‘The Sound Sweep’ by J. G. Ballard

Madame Gioconda is an opera singer who lives in a noisy future. The daytimes are full of traffic noise and nighttime brings “the mysterious clapping of her phantoms”. She calls Mangon, who tries to tidy up the psychoacoustic mess with his “sonovac”. But the story is by J. G. Ballard, whose rectangular concrete head was furnished entirely with messes, so peace and quiet are not on the menu for Madame Gioconda.

Sometimes I like to think ‘The Sound Sweep’ is an elaborate cautionary tale about the kind of miracle cures for tinnitus that occasionally appear in the little advertising zones of my laptop screen. Sometimes I like to think it’s an energetic plunge into the idea that sounds exist as objects, or a berserk exploration of the relationship between noise and waste. It’s a big philosophical hoover, and it’s heading directly for your house.

First published in Science Fantasy, February 1960. Collected in The Voices of Time, Orion, 1992

‘The Index’ by J. G. Ballard

The life of Henry Rhodes Hamilton is too strange and sprawling to be contained in any book, which perhaps is why only the index to his life story survives. Sample entries:

“Avignon, birthplace of HRH, 9-13, childhood holidays, 27; research at Pasteur Institute of Ophthalmology, 101; attempts to restore anti-Papacy, 420-35

“Schweitzer, Albert, receives HRH, 199; performs organ solo for HRH, 201; discusses quest for the historical Jesus with HRH, 203-11; HRH compared to by Leonard Bernstein, 245; expels HRH, 246”

One of Ballard’s funniest and most playful experiments with form, and the sort of thing that makes any writer who encounters it curse themselves for not thinking of it first.

First published in Bananas magazine, 1977. Collected in War Fever, Collins, 1964 and Complete Stories Vol 1, Flamingo, 2001. Also published in The Paris Review, 1991, and available to subscribers to read online here. Also anthologised in That Glimpse of Truth: 100 of the Finest Short Stories Ever Written, ed. David Miller, Head of Zeus, 2014

‘Notes Towards A Mental Breakdown’ by JG Ballard

Talking of doubling: there is a chapter in Ballard’s 1967 fix-up-collection-collage-novel-anomaly-thing The Atrocity Exhibition titled ‘Notes Towards A Mental Breakdown’ which is entirely different to this 1976 story; and yet also, because it’s Ballard, isn’t, quite. This ‘Notes’ though is probably my all-time favourite Ballard story, because it is made entirely of footnotes, and I love footnotes. Or possibly it’s that I love footnotes because of this story. Whatever.

An eighteen-word synopsis is all that remains of an “undiscovered document” detailing the final breakdown of one Dr Robert Loughlin, and events associated therewith (and just pause there a second to consider that whole “undiscovered document” notion). The story consists of those eighteen words and a paragraph-long footnote for each one of them (including for the two ‘a’s, two ‘his’s, and an ‘and’) that gradually eke out the details of the various characters’ tragic final meeting at Gatwick airport. Each of the characters is named for an aircraft manufacturer, except for Loughlin’s lover who is called Leonora Carrington (but who isn’t the Leonora Carrington, or at least I don’t think so). About halfway through is it noted of Loughlin, who is obsessed with man-powered flight, that “for some reason, empty swimming pools and multi-storey car parks exerted a particular fascination.” By this point, it’s clear that Ballard is having fun with his own mythology. We are then told that the obviously bonkers Dr Loughlin had a habit of meticulously footnoting every single word of large pharmaceutical indexes, usually with “imaginary aviation references”, and it is at this point you realise that you’re in an ouroboros of a story and that there’s no way out.

First published in Bananas, issue number unknown, 1976, and in RE/Search, No. 8/9, 1984. Collected in War Fever, Paladin, 1991, and The Complete Short Stories Volume Two, Flamingo, 2001

‘The Intensive Care Unit’ by J.G. Ballard

“As we undressed and exposed ourselves to each other the screens merged into a last oblivious close-up . . .”

With typical Ballardian prescience, this harrowing dystopian story reveals how contact with other people is restricted to screen-time only (sound familiar?) with humans isolated in their homes in solitary confinement (even the couple’s wedding night takes place apart). We are never told why this separation is necessary – seasoned storytellers know to shun explanatory neatness – but instead witness the aftermath of what occurs when a family (Ballard’s intensive care unit) decides to flout the draconian rules and meet in person. (Oh, how life imitates art.) Bookended by the present tense carnage is the story of how the couple met (via a screen of course), the ensuing domestic bliss and arrival of children (conceived via AID – which we presume to be a version of IVF). Amid the dark humour lie meditations on our desire for physical connection with others and what we become when this is removed.

First published in Myths of the Near Future, Jonathan Cape, 1982; collected in The Complete Stories, Vol 2, Fourth Estate, 2014 and English Short Stories from 1900 to the present, Everyman Classic, 1988

‘The Cloud-Sculptors of Coral D’ by J. G. Ballard

“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.

‘Arrival at the Zone’ by JG Ballard

These linked micro-tales are the moment we saw the emergence of a new, enduring voice from JG Ballard: no longer just one of a generation of visionary British science fiction writers, but now also a prophet of apocalypse and place, modern technology and pop-culture, violence and dislocation, sex and death. This book would lead on to his not-quite-trilogy of Crash, Concrete Islandand High-Rise, the books that today define his reputation and style. A short 12-line piece from the book, ‘Arrival at the Zone’, perfectly captures the tone.

“They sat in the unfading sunlight on the sloping concrete. The abandoned motorway ran off into the haze, silver firs growing through its sections. Shivering in the cold air, Talbot looked out over this landscape of broken flyovers and crushed underpasses.”

And then, three lines later:

“Against the drab concrete the white fabric of her dress shone with an almost luminescent intensity.”

Within pages we are seeing lurid visions of Monroe, of the Kennedys, of Elizabeth Taylor, in a world of ruined concrete and violence. The effect of these fractured shards is cumulative. The Atrocity Exhibition is the most frightening, dread-drenched book I have read.

First published in The Atrocity Exhibition, Jonathan Cape, 1969

‘The Index’ by J. G. Ballard

J. G. Ballard conceptualizes the book index as an autobiography in ‘The Index’. A brief prefatory note from an editor designates the index as all that remains of a autobiography by “Physician and philosopher, man of action and patron of the arts, sometime claimant to the English throne and founder of a new religion, Henry Rhodes Hamilton.” Immediately, the mystery of Hamilton’s person draws us into reading the index creatively, and engaging it narratively. Ultimately, Hamilton is who you make him, depending on how you connect references as disparate as:

“Berenson, Bernard, conversations with HRH, 134; offer of adoption, 145; loan of
Dürer etching, 146; law-suits against HRH, 173-85
Bergman, Ingrid, 197, 234, 267
Ecclesiastes, Book of, 87
Eckhart, Meister, 265
Hiroshima, HRH observes atomic cloud, 258
Hitler, Adolf, invites HRH to Berchtesgaden, 166; divulges Russia invasion plans, 172; impresses HRH, 179; disappoints HRH, 181”

A play on paranoia and conspiracy, this is Ballard at his disruptive best, challenging post-Enlightenment notions of individual selfhood by forcing us to define a person entirely by his quoted relations to others.

Published in The Paris Review, 1991 and available to subscribers here. Collected in The Complete Short Stories of J. G. Ballard: Volume 2, Fourth Estate, 2014

‘The Terminal Beach’ by JG Ballard

At night, as he lay asleep on the floor of the ruined bunker, Traven heard the waves breaking along the shore of the lagoon, like the sounds of giant aircraft warming up at the ends of their runways.

The key moment in Ballard’s fragmented evocation of a man’s anguished exploration of an abandoned atomic test site, vainly searching for his dead wife and child, is when a scientist he comes across tells him: “This island is a state of mind.” Ballard’s modus operandi is right there. He uses the blasted landscape of Eniwetok in the Marshall Islands – concrete bunkers, submarine pens and blast pans filled with deformed test dummies – to convey the shattered mentality of mankind in the post-nuclear age (the ‘Pre-Third’ as it is called in the story). Ballard is often criticized for the weakness of his plots and characterisation but here it doesn’t matter. Traven may be a cypher but Ballard locates him in an unforgettable landscape, haunted and dreamlike, and in his dilemma makes a compelling diagnosis of the human condition in the aftermath of the bomb.

First published in New Worlds, March 1964, and collected in The Terminal Beach, Gollancz 1964. Also in The Complete Short Stories of J. G. Ballard: Volume 1, Fourth Estate, 2014

‘The Enormous Space’ by J.G. Ballard

I first read this story while I was studying architecture at university and it made the whole thing feel redundant. It showed me that rather than design buildings you can just see the ones that already exist in a different way—Perec came next, intensifying the realisation. It’s still building and the best way to do it is by writing.

My copy of this story, in War Fever, is littered with so many notes that it runs the risk of sprouting a novel. It came later in Ballard’s writing career when the stories got better by dispensing with narrative in a more traditional sense, and the premise is simple: one morning a man decides not to leave his suburban home. The fallout is anything but, domestic space is a desert island traversed by a lone explorer, the house dilating with psychological proximity and distance, between agoraphobia and claustrophobia. The result is mesmerising, a mix between Caspar David Friedrich and potholing.

Nobody else has demonstrated so powerfully how the imagination can remake the world, while also showing that utopias can only really exist in our own heads, and it’s in there where they can quickly turn on us. Dali invented The Paranoid Critical Method but Ballard did it better.

First published in Interzone, 1989, and collected in War Fever, Collins 1990, and the Complete Short Stories Vol 2, Fourth Estate, 2014

‘Having a Wonderful Time’ by J G Ballard

J G Ballard is rarely conventional, but his more experimental work tends to be found in his short stories. One of my favourites is ‘Having a Wonderful Time’, written, as the title suggests, as a series of postcards. Diana and her husband Richard head off to Las Palmas for two weeks of sun and sand in July, only to discover that, when the time comes to return to England, their departure has been delayed, first by a day, but soon indefinitely. Diana adapts, pursuing amateur dramatics as well as a crush on Beach Counsellor Mark, but Richard claims the holiday complexes are “human reserves” and intends to form a resistance group. Written in the clipped, upbeat tone of the typical postcard (for those old enough to remember) Richard’s desperate rebellion plays out against Diana’s rehearsals.

First published in Bananas, Spring 1978 and collected in Myths of the Near Future, Jonathan Cape, 1982, and now available in The Complete Stories of J G Ballard Volume 2, Fourth Estate, 2014

‘The Intensive Care Unit’ by J.G Ballard

‘The Intensive Care Unit’ is a beautifully paced dystopian text written by Ballard in 1977, the very dark tale of a physical family reunion. Against all government recommendations, and having spent a lifetime only communicating via screens – in courtship, marriage, pregnancy and child-rearing – two parents and their children finally get together, for the first time, in real life.

The result, well, I think I should let you imagine how J.G. Ballard would write such a scene of unbounded love…

In terms of pyrotechnics, there is an article dealing with this subject entitled: How to Light Fireworks at Home – Without Getting Dead.

In Myths of the Near Future, Jonathan Cape, 1982. Also in The Complete Stories, Vol 2, Fourth Estate, 2014 and English Short Stories from 1900 to the present, Everyman Classic, 1988

‘Mr F is Mr F’ by JG Ballard

This early tale by Ballard is a Freudian nightmare. Charles Freeman is rapidly losing weight, getting smaller and looking younger. At first, he believes this alarming physical transformation is psychosomatic and attempts to hide it from his pregnant wife. As the story unfolds his metamorphosis begins to limit his freedom, sap his energy and change the way people respond to him. The narrative style is more traditional than that of Ballard’s later stories, but it exhibits the same economy and energy of language. It also exhibits the author’s lifelong fascination with the overlap of weird and mundane aspects of perception. A crazy but strangely convincing story – once read never forgotten.

First published in Science Fantasy, Vol 16, No 48 in August 1961, and collected in The Complete Short Stories of JG Ballard: Volume 1, Fourth Estate, 2014

‘1974: How to Face Doomsday Without Really Trying’ by JG Ballard

Twenty or thirty years ago [Ballard said this in 1974, to CBC interviewer Carol Orr] the elements of fiction … occupied a much smaller space. … But now I don’t think this is the case. I think we have seen the invasion of almost every aspect of our lives by fictions of one kind or another. We see this is people’s homes – the way they furnish their houses and apartments. Even the sorts of friends they have seem to be dictated by fictions, fantasies, by standards invented by other people to serve various ends, not necessarily commercial. But we’re living more and more in a hot mix of fictions of every kind.

In this interview, Ballard casually limns the next fifty years of human development, dismissing the contemporary obsession with nuclear war and instead pointing to the way that computers would transform human experience and that information technology would seep into our identities. “We are moving into a realm,” he says, “in which inner space is no longer just inside our skulls but is in the terrain we see around us in everyday life.” Fiction was taking over, and to cope we could not turn our backs on technology, but had to learn to cope with it. As prediction, it is extraordinary – and as a benchmark for the powers of a writer’s imagination, it is without equal.

In Extreme Metaphors, 4th Estate, 2012, edited by Simon Sellars and Dan O’Hara.

‘The Greatest TV Show on Earth’ by JG Ballard

This was my first and still my favourite Ballard story. I think I read this when I was around seventeen years old and I’d only really read books like Of Mice and Men and The Remains of the Day at school. I wasn’t a big reader until I got to my late teens – too busy kicking footballs, throwing cricket balls and playing with my own balls to care about literature. Essentially, I had no idea that you could write like this – with a total lack of characters or plot, no dialogue and certainly no particular literary merit to speak of. What I love about this story is that the concept (time travel meant you could make TV news set in the past by travelling there and filming it) rules the entire six pages. It’s bold and Ballard is clearly just sketching out an idea without needing such bourgeois complications like characterisation. Little did I know that absolutely everything he wrote is like this and it does get tiresome if you binge on it. But this story, it’s still my first love, and it always will be.

1972, from The Complete Short Stories Volume 2, Harper Perennial 2006