s garden, looks out over the river and the cliffs opposite and thinks how utterly dull and flat it is and so… in a sudden movement which synchronises or is triggered by the sudden eruption into the air of the thousands of gull, in an impulsive move he blinds himself and his wife hears his exultant yell of pain and triumph.

The story is short and has a powerful if, somehow, predictable arc. Ballard’s achievement is to make you believe it, which rests on the haunting power he manages to pack into the descriptions of the blue caves. There’s plot alright in these early stories but Ballard’s ability at description which captures a mood is also vital.

The Lost Leonardo (1964)

This is an oddity, a detective story told in the calm, bachelor tones of Dr Watson writing up one of Sherlock Holmes’s cases. Reminds you how utterly staid and jolly decent Ballard was, and how the decency of most of his characters is so tremendously at odds with the deranged situations and psychic states they find (or put) themselves in.

A priceless painting by Leonardo is stolen from the Louvre. The narrator, Charles, a director at Northeby’s auction house (barely disguised parody of Sothebys) flies over to Paris to meet a French gallery owning friend. Over the coming weeks the friend, George de Stael, assembles the evidence for a mind-blowing suggestion: that the Leonardo is just the latest in a long line of depictions of the crucifixion which have been stolen over the past two hundred years, and in every case tampered with in a small way – the face of Ahasuerus, the Jew who allegedly insulted Jesus as he carried the cross towards Calvary, and who was as a result condemned to wander the earth forever – the Wandering Jew – well, this figure’s faces has been altered to appear more saintly, mild and compassionate.

Is it possible, George suggests, that Europe’s great paintings have been systematically stolen and the face repainted by the Wandering Jew himself, Ahasuerus, in a desperate bid to curry favour with He Who he Insulted.

Then comes a telegram from Georg saying he’s spotted their man at an auction in Paris and Charles flies over in a hurry, and the pair give chase to the man who is now calling himself Count Enrique Daneliwicz, but who stays one step ahead of them, fleeing Paris for Spain and then emptying and abandoning the rented villa just before they get there, our dashing heroes just catching sight of him as their cars pass in the narrow lane to the villa, Ballard giving us an impressive description of this aged, weathered and despairing figure, dressed smartly in a pinstriped suit, a man who saw the Messiah in the flesh and has suffered for it for nearly 2,000 years.

A clever, eerie yarn but insofar as the narrator is a perfectly sane, balanced, successful man of the world, entirely unlike the characteristic Ballard protagonist who is usually going to pieces in a world overcome with decay.

As a collection, though, it’s an impressive display of range and styles and voices, and contains four or five really timeless, hard-core Ballard classics.

Urban or exotic?

Ballard is often hailed as the poet laureate of a certain kind of urban alienation, yet a glance through these stories suggest he was almost the opposite of urban: virtually all of them are set in deeply exotic, non-urban locations. The only one actively set in London, he Lost Leonardo, is by far the most conservative in tone and subject:

• A Question of Re-entry – Amazon jungle – RIVER
• The Drowned Giant – unknown beach near a city – SEA
• End-Game – East European villa – COUNTRY
• The Illuminated Man – the Florida Everglades – RIVER
• The Reptile Enclosure – a seaside resort – SEA
• The Delta at Sunset – Central America – DRIED RIVER
• The Terminal Beach – a Pacific island – SEA
• Deep End – dried-up SEA
• The Volcano Dances – Mexico – a VOLCANO
• Billennium – a futuristic city – CITY
• The Gioconda of the Twilight Noon – country house overlooking an estuary leading to the SEA
• The Lost Leonardo – LONDON/PARIS/SPAIN

The Drowned World is set in a world overcome by sea. The Drought follows its desperate characters to the sea. Arguably Ballard is more the poet laureate of The Beach than of the City.

Related links

• Ballard’s Complete Short Stories volume 1 on Amazon
• Ballard short story bibliography

Reviews of other Ballard books

Novels

• The Drowned World (1962)
• The Drought (1964)
• The Crystal World (1966)
• Some style features of the early novels of J.G. Ballard
• J.G. Ballard’s literary experimentalism
• The Atrocity Exhibition (1970)
• Preface to the French edition of Crash
• Crash (1973)
• Pornography, simile and surrealism in The Atrocity Exhibition and Crash
• Concrete Island (1974)
• High Rise (1975)
• The Unlimited Dream Company (1979)
• Hello America (1982)

Short story collections

• The Voices of Time and Other Stories (1962)
• The Terminal Beach (1964)
• The Disaster Area (1967)
• Vermilion Sands (1971)
• Low-Flying Aircraft and Other Stories (1976)
• The Venus Hunters (1980)
• Myths of the Near Future (1982)

Other science fiction reviews

Late Victorian
1888 Looking Backward 2000-1887 by Edward Bellamy – Julian West wakes up in the year 2000 to discover a peaceful revolution has ushered in a society of state planning, equality and contentment
1890 News from Nowhere by William Morris – waking from a long sleep, William Guest is shown round a London transformed into villages of contented craftsmen

1895 The Time Machine by H.G. Wells – the unnamed inventor and time traveller tells his dinner party guests the story of his adventure among the Eloi and the Morlocks in the year 802,701
1896 The Island of Doctor Moreau by H.G. Wells – Edward Prendick is stranded on a remote island where he discovers the ‘owner’, Dr Gustave Moreau, is experimentally creating human-animal hybrids
1897 The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells – an embittered young scientist, Griffin, makes himself invisible, starting with comic capers in a Sussex village, and ending with demented murders
1899 When The Sleeper Wakes/The Sleeper Wakes by H.G. Wells – Graham awakes in the year 2100 to find himself at the centre of a revolution to overthrow the repressive society of the future
1899 A Story of the Days To Come by H.G. Wells – set in the same future London as The Sleeper Wakes, Denton and Elizabeth defy her wealthy family in order to marry, fall into poverty, and experience life as serfs in the Underground city run by the sinister Labour Corps

1900s
1901 The First Men in the Moon by H.G. Wells – Mr Bedford and Mr Cavor use the invention of ‘Cavorite’ to fly to the moon and discover the underground civilisation of the Selenites
1904 The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth by H.G. Wells – scientists invent a compound which makes plants, animals and humans grow to giant size, prompting giant humans to rebel against the ‘little people’
1905 With the Night Mail by Rudyard Kipling – it is 2000 and the narrator accompanies a GPO airship across the Atlantic
1906 In the Days of the Comet by H.G. Wells – a comet passes through earth’s atmosphere and brings about ‘the Great Change’, inaugurating an era of wisdom and fairness, as told by narrator Willie Leadford
1908 The War in the Air by H.G. Wells – Bert Smallways, a bicycle-repairman from Kent, gets caught up in the outbreak of the war in the air which brings Western civilisation to an end
1909 The Machine Stops by E.M. Foster – people of the future live in underground cells regulated by ‘the Machine’ until one of them rebels

1910s
1912 The Lost World by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – Professor Challenger leads an expedition to a plateau in the Amazon rainforest where prehistoric animals still exist
1912 As Easy as ABC by Rudyard Kipling – set in 2065 in a world characterised by isolation and privacy, forces from the ABC are sent to suppress an outbreak of ‘crowdism’
1913 The Horror of the Heights by Arthur Conan Doyle – airman Captain Joyce-Armstrong flies higher than anyone before him and discovers the upper atmosphere is inhabited by vast jellyfish-like monsters
1914 The World Set Free by H.G. Wells – A history of the future in which the devastation of an atomic war leads to the creation of a World Government, told via a number of characters who are central to the change
1918 The Land That Time Forgot by Edgar Rice Burroughs – a trilogy of pulp novellas in which all-American heroes battle ape-men and dinosaurs on a lost island in the Antarctic

1920s
1921 We by Evgeny Zamyatin – like everyone else in the dystopian future of OneState, D-503 lives life according to the Table of Hours, until I-330 wakens him to the truth
1925 Heart of a Dog by Mikhail Bulgakov – a Moscow scientist transplants the testicles and pituitary gland of a dead tramp into the body of a stray dog, with disastrous consequences
1927 The Maracot Deep by Arthur Conan Doyle – a scientist, engineer and a hero are trying out a new bathysphere when the wire snaps and they hurtle to the bottom of the sea, where they discover…

1930s
1930 Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon – mind-boggling ‘history’ of the future of mankind over the next two billion years – surely the most sweeping vista of any science fiction book
1938 Out of the Silent Planet by C.S. Lewis – baddies Devine and Weston kidnap Oxford academic Ransom and take him in their spherical spaceship to Malacandra, as the natives call the planet Mars

1940s
1943 Perelandra (Voyage to Venus) by C.S. Lewis – Ransom is sent to Perelandra aka Venus, to prevent a second temptation by the Devil and the fall of the planet’s new young inhabitants
1945 That Hideous Strength: A Modern Fairy-Tale for Grown-ups by C.S. Lewis– Ransom assembles a motley crew to combat the rise of an evil corporation which is seeking to overthrow mankind
1949 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell – after a nuclear war, inhabitants of ruined London are divided into the sheep-like ‘proles’ and members of the Party who are kept under unremitting surveillance

1950s
1950 I, Robot by Isaac Asimov – nine short stories about ‘positronic’ robots, which chart their rise from dumb playmates to controllers of humanity’s destiny
1950 The Martian Chronicles – 13 short stories with 13 linking passages loosely describing mankind’s colonisation of Mars, featuring strange, dreamlike encounters with Martians
1951 Foundation by Isaac Asimov – the first five stories telling the rise of the Foundation created by psychohistorian Hari Seldon to preserve civilisation during the collapse of the Galactic Empire
1951 The Illustrated Man – eighteen short stories which use the future, Mars and Venus as settings for what are essentially earth-bound tales of fantasy and horror
1952 Foundation and Empire by Isaac Asimov – two long stories which continue the future history of the Foundation set up by psychohistorian Hari Seldon as it faces attack by an Imperial general, and then the menace of the mysterious mutant known only as ‘the Mule’
1953 Second Foundation by Isaac Asimov – concluding part of the  Foundation Trilogy, which describes the attempt to preserve civilisation after the collapse of the Galactic Empire
1953 Earthman, Come Home by James Blish – the adventures of New York City, a self-contained space city which wanders the galaxy 2,000 years hence, powered by ‘spindizzy’ technology
1953 Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury – a masterpiece, a terrifying anticipation of a future when books are banned and professional firemen are paid to track down stashes of forbidden books and burn them until one fireman, Guy Montag, rebels
1953 The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester – a breathless novel set in a 24th century New York populated by telepaths and describing the mental collapse of corporate mogul Ben Reich who starts by murdering his rival Craye D’Courtney and becomes progressively more psychotic as he is pursued by telepathic detective, Lincoln Powell
1953 Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke a thrilling narrative involving the ‘Overlords’ who arrive from space to supervise mankind’s transition to the next stage in its evolution
1954 The Caves of Steel by Isaac Asimov – set 3,000 years in the future when humans have separated into ‘Spacers’ who have colonised 50 other planets, and the overpopulated earth whose inhabitants live in enclosed cities or ‘caves of steel’, and introducing detective Elijah Baley to solve a murder mystery
1956 The Naked Sun by Isaac Asimov – 3,000 years in the future detective Elijah Baley returns, with his robot sidekick, R. Daneel Olivaw, to solve a murder mystery on the remote planet of Solaria
— Some problems with Isaac Asimov’s science fiction
1956 They Shall Have Stars by James Blish – explains the invention, in the near future, of i) the anti-death drugs and ii) the spindizzy technology which allow the human race to colonise the galaxy
1956 The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester – a fast-paced phantasmagoria set in the 25th century where humans can teleport, a terrifying new weapon has been invented, and tattooed hard-man, Gulliver Foyle, is looking for revenge
1959 The Triumph of Time by James Blish – concluding novel of Blish’s ‘Okie’ tetralogy in which mayor of New York John Amalfi and his friends are present at the end of the universe
1959 The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut – Winston Niles Rumfoord builds a space ship to explore the solar system where encounters a chrono-synclastic infundibula, and this is just the start of a bizarre meandering fantasy which includes the Army of Mars attacking earth and the adventures of Boaz and Unk in the caverns of Mercury

1960s
1961 A Fall of Moondust by Arthur C. Clarke a pleasure tourbus on the moon is sucked down into a sink of moondust, sparking a race against time to rescue the trapped crew and passengers
1962 The Drowned World by J.G. Ballard – Dr Kerans is part of a UN mission to map the lost cities of Europe which have been inundated after solar flares melted the worlds ice caps and glaciers, but finds himself and his colleagues’ minds slowly infiltrated by prehistoric memories of the last time the world was like this, complete with tropical forest and giant lizards, and slowly losing their grasp on reality.
1962 The Voices of Time and Other Stories – Eight of Ballard’s most exquisite stories including the title tale about humanity slowly falling asleep even as they discover how to listen to the voices of time radiating from the mountains and distant stars, or The Cage of Sand where a handful of outcasts hide out in the vast dunes of Martian sand brought to earth as ballast which turned out to contain fatal viruses. Really weird and visionary.
1962 A Life For The Stars by James Blish – third in the Okie series about cities which can fly through space, focusing on the coming of age of kidnapped earther, young Crispin DeFord, aboard space-travelling New York
1962 The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick In an alternative future America lost the Second World War and has been partitioned between Japan and Nazi Germany. The narrative follows a motley crew of characters including a dealer in antique Americana, a German spy who warns a Japanese official about a looming surprise German attack, and a woman determined to track down the reclusive author of a hit book which describes an alternative future in which America won the Second World War
1962 Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut – the memoirs of American Howard W. Campbell Jr. who was raised in Germany and has adventures with Nazis and spies
1963 Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut – what starts out as an amiable picaresque as the narrator, John, tracks down the so-called ‘father of the atom bomb’, Felix Hoenniker for an interview turns into a really bleak, haunting nightmare where an alternative form of water, ice-nine, freezes all water in the world, including the water inside people, killing almost everyone and freezing all water forever
1964 The Drought by J.G. Ballard – It stops raining. Everywhere. Fresh water runs out. Society breaks down and people move en masse to the seaside, where fighting breaks out to get near the water and set up stills. In part two, ten years later, the last remnants of humanity scrape a living on the vast salt flats which rim the continents, until the male protagonist decides to venture back inland to see if any life survives
1964 The Terminal Beach by J.G. Ballard – Ballard’s breakthrough collection of 12 short stories which, among more traditional fare, includes mind-blowing descriptions of obsession, hallucination and mental decay set in the present day but exploring what he famously defined as ‘inner space’
1964 Dr. Strangelove, or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb by Peter George – a novelisation of the famous Kubrick film, notable for the prologue written as if by aliens who arrive in the distant future to find an earth utterly destroyed by the events described in the main narrative
1966 Rocannon’s World by Ursula Le Guin – Le Guin’s first novel, a ‘planetary romance’ or ‘science fantasy’ set on Fomalhaut II where ethnographer and ‘starlord’ Gaverel Rocannon rides winged tigers and meets all manner of bizarre foes in his quest to track down the aliens who destroyed his spaceship and killed his colleagues, aided by sword-wielding Lord Mogien and a telepathic Fian
1966 Planet of Exile by Ursula Le Guin – both the ‘farborn’ colonists of planet Werel, and the surrounding tribespeople, the Tevarans, must unite to fight off the marauding Gaal who are migrating south as the planet enters its deep long winter – not a good moment for the farborn leader, Jakob Agat Alterra, to fall in love with Rolery, the beautiful, golden-eyed daughter of the Tevaran chief
1966 – The Crystal World by J.G. Ballard – Dr Sanders journeys up an African river to discover that the jungle is slowly turning into crystals, as does anyone who loiters too long, and becomes enmeshed in the personal psychodramas of a cast of lunatics and obsessives
1967 The Disaster Area by J.G. Ballard – Nine short stories including memorable ones about giant birds, an the man who sees the prehistoric ocean washing over his quite suburb.
1967 City of Illusions by Ursula Le Guin – an unnamed humanoid with yellow cat’s eyes stumbles out of the great Eastern Forest which covers America thousands of years in the future when the human race has been reduced to a pitiful handful of suspicious rednecks or savages living in remote settlements. He is discovered and nursed back to health by a relatively benign commune but then decides he must make his way West in an epic trek across the continent to the fabled city of Es Toch where he will discover his true identity and mankind’s true history
1966 The Anti-Death League by Kingsley Amis –
1968 2001: A Space Odyssey a panoramic narrative which starts with aliens stimulating evolution among the first ape-men and ends with a spaceman being transformed into a galactic consciousness
1968 Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick In 1992 androids are almost indistinguishable from humans except by trained bounty hunters like Rick Deckard who is paid to track down and ‘retire’ escaped ‘andys’ – earning enough to buy mechanical animals, since all real animals died long ago
1969 Ubik by Philip K. Dick In 1992 the world is threatened by mutants with psionic powers who are combated by ‘inertials’. The novel focuses on the weird alternative world experienced by a group of inertials after they are involved in an explosion on the moon
1969 The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Le Guin – an envoy from the Ekumen or federation of advanced planets – Genly Ai – is sent to the planet Gethen to persuade its inhabitants to join the federation, but the focus of the book is a mind-expanding exploration of the hermaphroditism of Gethen’s inhabitants, as Genly is forced to undertake a gruelling trek across the planet’s frozen north with the disgraced native lord, Estraven, during which they develop a cross-species respect and, eventually, a kind of love
1969 Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut – Vonnegut’s breakthrough novel in which he manages to combine his personal memories of being an American POW of the Germans and witnessing the bombing of Dresden in the character of Billy Pilgrim, with a science fiction farrago about Tralfamadorians who kidnap Billy and transport him through time and space – and introduces the catchphrase ‘so it goes’

1970s
1970 Tau Zero by Poul Anderson – spaceship Leonora Christine leaves earth with a crew of fifty to discover if humans can colonise any of the planets orbiting the star Beta Virginis, but when its deceleration engines are damaged, the crew realise they need to exit the galaxy altogether in order to find space with low enough radiation to fix the engines – and then a series of unfortunate events mean they find themselves forced to accelerate faster and faster, effectively travelling forwards through time as well as space until they witness the end of the entire universe – one of the most thrilling sci-fi books I’ve ever read
1970 The Atrocity Exhibition by J.G. Ballard – Ballard’s best book, a collection of fifteen short experimental texts in stripped-down prose bringing together key obsessions like car crashes, mental breakdown, World War III, media images of atrocities and clinical sex
1971 Vermilion Sands by J.G. Ballard – nine short stories including Ballard’s first, from 1956, most of which follow the same shape, describing the arrival of a mysterious, beguiling woman in the fictional desert resort of Vermilion Sands, the setting for extravagantly surreal tales of the glossy, lurid and bizarre
1971 The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula Le Guin – thirty years in the future (in 2002) America is an overpopulated environmental catastrophe zone where meek and unassuming George Orr discovers that is dreams can alter reality, changing history at will. He comes under the control of visionary neuro-scientist, Dr Haber, who sets about using George’s powers to alter the world for the better with unanticipated and disastrous consequences
1971 Mutant 59: The Plastic Eater by Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis – a genetically engineered bacterium starts eating the world’s plastic, leading to harum scarum escapades in disaster-stricken London
1972 The Word for World Is Forest by Ursula Le Guin – novella set on the planet Athshe describing its brutal colonisation by exploitative Terrans (who call it ‘New Tahiti’) and the resistance of the metre-tall, furry, native population of Athsheans, with their culture of dreamtime and singing
1972 The Fifth Head of Cerberus by Gene Wolfe – a mind-boggling trio of novellas set on a pair of planets 20 light years away, the stories revolve around the puzzle of whether the supposedly human colonists are, in fact, the descendants of the planets’ shape-shifting aboriginal inhabitants who murdered the first earth colonists and took their places so effectively that they have forgotten the fact and think themselves genuinely human
1973 Crash by J.G. Ballard – Ballard’s most ‘controversial’ novel, a searingly intense description of its characters’ obsession with the sexuality of car crashes, wounds and disfigurement
1973 Rendezvous With Rama by Arthur C. Clarke – in 2031 a 50-kilometre-long object of alien origin enters the solar system, so the crew of the spaceship Endeavour are sent to explore it in one of the most haunting and evocative novels of this type ever written
1973 Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut – Vonnegut’s longest and most experimental novel with the barest of plots and characters allowing him to sound off about sex, race, America, environmentalism, with the appearance of his alter ego Kilgore Trout and even Vonnegut himself as a character, all enlivened by Vonnegut’s own naive illustrations and the throwaway catchphrase ‘And so on…’
1974 Concrete Island by J.G. Ballard – the short and powerful novella in which an advertising executive crashes his car onto a stretch of wasteland in the juncture of three motorways, finds he can’t get off it, and slowly adapts to life alongside its current, psychologically damaged inhabitants
1974 Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said by Philip K. Dick – America after the Second World War is a police state but the story is about popular TV host Jason Taverner who is plunged into an alternative version of this world where he is no longer a rich entertainer but down on the streets among the ‘ordinaries’ and on the run from the police. Why? And how can he get back to his storyline?
1974 The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin – in the future and 11 light years from earth, the physicist Shevek travels from the barren, communal, anarchist world of Anarres to its consumer capitalist cousin, Urras, with a message of brotherhood and a revolutionary new discovery which will change everything
1974 Inverted World by Christopher Priest – vivid description of a city on a distant planet which must move forwards on railway tracks constructed by the secretive ‘guilds’ in order not to fall behind the mysterious ‘optimum’ and avoid the fate of being obliterated by the planet’s bizarre lateral distorting, a vivid and disturbing narrative right up until the shock revelation of the last few pages
1975 High Rise by J.G. Ballard – an astonishingly intense and brutal vision of how the middle-class occupants of London’s newest and largest luxury, high-rise development spiral down from petty tiffs and jealousies into increasing alcohol-fuelled mayhem, disintegrating into full-blown civil war before regressing to starvation and cannibalism
1976 Slapstick by Kurt Vonnegut – a madly disorientating story about twin freaks, a future dystopia, shrinking Chinese and communication with the afterlife
1979 The Unlimited Dream Company by J.G. Ballard – a strange combination of banality and visionary weirdness as an unhinged young man crashes his stolen plane in suburban Shepperton, and starts performing magical acts like converting the inhabitants into birds, conjuring up exotic foliage, convinced his is on a mission to liberate them
1979 Jailbird by Kurt Vonnegut – the satirical story of Walter F. Starbuck and the RAMJAC Corps run by Mary Kathleen O’Looney, a baglady from Grand Central Station, among other satirical notions including the new that Kilgore Trout, a character who recurs in most of his novels, is one of the pseudonyms of a fellow prison at the gaol where Starbuck serves a two year sentence, one Dr Robert Fender

1980s
1980 Russian Hide and Seek by Kingsley Amis – set in an England of 2035 after a) the oil has run out and b) a left-wing government left NATO and England was promptly invaded by the Russians – ‘the Pacification’, who have settled down to become a ruling class and treat the native English like 19th century serfs
1980 The Venus Hunters by J.G. Ballard – seven very early and often quite cheesy sci-fi short stories, along with a visionary satire on Vietnam (1969), and then two mature stories from the 1970s which show Ballard’s approach sliding into mannerism
1981 The Golden Age of Science Fiction edited by Kingsley Amis – 17 classic sci-fi stories from what Amis considers the ‘Golden Era’ of the genre, basically the 1950s
1981 Hello America by J.G. Ballard – a hundred years from now an environmental catastrophe has turned America into a vast, arid desert, except for west of the Rockies which has become a rainforest of Amazonian opulence, and it is here that a ragtag band of explorers from old Europe discover a psychopath has crowned himself President Manson, has revived an old nuclear power station in order to light up Las Vegas, and plays roulette in Caesar’s Palace to decide which American city to nuke next
1981 The Affirmation by Christopher Priest – an extraordinarily vivid description of a schizophrenic young man living in London who, to protect against the trauma of his actual life (father died, made redundant, girlfriend committed suicide) invents a fantasy world, the Dream Archipelago, and how it takes over his ‘real’ life
1982 Myths of the Near Future by J.G. Ballard – ten short stories showing Ballard’s range of subject matter from Second World War China to the rusting gantries of Cape Kennedy
1982 2010: Odyssey Two by Arthur C. Clarke – Heywood Floyd joins a Russian spaceship on a two-year journey to Jupiter to a) reclaim the abandoned Discovery and b) investigate the monolith on Japetus
1984 Neuromancer by William Gibson – Gibson’s stunning debut novel which establishes the ‘Sprawl’ universe, in which burnt-out cyberspace cowboy, Case, is lured by ex-hooker Molly into a mission led by ex-army colonel Armitage to penetrate the secretive corporation, Tessier-Ashpool, at the bidding of the vast and powerful artificial intelligence, Wintermute
1986 Burning Chrome by William Gibson – ten short stories, three or four set in Gibson’s ‘Sprawl’ universe, the others ranging across sci-fi possibilities, from a kind of horror story to one about a failing Russian space station
1986 Count Zero by William Gibson – second in the ‘Sprawl trilogy’
1987 2061: Odyssey Three by Arthur C. Clarke – Spaceship Galaxy is hijacked and forced to land on Europa, moon of the former Jupiter, in a ‘thriller’ notable for Clarke’s descriptions of the bizarre landscapes of Halley’s Comet and Europa
1988 Mona Lisa Overdrive by William Gibson – third of Gibson’s ‘Sprawl’ trilogy in which street-kid Mona is sold by her pimp to crooks who give her plastic surgery to make her look like global simstim star Angie Marshall, who they plan to kidnap but is herself on a quest to find her missing boyfriend, Bobby Newmark, one-time Count Zero; while the daughter of a Japanese gangster who’s sent her to London for safekeeping is abducted by Molly Millions, a lead character in Neuromancer

1990s
1990 The Difference Engine by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling – in an alternative version of history, Charles Babbage’s early computer, instead of being left as a paper theory, was actually built, drastically changing British society, so that by 1855 it is led by a party of industrialists and scientists who use databases and secret police to keep the population suppressed