Ballard wrote over a hundred short stories. Nowadays they’re gathered in the two massive volumes of Collected Short Stories, but they were originally published in various science fiction magazines and then brought together into occasional book collections, of which about nine were published in the 1960s alone (although the situation is confused because 1. there are UK and US editions of most of the collections, each with slightly different contents, and 2. these occasional collections didn’t gather the stories in chronological order, but more randomly).
The Terminal Beach is often cited as the best single collection of Ballard’s short stories, and marked a commercial and critical breakthrough. I bought a paperback copy in 1973 and some of the stories in it have haunted me ever since. The UK edition contains the following stories:
- A Question of Re-entry (1963)
- The Drowned Giant (1964)
- End-Game (1963)
- The Illuminated Man (1964)
- The Reptile Enclosure (1963)
- The Delta at Sunset
- The Terminal Beach (1964)
- Deep End (1961)
- The Volcano Dances
- Billennium
- The Gioconda of the Twilight Noon
- The Lost Leonardo (1964)
1. A Question of Re-entry (1963)
This is a wonderfully slow, lazy, atmospheric evocation of the steamy, dank, rotting atmosphere of the Amazon jungle, which is a sensual pleasure to read and reread, and which has justifiably drawn comparisons with Joseph Conrad’s early stories of isolated white men going to seed in the tropics.
A strange atmosphere of emptiness hung over the inland lagoon, a flat pall of dead air that in a curious way was as menacing as any overt signs of hostility, as if the crudity and violence of all the Amazonian jungles met here in a momentary balance which some untoward movement might upset, unleashing appalling forces. Way in the distance, down-shore, the great trees leaned like corpses into the glazed air, and the haze over the water embalmed the jungle and the late afternoon in an uneasy stillness… (p.15)
The tale is set in the near future. Lieutenant Connolly works for the Space Department, Reclamation Division of the United Nations. Five years earlier a space capsule, the Goliath 7, carrying astronaut Captain Francis Spender returning from a moon mission, lost contact with mission control and is estimated to have crashed somewhere in the vast Amazon jungle. Hundreds of UN inspectors have been deployed to try and locate the lost capsule which was equipped with radio and sonar beacons. Connolly spent some time working at Lake Maracaibo on the dredging project there. Now he’s been redeployed to go deep into the jungle and contact native tribes to find out if any of them have seen anything.
The story opens with rich descriptions of the rotting swamps of the Amazon tributary Connolly is puttering up in a patrol launch skippered by Captain Pereira of the Native Protection Missions. They are heading up to the squalid camp of the Nambikwara tribe. This – it just so happens – is where a 40-something high-profile white man, Ryker, the former journalist and ‘man of action’ (sounds a bit like Ernest Hemingway) decided to flee when he got sick of Western civilisation.
Thus the scene is set for Connolly to arrive at the scrappy squalid camp of ‘the Nambis’ and find Ryker a tall, imposing, cynical and mysterious man. Why was he so insistent that Pereira bring him a clock, of all things, from faraway civilisation? Why was the tribe’s one-time medicine man dislodged from his position, and how does Ryker maintain his hold over the natives?
Briefly, it turns out that Ryker has a set of NASA tables which show the orbiting times of massive new ECHO satellite which periodically crosses the sky as a bright stars in the sky. That’s why he needs an accurate clock – in order to predict the arrival of the stars; just before it appear, Ryker leads the tribe off on whooping hollaring jaunts into the forest. It is much stronger juju than the old medicine man could ever manage. (Incidentally, glancing at the tables Connolly notes ‘today’s’ date, March 17 1978 – must have seemed a long way in the future when Ballard wrote this story.)
That’s Connolly’s first discovery. His second is when the shy, ill stunted son of the rejected witch doctor makes a swap with him, Connolly’s watch for some kind of shiny orb he’s holding. On close examination it turns out to be the lunar altimeter of the Goliath 7, crudely prised out of its control panel.
So the space capsule did land somewhere near by! Disgusted, Connolly shows the altimeter to Pereira and lets the captain deal with Ryker. He comes back to say Ryker admits it all. Spender was still alive when they pulled him out of the capsule, but didn’t last long, but making it clear that he didn’t intervene to save him.
The story ends with Pereira explaining that a man who fell to earth in a shiny capsule would have been greeted as a god by the Nambis, confirming all their beliefs in cargo cults, and… the Nambikwara eat their gods!
Thus the story brings together a number of Ballard’s early obsessions in a winning combination: the journey up a tropical river; a (sort of) scientist protagonist; the image of dead astronauts trapped in their burning capsules; the eeriness of the entire space programme itself seen for the first time by Connolly as not reflecting a healthy urge to explore but rather a projection of the inner neuroses of the technocratic West; and the central but obscure important of time… the scientifically accurate time needed to predict the capsules’ orbits overlaying or superimposed on the native tribe’s complete lack of time awareness, and behind it all the image of outer space itself which, at one point, Connolly poetically speculates, might itself be a vast unconscious symbol of time and eternity.
2. The Drowned Giant (1964)
A pessimistic fable or fairy tale.
A giant is washed up on the beach. Over the succeeding days and weeks the unnamed narrator visits and revisits the beach and watches the amazement of the huge crowds soon give away to bored vandalism, then the dismemberment of the huge body to be used for fertiliser and the enormous bones re-used as archways into scrap yards or even houses.
3. End-Game (1963)
In what seems to be a communist east European country, a discredited member of the Politburo – Constantin – has been tried, found guilty, and is now confined to a villa with his executioner – Malek – with whom he plays chess and has tantalising conversations, as he tries to find out… when he is scheduled to be executed. It’s quite a long story as Constantin pathetically persuades himself that Malek understands, or can be made to understand that he, Constantin, is in fact innocent, that the circumstances of the trial were invalid etc etc.
This is the kind of story which undermines any claim that Ballard is a world class literary writer because, although made up of familiar tropes and settings it is, ultimately, neither as clever nor as subtle as Ballard wants his readers to think it is.
4. The Illuminated Man (1964)
The visionary short story which he quickly turned into the full-blown ‘novel’, The Crystal World, this is an extraordinarily vivid account of a trip by journalists up the river Opotoka into the Florida Everglades, to the quickly emptying town of Maynard, to see for themselves the new phenomenon whereby the natural world is becoming crystallised. Told in retrospect by the narrator (one James B———) who says that ‘now’, a few months later, as he recuperates in Puerto Rico, the entire Florida peninsula has been abandoned and three million people displaced i.e. the phenomenon is spreading and will, in time, possibly make the entire planet uninhabitable.
If there’s any plot it’s that, as a wave of new crystallisation breaks over the forest B—– gets separated from the soldiers who took him into the danger zone and then quickly lost becoming a) caught up in a weird feud between the local chief of police, Captain Shelley, who has abducted the unhappy wife of an architect who’s gone round the bend, Marquand, with the result that they are creeping up on each other and taking potshots, either in the ruined city of Maynard or in the remote crystallising summer house where Shelley has spirited away young and sickly Mrs Marquand, first name Emerelda.
And b) having fallen asleep and become half crystallised, B—– runs for hours, maybe days, because movement is the only thing which holds back the crystallising process, until he comes across a clearing in the crystal forest, location of a church and of the Reverend Thomas, who continues to play his organ even as the jungle around crystallises, its canopy overhead forming a vast lattice of glass, with narrower and narrower alleys of escape. With this visionary man B—– stays as long as a week until it is clear the forest is going to swamp them at which point he thrusts the huge jewel-encrusted altar cross into B——‘s arms and pushes him out into the crystal forest, protected by the jewels, to blunder towards the frozen river and make his way slowly through the weirdly bejewelled landscape, finally emerging into reality, the army, and hospital.
But writing now, some months later in Puerto Rico, he finds reality bland and boring. And tells us that he knows he is fated, doomed and destined to return to the forest, at the earliest possible opportunity, in order to find his destiny among the jewelled tropical forest.
This story exemplifies Ballard’s ability to imagine something unlike anyone else, to root it in the workaday world of the present day, to give rein to his extraordinarily lush and purple prose and yet, at the same time, to be somehow completely unconvincing at a human level about any of the characters.
5. The Reptile Enclosure (1963)
Ballard creates an over-intellectual, frustratedly verbose academic, Roger Pelham, who has taken his dim unintellectual wife to the beach which is packed out, with spotty bodies and blaring transistor radios. A report on the radio that a new satellite is being launched from Cape Canaverel prompts him to half-heartedly try to explain the theory of a colleague of his, Sherrington, that orbiting satellites emit infrared light which our unconscious minds can detect – and that the colleague, Sherrington, thinks it might trigger innate releasing mechanisms or IRMs. And that there might be connections with mass graves of Cro-Magnon Man which have been found under what were in his day lakes.
He’s still trying to explain it when a strange mood comes over the beach, silence descends, people begin to stand, some walk down to the sea and form an orderly line along the surfline, Pelham seems to be the only one not affected as people in the cafe where they’re sitting lurch to their feet and make their way to the shore. Pelham calculates that the new satellite is in fact orbiting right over them and… at that moment the lines of silent zombie people begin to walk quietly into the sea.
This is a shilling shocker, short and sharp and lurid, and all the better for it.
6. The Delta at Sunset (1964)
Charles Gifford is the senior archaeologist leading a small archaeological expedition to a ruined Toltec site presumably somewhere in Central America. He is accompanied by his long-suffering wife, Louise, and a young academic assistant, Dr Richard Lowry, and a number of native Indian bearers and servants.
A few weeks earlier Gifford had some kind of bad accident at the excavation site which crushed his ankle. Now he is confined to a kind of stretcher-chair (p.127) with the sheets propped up so as not to touch his bandaged ankle. The ankle is starting to smell (presumably gangrene) and Gifford – not a nice man to begin with – has become deliberately provoking and vicious to Louise and Lowry alike, passing in and out of increasingly intense fevers, with dreams and visions.
Above all he is obsessed with the great mass of writhing snakes which emerges out into the dried-up delta they can see from their camp on a bluff. Every night they come out at the same time and wriggle and writhe across the dry mud flats
The story drops heavy hints about time – pondering the inscrutable faces of the native Indians, Gifford reflects that they are more in tune with the millennial-old forest than the average American with their obsessive time-consciousness, trying to cram ‘significant’ experiences into their lives.
At one point he turns lyrical about the snakes writhing down in the delta, speculating that they must carry in their DNA ancestral memories of ‘a coded internal landscape, a picture of the Paleocene’. As he sinks into fever he conceives of the delta as a zone of timelessness, where all time co-exists, and hallucinate the Toltec ruins reverting to some primeval level, being reassimilated into the jungle as they’re covered with moss and creepers.
So the reader is fairly prepared for the bombshell at the climax of the story when, listening yet again to her husband’s feverish descriptions of the snakes, Louise bursts out in exasperation that there are no snakes – the dry delta is bare as a bone!
So the obvious question is, Is Gifford feverishly hallucinating? Or is he he having a genuine experience and, psychologically, travelling back in time to the Paleocene era? Exactly as in the 1963 story Now Wakes The Sea when a white collar American, recovering from an illness, begins to hallucinate the deep ocean of the Triassic Era is washing over his suburb although it is a thousand miles from the nearest sea.
(Although it’s titled ‘The Delta’ Gifford increasingly visualises it as a beach, or beaches, ‘the white beaches of the delta’, and the last words describe ‘the snakes on the beaches‘. Beaches, early Ballard’s primal location.)
7. The Terminal Beach (1964)
Traven used to be a military pilot. Then his wife and six-year-old son were killed in a car crash. He’s spent six months travelling across the Pacific and on the last leg borrowed a boat from an Australia which has now finally brought him to the abandoned island of Eniwetok where the Americans carried out their atom bomb tests.
The small atoll is littered with rows of concrete bunkers, a network of concrete blocks, sunken lakes, figures of mannequins left out exposed to the blast and half melted. In this psychic zero zone he intends to stay and starve and die. He forages for the emergency rations left in the wrecks of the Superfortress bombers. There’s a strip of shops and bars where the Americans used to do R&R. Everything is abandoned. No people are there.
In a premonition of the technique of The Atrocity Exhibition the text is divided into short passages of a few paragraphs each with a heading, such as The Corpses, the Blocks, The Terminal Bunker. He is seeking to escape from time. Time ceases to be linear. Time becomes quantised, passing in sudden discrete jumps. His wife and son appear to him, standing perfectly still and expressionless. He makes a bed out of dried-up American magazines from the derelict shops. One of them has a photo of a six-year-old girl in it and he cuts it out and pastes it to the wall of the squalid concrete bunker where he sleeps as time disintegrates.
A pair of biologists arrive on the island in a light aircraft. They have a temporary office and lab there where they carry out tests on the irradiated fauna. the old biologist, Osbourne, is tetchy with Traven for nicking their food. The young woman assistant (and pilot) sympathises with him when she hears about his dead wife and son. She warns him a naval party has been sent to catch and repatriate him. Traven easily eludes them and they give up, get drunk, and detonate one of the old petrol dumps.
At the ‘climax’ of the story Traven comes across the mummified corpse of a dead Japanese and after holding a Sam Beckett-style conversation with the dead man, hauls it on a makeshift sledge back to his bunker and ties it to a chair where it sits in the moonlight like a tutelary deity.
8. Deep End (1961)
Earth is populated by the elderly, at least those who haven’t yet died from its terminal pollution. Holliday, aged 22, is one of the few people left under the age of 50, everyone else has migrated to the colonies on Mars. The story is set in an abandoned seaside resort with its characteristically empty hotels. Holliday is holed up in the penthouse room of an abandoned hotel but he knows the foundations are rotting and it’s sinking and also the sand is drifting up against it; soon he’ll have to move (very like Paul Bridgman, the protagonist of the 1962 story, The Cage of Sand, who is holed up in a ruined hotel in a deserted holiday resort which is buried by slowly drifting Martian sand, but has to keep moving on.)
An emigration officer, Buller, is making his last rounds of Earth’s few remaining occupied places, and is encouraging Holliday to leave the planet. The oceans have long retreated, consumed by mining processes that generated oxygen to terraform the colonised planets, leaving a residue of hydrogen which makes the former continents uninhabitable. Only in the former ocean depths can the last few humans survive (p.171).
Thus the old Atlantic Ocean has now shrunk to a remnant named Lake Atlantic, ten miles long and one mile wide, and thus it is that Holliday walks across what was once the ocean floor looking up at the hills which were once the Bahama islands. He feels some obscure compulsion to remain behind and ‘keep watch over a forgotten earth’.
The huge launching platforms on which people transferred to the long-haul ships to Mars are mostly abandoned and hundreds of them are due to fall back into the atmosphere and to earth. Only two are left functional. It’s now or never if he wants to leave.
As he chats to Granger in the Bar Neptune a launching platform crashes nearby and they decide to go and see it. It’s smashed into one of the pools close to Lake Atlantic. The mere fact of being drained holds a powerful psychological hold on Ballard’s imagination – puddles and pools where lakes and seas had been recur again and again, as in the drained lake at the start of The Drought.
It was here that Holliday and Granger discovered the fish, a two-foot-long dogfish (it’s handy that Granger used to be a marine biologist with a memory of thirty years back, when the oceans had only been half drained). It’s flopping as the water in its shallow lake drains away (water is always draining away) and so Holliday work hard for a couple of hours not only to shore the leaks but use their car to press the mud in closer to raise the water level to two feet deep so the fish can cruise around in style.
Tired and dirty, they drive back to the town, take showers, have a rest. Holliday is inspired, now, to stay on earth, he has something to live for, the fish is a symbol of the new life that can be created here. Which makes it all the more crushing when they drive back out to the ruined space platform and the pond the next morning and find three of the town’s remaining teenagers (due to leave on the last spaceship out of town) have kicked breaches in the wall, emptied the pond of its water (water is always draining away) and amused themselves by stoning the dogfish to death.
Holliday had that very morning told Bullen he was not leaving on the last ships from earth, but was staying to guard its wildlife and its future, and now… Such is Homo sapiens – Homo interfector more like.
9. The Volcano Dances (1964)
A short short story, only 6 pages long. Charles Vandervell has rented a house on the side of a smouldering volcano, which he shares with his girlfriend Miss Gloria Watson. At night the fires illuminate the sky, during the day he pays a ragged shaman – the ‘devil sticks man – who lives in caves across the road to dance to keep the volcano’s might at bay. For a reason we never find out, Vandervell is obsessed that a friend or acquaintance or colleague named Springman has been here, and he asks the estate manager who comes to tell him to leave and the car hire men who come to reclaim the rented car, whether they’ve seen him.
Over the course of a few days Vandervell refuses all the pleas for him to leave, obsessing about this Springman, while the volcano becomes more and more active. One afternoon Gloria wakes to find him gone – up into the cone? She waits till five, then takes the cash from his jacket and drives down the mountain.
10. Billennium (1961)
In the future the world is horribly overcrowded. Not a square foot of countryside remains, it is all factory farming, while every metre of space in every building in the vast sprawling cities is carefully measured and allotted out. Ward and Rossiter club together to rent a poky little one room apartment when they make an amazing discovery – they can get access to a long-sealed-off whole attic space!
At first they frolic in the kind of open space no-one anywhere on the planet enjoys any more. Then one of the girls they fancy asks if she can move in, so they say yes and the two girls move in and they set up a partition. The girls would feel more comfortable if Judith’s aunt could move in, too, as a sort of chaperone. Which she does.
Then they learn that Helen’s mother is ill and Helen would really like her to move in, too, so she can look after her. Then Helen’s father. All of them wanting partitions. At which point, right at the end of the story, Ward realises they now have less room per person than people renting the same space downstairs.
The moral of the story – that wherever people go and whatever they do, they will, through a hopeless, helpless kind of logic, screw up, poison and wreck whatever good they have – has stuck with me for the last forty years.
11. The Gioconda of the Twilight Noon (1964)
The Virgin of the Rocks by Leonardo da Vinci
A Gothic horror. After a minor eye injury became infected, Richard Maitland required surgery and bandages over his eyes for a month. His wife Judith accompanies him to his mother’s house high on the banks of a river estuary leading down to the sea. Blindfolded, he is plagued by the sound of the thousands of gulls but even more by an increasingly urgent vision, of a walled house high on cliffs, which reminds him of the mysterious grotto behind the Virgin in the Leonardo painting. In his daydream he enters the caves at the foot of the cliffs and climbs stairs up through the eerie caverns, towards a tall, green-robed figure… the lamia.
Over the next few days he reverts to this image, he can’t wait for his wife to stop fussing so he can return to it again and again, exploring the blue grottos down by the surf-wracked cliffs, and taking his time walking up those steps to confront that face.
When Dr Phillips tells him his bandages can come off in a few days and shoves a pencil flashlight in his face, it takes Maitland a few days to recover from the all-blotting daylight and retreat back into the blue grottos which emerge from the utter darkness of the blind.
And thus it is, that utterly transfixed by the power of the grottos and their Lady, when Dr Phillips finally removes the bandages and leaves Maitland with only a pair of sunglasses to protect his eyes… next morning Maitland makes a tour of his mother’s garden, looks out over the river and the cliffs opposite and thinks how utterly dull and flat it is and so… in a sudden movement which synchronises or is triggered by the sudden eruption into the air of the thousands of gull, in an impulsive move he blinds himself and his wife hears his exultant yell of pain and triumph.
The story is short and has a powerful if, somehow, predictable arc. Ballard’s achievement is to make you believe it, which rests on the haunting power he manages to pack into the descriptions of the blue caves. There’s plot alright in these early stories but Ballard’s ability at description which captures a mood is also vital.
12. The Lost Leonardo (1964)
This is an oddity, a detective story told in the calm, bachelor tones of Dr Watson writing up one of Sherlock Holmes’s cases. Reminds you how utterly staid and jolly decent Ballard was, and how the decency of most of his characters is so tremendously at odds with the deranged situations and psychic states they find (or put) themselves in.
A priceless painting by Leonardo is stolen from the Louvre. The narrator, Charles, a director at Northeby’s auction house (barely disguised parody of Sothebys) flies over to Paris to meet a French gallery owning friend. Over the coming weeks the friend, George de Stael, assembles the evidence for a mind-blowing suggestion: that the Leonardo is just the latest in a long line of depictions of the crucifixion which have been stolen over the past two hundred years, and in every case tampered with in a small way – the face of Ahasuerus, the Jew who allegedly insulted Jesus as he carried the cross towards Calvary, and who was as a result condemned to wander the earth forever – the Wandering Jew – well, this figure’s faces has been altered to appear more saintly, mild and compassionate.
Is it possible, George suggests, that Europe’s great paintings have been systematically stolen and the face repainted by the Wandering Jew himself, Ahasuerus, in a desperate bid to curry favour with He Who he Insulted.
Then comes a telegram from Georg saying he’s spotted their man at an auction in Paris and Charles flies over in a hurry, and the pair give chase to the man who is now calling himself Count Enrique Daneliwicz, but who stays one step ahead of them, fleeing Paris for Spain and then emptying and abandoning the rented villa just before they get there, our dashing heroes just catching sight of him as their cars pass in the narrow lane to the villa, Ballard giving us an impressive description of this aged, weathered and despairing figure, dressed smartly in a pinstriped suit, a man who saw the Messiah in the flesh and has suffered for it for nearly 2,000 years.
A clever, eerie yarn but insofar as the narrator is a perfectly sane, balanced, successful man of the world, entirely unlike the characteristic Ballard protagonist who is usually going to pieces in a world overcome with decay.
As a collection, though, it’s an impressive display of range and styles and voices, and contains four or five really timeless, hard-core Ballard classics.
Urban or exotic?
Ballard is often hailed as the poet laureate of a certain kind of urban alienation, yet a glance through these stories suggest he was almost the opposite of urban: virtually all of them are set in deeply exotic, non-urban locations. The only one actively set in London, The Lost Leonardo, is by far the most conservative in tone and subject:
- A Question of Re-entry – Amazon jungle – RIVER
- The Drowned Giant – unknown beach near a city – SEA
- End-Game – East European villa – COUNTRY
- The Illuminated Man – the Florida Everglades – RIVER
- The Reptile Enclosure – a seaside resort – SEA
- The Delta at Sunset – Central America – DRIED RIVER
- The Terminal Beach – a Pacific island – SEA
- Deep End – dried-up SEA
- The Volcano Dances – Mexico – a VOLCANO
- Billennium – a futuristic city – CITY
- The Gioconda of the Twilight Noon – country house overlooking an estuary leading to the SEA
- The Lost Leonardo – LONDON/PARIS/SPAIN
The Drowned World is set in a world overcome by sea. The Drought follows its desperate characters to the sea. Arguably Ballard is more the poet laureate of The Beach than of the City.
Credit
‘The Terminal Beach’ by J.G. Ballard was published by Victor Gollancz in 1964. Page references are to the 1974 Penguin paperback edition. All quotations are used for the purpose of criticism and review.
Related links
- The Terminal Beach Wikipedia article
- Ballard short story bibliography
Ballard’s Complete Short Stories volume 1 on Amazon
Related reviews
- J.G. Ballard reviews
- Science fiction reviews
Books & Boots 