J. Ballard: The Complete Short Stories

Short stories are the loose change in the treasury of fiction, easily ignored beside the wealth of novels available, an over-valued currency that often turns out to be counterfeit. At its best, in Borges, Ray Bradbury and Edgar Allan Poe, the short story is coined from precious metal, a glint of gold that will glow for ever in the deep purse of your imagination.

Short stories have always been important to me. I like their snapshot quality, their ability to focus intensely on a single subject. They're also a useful way of trying out the ideas later developed at novel length. Almost all my novels were first hinted at in short stories, and readers of The Crystal World, Crash and Empire of the Sun will find their seeds germinating somewhere in this collection.

When I started writing, fifty years ago, short stories were immensely popular with readers, and some newspapers printed a new short story every day. Sadly, I think that people at present have lost the knack of reading short stories, a response perhaps to the baggy and long-winded narratives of television serials.

Young writers, myself included, have always seen their first novels as a kind of virility test, but so many novels published today would have been better if they had been recast as short stories. Curiously, there are many perfect short stories, but no perfect novels.

The short story still survives, especially in science fiction, which makes the most of its closeness to the folk tale and the parable. Many of the stories in this collection were first published in science fiction magazines, though readers at the time loudly complained that they weren't science fiction at all.

But I was interested in the real future that I could see approaching, and less in the invented future that science fiction preferred. The future, needless to say, is a dangerous area to enter, heavily mined and with a tendency to turn and bite your ankles as you stride forward. A correspondent recently pointed out to me that the poetry-writing computers in Vermilion Sands are powered by valves. And why don't all those sleek people living in the future have PCs and pagers?

I could only reply that Vermilion Sands isn't set in the future at all, but in a kind of visionary present — a description that fits the stories in this book and almost everything else I have written. But oh for a steam-powered computer and a wind-driven television set. Now, there's an idea for a short story

I first met Jane Ciracylides during the Recess, that world slump of boredom, lethargy and high summer which carried us all so blissfully through ten unforgettable years, and I suppose that may have had a lot to do with what went on between us. Certainly I can't believe I could make myself as ridiculous now, but then again, it might have been just Jane herself.

Whatever else they said about her, everyone had to agree she was a beautiful girl, even if her genetic background was a little mixed. The gossips at Vermilion Sands soon decided there was a good deal of mutant in her, because she had a rich patina-golden skin and what looked like insects for eyes, but that didn’t bother either myself or any of my friends, one or two of whom, like Tony Miles and Harry Devine, have never since been quite the same to their wives.

We spent most of our time in those days on the balcony of my apartment off Beach Drive, drinking beer — we always kept a useful supply stacked in the refrigerator of my music shop on the street level — yarning in a desultory way and playing i-Go, a sort of decelerated chess which was popular then. None of the others ever did any work; Harry was an architect and Tony Miles sometimes sold a few ceramics to the tourists, but I usually put a couple of hours in at the shop each morning, getting off the foreign orders and turning the beer.

One particularly hot lazy day I’d just finished wrapping up a delicate soprano mimosa wanted by the Hamburg Oratorio Society when Harry phoned down from the balcony. ‘Parker’s Choro-Flora?’ he said. ‘You’re guilty of overproduction. Come up here. Tony and I have something beautiful to show you.’

When I went up I found them grinning happily like two dogs who had just discovered an interesting tree.

‘Well?’ I asked. ‘Where is it?’

Tony tilted his head slightly. ‘Over there.’

I looked up and down the street, and across the face of the apartment house opposite.

‘Careful,’ he warned me. ‘Don’t gape at her.’

I slid into one of the wicker chairs and craned my head round cautiously.

‘Fourth floor,’ Harry elaborated slowly, out of the side of his mouth. ‘One left from the balcony opposite. Happy now?’

‘Dreaming,’ I told him, taking a long slow focus on her. ‘I wonder what else she can do?’

Harry and Tony sighed thankfully. ‘Well?’ Tony asked.

‘She’s out of my league,’ I said. ‘But you two shouldn’t have any trouble. Go over and tell her how much she needs you.’

Harry groaned. ‘Don’t you realize, this one is poetic, emergent, some thing straight out of the primal apocalyptic sea. She’s probably divine.’ The woman was strolling around the lounge, rearranging the furniture, wearing almost nothing except a large metallic hat. Even in shadow the sinuous lines of her thighs and shoulders gleamed gold and burning. She was a walking galaxy of light. Vermilion Sands had never seen anything like her.

‘The approach has got to be equivocal,’ Harry continued, gazing into his beer. ‘Shy, almost mystical. Nothing urgent or grabbing.’ The woman stooped down to unpack a suitcase and the metal vanes of her hat fluttered over her face. She saw us staring at her, looked around for a moment and lowered the blinds.

We sat back and looked thoughtfully at each other, like three triumvirs deciding how to divide an empire, not saying too much, and one eye watching for any chance of a double-deal.

Five minutes later the singing started.

At first I thought it was one of the azalea trios in trouble with an alkaline pH, but the frequencies were too high. They were almost out of the audible range, a thin tremolo quaver which came out of nowhere and rose up the back of the skull.

Harry and Tony frowned at me.

‘Your livestock’s unhappy about something,’ Tony told me. ‘Can you quieten it down?’

‘It’s not the plants,’ I told him. ‘Can’t be.’

The sound mounted in intensity, scraping the edges off my occipital bones. I was about to go down to the shop when Harry and Tony leapt out of their chairs and dived back against the wall.

‘Steve, look out!’ Tony yelled at me. He pointed wildly at the table I was leaning on, picked up a chair and smashed it down on the glass top. I stood up and brushed the fragments out of my hair.

‘What the hell’s the matter?’

Tony was looking down at the tangle of wickerwork tied round the metal struts of the table. Harry came forward and took my arm gingerly. ‘That was close. You all right?’

‘It’s gone,’ Tony said flatly. He looked carefully over the balcony floor and down over the rail into the street.

‘What was it?’ I asked.

Harry peered at me closely. ‘Didn’t you see it? It was about three inches from you. Emperor scorpion, big as a lobster.’ He sat down weakly on a beer crate. ‘Must have been a sonic one. The noise has gone now.’

After they’d left I cleared up the mess and had a quiet beer to myself. I could have sworn nothing had got on to the table.

On the balcony opposite, wearing a gown of ionized fibre, the golden woman was watching me.

I found out who she was the next morning. Tony and Harry were down at the beach with their wives, probably enlarging on the scorpion, and I was in the shop tuning up a Khan-Arachnid orchid with the UV lamp. It was a difficult bloom, with a normal full range of twenty-four octaves, but unless it got a lot of exercise it tended to relapse into neurotic minor-key transpositions which were the devil to break. And as the senior bloom in the shop it naturally affected all the others. Invariably when I opened the shop in the mornings, it sounded like a madhouse, but as soon as I’d fed the Arachnid and straightened out one or two pH gradients the rest promptly took their cues from it and dimmed down quietly in their control tanks, two-time, three-four, the multi-tones, all in perfect harmony.