Adam Thirlwell: The Complete Short Stories: Volume 1

J.G. BALLARD

VOLUME I

Fourth Estate

An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers 77–85 Fulham Palace Road London W6 8JB 4thestate.co.uk

This edition published by Fourth Estate in 2014

First published in Great Britain by Flamingo in 2001

This collection copyright © J. G. Ballard 2001

Most of the stories in this book previously appeared in the following collections:

The Voices of Time © J. G. Ballard 1963 The Terminal Beach © J. G. Ballard 1964

The right of J. G. Ballard to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988.

Introduction © Adam Thirlwell 2014

Interview © Vanora Bennett 2004

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

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Cover by Stanley Donwood

Ebook Edition © MAY 2012 ISBN: 9780007369386

Version: 2014-08-16

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Author’s Note

Introduction by Adam Thirlwell

Prima Belladonna

Escapement

The Concentration City

Venus Smiles

Manhole 69

Track 12

The Waiting Grounds

Now: Zero

The Sound-Sweep

Zone of Terror

Chronopolis

The Voices of Time

The Last World of Mr Goddard

Studio 5, The Stars

Deep End

The Overloaded Man

Mr F. is Mr F.

Billennium

The Gentle Assassin

The Insane Ones

The Garden of Time

The Thousand Dreams of Stellavista

Thirteen to Centaurus

Passport to Eternity

The Cage of Sand

The Watch-Towers

The Singing Statues

The Man on the 99th Floor

The Subliminal Man

The Reptile Enclosure

A Question of Re-Entry

The Time-Tombs

Now Wakes the Sea

The Venus Hunters

End-Game

Minus One

The Sudden Afternoon

The Screen Game

Time of Passage

Interview with J. G. Ballard

About the Author

By the Same Author

About the Publisher

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 …

J.G. Ballard, 2001

There is no single way of talking about the collected stories of J. G. Ballard. They are so various that no one reading will contain them. When talking about this giant oeuvre, it’s better to borrow terms from geology, and other sciences of natural phenomena; better to talk of strata , or of eras .

And a preliminary summary of these epochs in one paragraph might go something like this …

First there is the era of what might be called, for useful shorthand, science fiction : where the nature of Nature has undergone sinister changes, and become strangely technological. In these stories, many of which take place in a warped version of Palm Springs, the reader will find sonic sculptures, and singing flowers, among other curiosities. In the second era, the modulations Ballard enjoyed performing on the natural world became grander: now these modulations affected the deep conditions of being: his material became time and space. In the third era, his imagination became more and more apocalyptic, replete with visions of environmental disaster. And all these eras were ones of dense and hectic composition – the 750 pages of this complete edition’s first half move only from 1956 to 1964. Its second half, of equal length, takes in the greater time span of 1964 to 1992. And it was somewhere in the late 1960s that a new and final era emerged: where the cosmic alterations now took place in an atmosphere of late modernity – computerised finance, terror, dictator politics, and flat pornography. It was this landscape that formed the last and longest era of Ballard’s stories – a shiny, dilapidated vista of motels, space voyages, assassination attempts.

In other words, Ballard’s stories constitute a corpus that is unlike anything else in twentieth-century British fiction. This corpus is unique.