Telling Stories: The Case of J.G. Ballard and Robert SheckleyCan you write short stories without recognizable characters, coherent plot, or realistic dialogue? Of course you can. That's why God invested modernism. The list of writers who have produced such works is long and distinguished: Jorge Borges, David Barthelme, David Foster Wallace, Italo Calvino, et. al.But what happens if you're writing in a specific genre like science fiction? Which brings us to the problem of J.G. Ballard, whose massive volume of complete stories was recently published.I read a fair amount of SF growing up, and over the years, I've discovered the stories and images that remain most indelible come from two writers: J.G. Ballard and Robert Sheckley. Ballard today is lionized as one of the most innovative SF and post-modern writers of the 20th century. Sheckley, regarded by many of one of the great SF darkly absurdist writers of his time , is basically out of print. (A new collection, edited by Jonathan Lethem, is due out in April 2012.)Life, and writing, aren't fair, as if we needed any reminders.Why Ballard? Why not Sheckley?Revisiting 60s-era Ballard's stories -- some vaguely remembered, others forgotten -- has been alternately frustrating, puzzling, but only fitfully rewarding.What I do seem to have remembered more or less accurately is Ballard's special blend of desolation and post-apocalyptic menace, often embodied in his bleak landscapes of abandoned buildings, ruined suburbs, empty swimming pools (a favorite), and infestations of sand, either desert or ocean. Ballard possessed a dystopian vision utterly unlike from that of any other SF writer of his time, with the possible exception of Harlan Ellison.The opening words of a Ballard story can be as distinctive and evocative as the chords of a familiar song:-- “Terminal Beach”: “At night, as he lay asleep on the floor of the ruined bunker, Traven heard the waves breaking along the shore of the lagoon ...”-- “Cry Hope, Cry Fury”: “Again last night, as the dusk air moved across the desert from Vermilion Sands, I saw a faint shiver of rigging among the reefs …” -- “Voices of Time”: Later Powers often thought of Whitby, and the strange grooves the biologist had cut, apparently at random, all over the floor of the empty swimming pool.”-- “Cage of Sand”: “At sunset, when the vermilion glow reflected from the dunes along the horizon fitfully illuminated the white faces of the abandoned hotels …”-- “Thousand Dreams of Stellavista”: “No one comes to Vermilion Sands now, and I suppose there are few people who have ever heard of it …”It doesn’t get any better than that … no, I mean that literally. With a few exceptions (“Stellavista,” “Voices of Time,” “The Cloud Sculptors of Coral D”), these haunting openings are about as good as a Ballard story gets. Especially those set in the abandoned desert enclave of Vermilion Sands -- a ruined Palm Springs setting where the landscape and buildings themselves appear to be on psychedelic drugs. (Read “Stellavista”; you won’t remember the characters, but you’ll never forget the insane “psychotropic” house.)But beyond mood and menace, most of these pieces barely function as stories. Even in his earlier, purely SF phase, Ballard appears to have little interest in character development or narrative, and even Marin Amis, in his introduction, acknowledges Ballard’s inability to write plausible dialogue.Ballard’s literary status, however, doesn’t rest on his SF, but on his reputation as a modernist who faithfully pursued his obsessions, whether conspiracies, ecological collapse, and the “eroticism” of car crashes. Yet his work, now stripped of their shock value, lacks the genuinely imaginative leaps of great fabulists like Borges and Calvino.The title of his piece, “The Assassination of John Kennedy Considered as an Automobile Race,” is all you need to know: the story itself is barely an appendage to the title. “The Drowned Giant” pays tribute to Barthelme, but otherwise plods.Ballard’s ability to evoke a psychological state of isolation and alienation is unparalleled, but without the qualities of nimbleness, word play, and humor, most of these stories have not aged well.Contrast him to Robert Sheckley, a writer even more prolific than Ballard, who wrote highly inventive, satiric, and darkly absurdist stories in a career that spanned more than 50 years. He is hardly a forgotten figure in SF fandom, but his reputation in the larger literary community is overshadowed by that of Ballard.In one respect, this is hardly surprising. Sheckley never escaped from the confines of the SF ghetto, at a time when the walls between genre and mainstream fiction were virtually insurmountable. (The list of successful SF escapees from the 1950s-70s era is a short one: Ballard and Ray Bradbury, maybe one or two others I’ve forgotten. Isaac Asimov made his non-SF reputation through nonfiction.)Nevertheless, the best of Sheckley’s tales, while rooted in their time, remain consistently fresh and inventive, able to delight and engage a new generation of readers in ways that Ballard no longer can. Sheckley was a creature of pulp fiction, in the best sense of that term, but his polished craftsmanship and darkly unpredictable humor endure. Ballard’s heavy obsessive prose – not so much.I recall those eerie opening scenes in Ballard, but that’s about all. On the other hand, I can remember, in rough approximation, complete Sheckley stories such as “The Specialist” (aliens combining to form a spaceship), “The Monsters” (very complex anthropology), “Ask a Foolish Question” (the secrets of the universe), and “Pilgrimage to Earth” (forget about buying sex, what about purchasing true love?).In the end, the Collected Stories of J.G. Ballard feel more like artifacts from an archaeological dig; they can illuminate a certain time and place, but they can no longer speak to us.Sheckley, on the other hand, left us with stories, and as human beings, our hunger for such tales remains constant and vast in every time and age.
I'm not reading this book in a linear fashion (and I think Ballard would approve).Because... I'm in a science-fiction/fantasy/horror book club and we're reading a smaller edition called "The Best Short Stories of J.G. Ballard." I read the "Best" about six or seven years ago, but I want to read them again to refresh my memory, so I have marked them in this edition and I'm saving them for last (i.e. right before book club). With the exception of those stories, I am roughly one-third of the way through the book.I first came across Ballard in college when I had to read "Time of Passage" for a short story class.There was something about Ballard and his writing that hooked me.I initially have a bit of difficulty entering each short story (I blame my American ear as my eyes stumble over British syntax), but Ballard beckons. He flirts and teases and entices me to read more.The ideas he presents are intriguing:* Microsonics -- the idea that sounds we can't hear affect us emotionally (as in "Track 12"), and the idea that they must be swept away if we are to feel truly calm and relaxed (as in "The Sound-Sweep")* Psychogeography -- the idea that where we live has an impact on our psyche* The simultaneous stigmatization and destigmatization of mental illness -- a world where it's perfectly OK to be mentally ill as long as you take responsibility for your actions and psychiatric treatment is illegal (as in "The Insane Ones")The things he creates are fascinating:* Psychotropic houses -- houses that absorb and react to our emotions, with walls that darken when we're angry and lighten when we're happy or expand and contract with our breathing (as in "The Thousand Dreams of Stellavista")* Plants that can be tuned to perform classical musical pieces (as in "Prima Belladonna")And then there's the way he plays with time and space and our inner worlds.All the while, Ballard's writing seems to have a lyrical quality to it... like he's leading me in a dance to the final flourish (usually something unpredictable).It's both beautiful and disturbing.
Do You like book The Complete Short Stories (2002)?
It took a while while for Ballard to really hit his stride, and he was much better as a conceptualist than as a storyteller. But what concepts! How to write a J.G. Ballard story: Technology + sex + Levi-Straussian anthropology + the impact of behavioral psychology on modern man. Recombine in every possible way. Wheeee!!!!Also, this volume gives you a great perspective on Ballard's evolution as a writer, from his early sci-fi pieces to his more stylistically distinct later works, as well as a bunch of odd experimental one-offs, some of which are amazing. "The Drowned Giant" is pure Borges, "A Guide to Virtual Death" is funny as hell, "The Ultimate City" is alarmingly prescient, and "Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan" makes me want to fuck Ronald Reagan.
—Andrew
Wonderful collection of all of Ballard's short stories. It's a huge book with surprisingly few duds. My favorites include The Illuminated Man, clearly the inspiration for The Crystal World, which includes meaning bombs like "It's almost as if a sequence of displaced but identical images were being produced by refraction through a prism, but with the element of time replacing the role of light." and The Ultimate City (which isn't using ultimate in the sense of being good...). I've read most of Ballard's novels but not many of the short stories before. They're well worth the time.
—Robert
JG Ballard's stuff divides fairly neatly into three phases:1) 1956-64 - At first he was writing actual science fiction, and he was really cranking it out. There are some beautiful ones in this early part, probably my favourites - "The Sound Sweep", "The Concentration City", "Billenium", "The Voices of Time". It became gradually clear - to JG and to the reader - that he wasn't really able to do the hard-sf thing (extrapolation with a lot of wires and diagrams), but instead, he was developing, slowly, a genuine voice, a way of seeing the present in the guise of the future, and a unique form of poetry. He also wrote a trio of potboiling disaster novels, which are fun for people who like contemplating the destruction of humanity, which I know is a popular form of entertainment.2) 1965-83 - Something happened. He became noticably strange in 1965, at the exact time when the 60s counterculture was becoming self-conscious. You may be thinking that he would have turned out like the Michael Caine character in Children of Men, all long hair and the best hashish, the poshest, most mature and most well-read hippy, but no, he kept his suit on and his hair was cut every three weeks. Intellectually, he was hurtling towards the outer edge, and then when he found it, he built a further edge on top of it. Falling in with a bunch of other new crazed experimentalists (like Michael Moorcock) he became part of the take-over of the formerly staid British sf mag New Worlds. This mag then became a major platform for cultural madness and outrage in Britain in print for the next five years. (And was duly prosecuted for obscenity.) There was an assumed sf sensibility behind the madness published by New Worlds but often it was hard to see because it wasn't there. This was when sf became "speculative fabulation". I wish I had a collection of New Worlds 1965-1970. Man alive! I would look over them and be amazed – so prescient, and so gone. So anyway, in this period JG invented "the compressed novel", i.e. the very refined, hyperintellectualised mashup of Hollywood Babylon, the National Enquirer, the facelifts of the rich and famous, the autopsies of the rich and famous, the study of autoerotic fatalities, the architecture of Los Angeles with especial reference to its swimming pools, inner space as alien landscape, the topography of hospitals and beaches, aeronautical engineering manuals, the soundless autogeddon of the near future, the frigid poetry of motorways, decayed technologies, abandoned futures – all rendered into distilled prose in which the more lurid the event being described, the more crystalline became the prose. JG became infatuated by public events like the assassination of Kennedy and the death of Marilyn Monroe. This was not space opera. There were no aliens. Earth is the only alien planet, said JG Ballard, and he meant it. The apotheosis of this most ballardian phase of Ballard was, of course, Crash. Typical short story titles from this period:The Terminal BeachThe Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor RaceThe Atrocity ExhibitionThe Intensive Care UnitMemories of the Space AgeMyths of the Near Future3) 1984 – 2009 – With the publication of the non-sf, non-weird The Empire of the Sun, JG suddenly got himself a massive hit, and his long time fans were amazed to see him atop the bestseller lists and being filmed by Spielberg. Couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy but it was like seeing Captain Beefheart at No 1 in the pop charts. Huh? God help anyone who bought Crash after reading Empire of the Sun – “Oh look, dear, this is by the same author as that one you liked” “Oh okay, let’s see – whoah! Engine oil! Semen! Internal organs! Surgery! Deliberate car crashes! Aaaargh!”. So anyway, in his final phase JGB abandoned the short story form (only 80 pages of this 1186-page collection are from this period) and instead cranked out seven dystopian novels of varying qualities, which I confess have never tempted me. Maybe one day. No, what I like is JGB at his most elegiac, which is to say, at his most lethal. It's all in these short stories. Every home should have one. Random quote generator - from page 817 :Already other memories were massing around him, fragments that he was certain belonged to another man’s life, details from the case-history of an imaginary patient whose role he had been tricked into playing. As he worked on the Fortress high among the dunes, brushing the sand away from the cylinder vanes of the radial engines, he remembered other aircraft he had been involved with , vehicles without wings.Some first lines of stories:In the evening, as Franklin rested on the roof of the abandoned clinic,he would often remember Trippett, and the last drive he had taken into the desert with the dying astronaut and his daughter.All day this strange pilot had flown his antique aeroplane over the abandoned space centre, a frantic machine lost in the silence of Florida.At dusk Sheppard was still sitting in the cockpit of the stranded aircraft, unconcerned by the evening tide that advanced towards him across the beach.Later Powers often thought of Whitby and the strange grooves the biologist had cut, apparently at random, all over the floor of the empty swimming pool.At sunset, when the vermilion glow reflected from the dunes along the horizon fitfully illuminated the white faces of the abandoned hotels…These stories are sad, wistful, clinical, upsetting meditations on the future we thought we were going to have and the future we turned out to be having all the while, which were two very different things.
—Paul Bryant
