Like Truth (though, whatever anyone says, it rarely deserves a place in that category, and a good thing too), the best imaginative or fantastic fiction comes up out of the well in a bad mood, from a place of struggle, rage and uncontrollable, deeply unsentimental weirdness, ready to sort you out. In ‘The Voices of Time’, the clock is running down. The genetic code, so recently discovered, is wearing out. Powers the doomed neurologist watches as his specimens–a brain damaged monkey in a jet pilot helmet, a sea anemone that has built itself a new nervous system, a spider that can only see gamma radiation–evolve to deal with a nascent yet still unimaginable future. Meanwhile, the great bowls of the radio telescopes sieve the sky for clues to the real time in the Universe. There’s a drained swimming pool and a woman called Coma. At the age of seventeen I couldn’t imagine anything more savagely exciting. This story doesn’t try to be science fiction. Instead it tries to make science fiction a poetics, and infuse it into the reader’s way of getting knowledge. This is the thing Ballard did so well. I was sad when he moved along, but contemporary fiction needed a sardonic, threatening, intelligent–if by then more easily measurable–darling, and from the 1970s on he was perfect for the part.
First published in New Worlds, October 1960. Collected in The Complete Short Stories Vol 1, Flamingo, 2001
