“All summer the cloud-sculptors would come from Vermilion Sands and sail their painted gliders above the coral towers that rose like white pagodas beside the highway to Lagoon West.”
Sounds lovely, doesn’t it? Rich and warm and rhythmic, full of magnificent views and invitingly avant-garde vacationeers. Vermilion Sands, last – as in terminal, as in only remaining – resort of the super-rich, the ultra-self-regarding, the mega-disaffected: a summer escape of endless beaches but no seas, sonic statues*, operatic flora, lakes of fused glass, and viciously bored people.
‘The Cloud-Sculptors of Coral D’ is a tale of bitter love, climatic revenge, and ephemeral installation art, told by the jaded but still (mostly) gallant Major Parker, retired air force pilot and reluctant beachcomber, who finds himself running an oddball sky-bound performance art troupe with professional lounge lizard Van Eyck, failed portraitist Nolan, and manic dwarf Petit Manuel, all four of them drawn into the celebrity maelstrom that is Leonora Chanel (a type of retro-futuristic Paris Kardashian, if you will). To summarise would be to ruin, but if that gorgeously cadenced opening smacks of radiant Monaco sublime, then the ending is perfectly pitched Death Valley tragi-farce.
“We had entered an inflamed landscape. Half a mile away the angular cornices of the summer house jutted into the vivid air as if distorted by some faulty junction of time and space.”
Which certainly nails the undertow of every summer resort holiday I’ve ever had.
Ballard inverts science-fictional technique. An example: for the first two-thirds of the story, Leonora Chanel is described as having “jewelled eyes”, and because this is Ballardian SF, and because Vermilion Sands is a super-rich hi-technotopia, you naturally enough take it literally: she has body-mods, diamond eyeballs, or emerald, maybe topaz, whatever, but anyway actual bionic gemstone eyeballs! A literal sfnal eyeball-kick! Cool as. And then, in a brief prelude of surface slippage before the finale’s carnival of destruction, Leonora has a hissy fit, and Ballard shows you it’s all for show. Just like summer, when all you can really rely on is the cold winter depth of a human heart.
Ballard said of his imagined desert resort (a far cry from his native Shepperton) that it was a place where he would be happy to live. But then he also said that it “has more than its full share of dreams and illusions, fears and fantasies,” and that “it celebrates the neglected virtues of the glossy, lurid and bizarre.” So of course it’s a place where the great writer of surrealistic interiority would want to live. He’d have had enormous fun sipping coffee on a terrace and watching the slow-quick-slow entropy waltz circling around him.
He wrote a suite of nine stories set there, of which ‘The Cloud-Sculptors of Coral D’ was the eighth written (in 1967, so it’s the same age as me, which is one small reason why it’s my favourite), but it fronts the collected edition, and thereby sets the tone: lush and decadent surface detail, a Riviera of the imagination: louche, decaying, and dangerous underneath. The Vermilion Sands suite (not an accidental term) may be Ballard’s most flamboyantly surrealistic tales. They’re certainly, to me, his most straightforwardly enjoyable — perfect beach reading for people who aren’t, in fact, that keen on beaches.
(*There are at least four very different, yet oddly similar, prog-ambient type music tracks named for this story, all by different bands. It’s just that kind of story.)
First published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, December 1967. Collected in Vermilion Sands, Berkley Books, 1971, now Vintage, 2016; and in The Complete Short Stories, Volume Two, Harper Perennial, 2006. Picked by Robert Cook. Robert is Anglo-Irish, a registered nurse, and a writer. He lives in Brisbane, Australia.
A Personal Anthology 