Nine Ballard short stories from the late 1950s and early 1960s, over 60 years ago.
- Storm-bird, Storm-dreamer (1966)
- The Concentration City (1957)
- The Subliminal Man (1963)
- Now Wakes the Sea (1963)
- Minus One (1963)
- Mr F. is Mr F. (1961)
- Zone of Terror (1960)
- Manhole 69 (1957)
- The Impossible Man (1965)
1. Storm-bird, Storm-dreamer (1966)
Five years ago the giant birds attacked. They seem to have been caused by new hormone fertilisers laid down in agriculture. Dead gulls and magpies were found their beaks glutted with the sticky new substance. But later that year clouds of terrifying huge mutant birds attacked, gulls and pigeons and other species with ten or twelve feet wingspans, swooping out of the sky, wreaking havoc on flocks of sheep or cattle and even people.
Short hawk-faced Crispin was the only survivor of an attack on his farm, fighting the huge birds off with a pitchfork. He was accepted into the new volunteer force being assembled to defend Britain from the giant birds. The story opens as, stationed on a rusting picket ship in a river estuary, he opens up with the navy machine gun and blasts huge numbers of birds out of the sky with ammunition brought from below by the brain-damaged hunchback, Quimby.
Although the whole concept of the giant birds, and the industrial-agricultural-scientific experiment which has given rise to them, take some getting used to, this is only the backdrop to the story.
The story concerns Crispin’s growing obsession with a widow who lives in a remote cottage on one bank of the river, and who Crispin sees, through his binoculars, apparently plucking giant feathers from the piles of birds he’s massacred. Her name is Catherine York and her husband was torn to shreds by one of the giant birds – ironically a huge white dove they had captured and thought they could tame – which then made off with her baby son, years ago. Now she is carefully plucking big white feathers to make what Crispin discovers, when he rows across the river to introduce himself, is a kind of bower or nest.
Crispin becomes convinced Catherine is in danger. A few days later a stray bird appears out of nowhere and gets tangled up in the ship’s rigging while Crispin blasts it with his gun. Via an unlikely set of mental processes, Crispin decides to gut the bird and make a man-sized suit out of it. Clambering up to the shallow cliff above Catherine’s house, wearing the suit, he runs down the steep slope and is half surprised to find the enormous wings catching the air and lifting him off his feet.
Crispin is still trying to get the hang of it and maintain his balance when Catherine York comes out of her cottage and lets off two blasts from her shotgun, shooting Crispin through the heart. She waits beside his crashed body till quite sure he is dead, then returns to her self-imposed task, making a nice soft nest for the giant dove who she hopes, one day, will return with her baby boy.
This is a devastating psychodrama, and a weird portrait of deranged obsession, the way traumatised humans retreat into private worlds of their own making.
2. The Concentration City (1957)
The city has thousands of levels and extends indefinitely in all directions. It doesn’t, in fact, appear to stop, it makes up the world and the universe. Student Franz M has dreamed up the idea of a flying machine, in reality little more than a glider, but he needs space to try it out in and so makes enquiries of his teachers, tries to co-opt his friend Gregson. They find a small sports hall and the glider flies alright, but he needs somewhere larger and so goes to investigate a vast hole which has been opened up in the city by demolishing a hundreds blocks across and several down. He and other bystanders are made giddy with agoraphobia.
At another moment he and Gregson are discussing the glider in a café, when the Fire Police arrive because someone has been breaking the law by having a naked flame or cooking at heat. The point being that, in a city which stretches indefinitely in every direction, they cannot afford to have fires. Anyone cooking at real heat or doing anything else risky is called a Pyro and there are plenty of meatheads like the café owner who applaud when the Fire Police in fact demolish the building the alleged Pyros were.
But the thrust of the story is that Franz eventually decides to buy a ticket on one of the super-express trains heading West, cadges money off Gregson for the food and sets off. He keeps a diary of his journey as he passes through neighbourhoods and sections and territories and federations but – the point is – never leaving the enormous, built-up, three-dimensional city and – here’s the rub – eventually finds himself right back where he started. There is no escape. There is no ‘outside’. The city is all that there is.
Structurally this is like Chronopolis in the sense that the main story is book-cased between the present-day setting: In Chronopolis we hear about Conrad Newman’s adventures in retrospect from the situation he’s now in, which is going on trial for the murder of Stacey, the ‘present’ in which the story opens and closes.
3. The Subliminal Man (1963)
Dr Robert Franklin works at ‘the Clinic’. Recently he’s been bothered by the unkempt student, Hathaway, who keeps buttonholing him in the car park with various fads and obsessions. The latest one is Hathaway’s conviction that the enormous, 100-foot-high billboards which are being erected alongside all the major motorways and freeways are deploying subliminal advertising.
We witness Franklin’s scepticism, shared by his wife Judith. But then we witness them experiencing strange compulsions to shop for stuff they really don’t need, for example after driving past one of the enormous signs Franklin feels an uncontrollable urge to stop at a services and buy a new pack of cigarettes even though, when he opens his dashboard shelf it turns out he’s already got five packs in there, unopened.
Towards the end Hathaway calls Franklin to tell him he climbed to the top of one of the new hoardings and, using a stroboscope, discovered that there are:
‘hundreds of high speed shutters blasting away like machine guns straight into people’s faces!’ (p.71)
But Hathaway disappears, presumed taken away by the police, and Franklin goes shopping with his wife.
A short, snappy fictional nod to an issue very much in the news at the time, brought to prominence by Vance Packard’s sensational exposé The Hidden Persuaders (1957).
4. Now Wakes the Sea (1963)
Mason lives in a neat American town with white picket fences and a nice local church. His illness kept him off work for six months, sleeping on a sofa in the lounge but luckily his wife, Miriam’s, independent income kept them afloat. But recently, in just the last three weeks, he has started to have visions (p.80). He is woken at night by the sound and smell of the sea and, opening his front door, sees most of his town underwater, only the top of the church spire emerging from the tumultuous waves which diminish down to the surf roaring onto the road just beyond his lawn. Eerily he walks out across his lawn and along the road washed by the sea, sometimes for hours, returning tired to his house, and waking the next morning to be questioned by his wife who is concerned about him.
During daylight hours he fingers the fossilised conch shell which they have in the house, which has become a sort of talisman, which he weighs in his hand:
like a capsule of time, the condensation of another universe (p.79)
After trying and failing to convince her that what he sees is real, Mason realises it’ll be wiser to drop it. She insists on staying up for a few nights to try and share his visions, admitting that she almost thinks that she can hear it too
‘like something very old and blind, like something waking again after millions of years.’ (p.85)
But both times falls fast asleep and Mason tiptoes past her. On these last few occasions he sees the figure of a woman dancing on the headland overlooking the town and tries to make it towards he but she disappears before he can struggle through the rising surf and he is forced back to his house, waking next morning exhausted, with grazed hands and, eerily, smelling of salt water.
The climax of the book comes from a conjunction of circumstances more like a ghost story than sci fi. In the present a team of paleontologists led by a Professor Goodhart are excavating up on the headland, using an abandoned mineshaft as entrance to geological layers buried far down. The climax of the story comes when Mason wakes again, to find the surf lapping across his garden, and this time makes a determined effort to circle around the ‘beach’ established by the perimeter of the sea and up onto the headland, to confront or speak to the slim young woman in the diaphanous dress.
But as he approaches and she turns round, Mason realises with a shock that her head beneath her flowing white hair is that of a skull! and the arms she reaches out to him are the bones of a skeleton! He backs away from her and… stumbles against the barriers roping off the disused mineshaft and… falls falls falls down it.
Cut back to the present and the town police interviewing Professor Goodhart. Mason has been missing for two days. Meanwhile the Professor is puzzling how two proto-human (Cro-Magnon) skeletons can have ended up in geological strata laid down 200 million years ago in the Triassic Age!
5. Minus One (1963)
A would-be humorous story in which a patient, Hinton, goes missing from the Green Hill Asylum, and its director, Dr Mellinger, takes the unusual step of coming up with a metaphysical solution, which is to persuade the other three doctors on the staff of the possibility that Hinton never existed but was a function of their paperwork. He is shown slyly insinuating this thought into each of their minds (and handily destroying Hinton’s file) before the boom-boom punchline where all four doctors are sharing a nice glass of sherry before dinner and agreeing that Hinton was purely a bureaucratic figment when there’s a knock at the door and… Hinton’s wife is announced, come for a visit.
6. Mr F. is Mr F. (1961)
Freeman’s wife is pregnant but as she grows he finds himself shrinking. Really shrinking, losing weight, his moustache becoming light, his hair blonde. Weighing himself he finds he’s losing pounds each day. When he can’t reach the top shelves at work he calls in sick but continues to decline. Meanwhile his wife orders a suite of baby clothes, a cot, a playpen and so on.
Freeman continues diminishing, to the size of a 14-year-old, then a six-year-old, then his wife has to help him in and out of bed, until he’s a toddler and she puts him in his playpen. He’s hoping against hope that his friend Hanson will come round and he can explain his plight, but Hanson never shows and then Freeman is so small his wife puts him in baby clothes. He watches her pack up his shirts and suits and send them off to the charity.
And when he tries to express himself all that comes out is baby talk. Soon he can’t speak at all. He lies, an insensate bundle next to her naked body. And in a very odd passage we infer that he has, er, returned inside her!
A few days later she is walking back to the house when a car draws up and dashing Hanson gets out to pay his respects. Freeman’s wife smiles flirtatiously. Needing no encouragement, Hanson sees her to her front door, and through it and, three hours later, Freeman is negatively conceived i.e. dies, in some metaphorical sense as Hanson inseminates his wife.
Strange, eh, but a grown man reverting to childhood has been done by Hollywood a number of times, and a life described backwards done by several other authors.
7. Zone of Terror (1960)
Larsen works with Bayliss the psychologist at a chalet complex on the edge of the desert which is a sort of recreational centre for burned out executives. Except it’s Larsen who’s burned out, after working hard for three months on a huge brain simulator made of linked computers. Bayliss spotted he needed a rest and got him time off and orders to rest, sleeping 12 hours a day in an isolated chalet.
Trouble is Larsen’s been having hallucinations. He opened the garage door and saw a man in a suit walking towards, realising his suit seemed striped because he could see right through him. He slammed the garage door down and was holding it tight shut, sweating and trembling, when Bayliss drove up half an hour later.
So Bayliss has put him on tranquilisers but is taking an irritatingly abstract view of the ‘case’. A few days later it happens again, Larsen re-entering his living room and seeing a man in a suit sitting on the sofa, before he runs off. This time he realises the spectral figure is… himself!
When Bayliss appears a bit later he doses Larsen with whiskey and gives vent to his pet theory about ghosts, that they are sort of retinal memories we all create, information about our location in time and space recorded on a continual memory tape in our minds, but the player sometimes gets confused and replays the temporal-spatial experience but externalised.
Whatever the scientific cause Larsen is so scared he digs up an old revolver he’s got and hides it in his letterbox. And then another phantom appears. Then two! Two of them! In positions he was in only a few moments before. He runs off into the desert, then turns, turns and crawls back, determined to alert Bayliss in the nearby chalet.
But Bayliss has seen one of the phantoms and comes running, Larsen can see him and then.. sees him talking to one of the phantoms! The phantom is pointing… pointing at him! Bayliss thinks that he is one of the phantoms and the phantom talking to him is the real Larsen. He turns. He runs. Bayliss is running after him wielding the revolver.
He only hears the first of the shots…
8. Manhole 69 (1957)
Dr Neill is carrying out an experiment on three volunteers, Lang, Gorell and Avery. He has operated on their brains and removed the structures responsible for sleep. Neill is bullishly confident that sleep is a waste of time, given over to an eight-hour peep show when the unconscious is set free in the form of unedifying dreams, All stuff and nonsense, his pioneering work will ‘reclaim some of the marshland’, push back the domain of the unconscious, and produce a new race of 24/7 humans, who will enjoy a third more life experiences.
His assistant, John Morley, is sceptical. It’s not so much the classical reasons for sleep – to allow the brain to recuperate and process the day’s information – that worry him. He puts it in a novel way: what if we need a rest from ourselves? How much of yourself can you actually stand, without a break?
Shrewd point.
Halfway through the story begins to see the world from the patients’ point of view. They are playing chess or ping-pong or listening to music in the observation room of the clinic as they have been doing for over two weeks non-stop, under constant observation from Neill or Morley or other clinic staff when… when the room suddenly starts shrinking… slowly the walls, and the ceiling, begin closing in on the three men… slowly they suspect the room is bugged and begin looking for microphones… wonder what happened to the doors… find themselves walking round the small coffee table as the walls cram in closer and closer and then…
Morley only stepped away from monitoring them for ten minutes, into the administrative office. When he returns, he finds all three of them in an irreparable catatonic state.
9. The Impossible Man (1965)
Conrad is a 17-year-old orphan, parents dead in a plane crash. He’s on a trip to the beach with his uncle when he’s hit by a sports car, is seriously injured and has one leg amputated. In the weeks that follow we learn that the world he’s living in has become old. Due to medical advances most people are elderly, so the birthrate has fallen. Except… Dr Knight who is treating Conrad explains that the hospital they’re in is a specialist unit specialising in restorative surgery. In the past fifty years [so is the story set fifty years in the future?] replacement surgery has moved beyond organ replacements to replacing and fixing just about anything. And so Dr Knight proposes to replace Conrad’s amputated leg with the leg of the driver of the car which crashed into him and was killed when the car ploughed on into the beach wall.
Except that… Dr Knight shares the fact that the desire for restorative surgery has dropped right off. The hospital used to be packed and turn away patients so desperate they paid big bribes. Now it functions at barely 1% of its capacity. The old have seen the kind of world they’ve created, a civilisation of oldsters, and they don’t like it. A counter-movement is in train, a movement away from extending life as long as possible.
Conrad’s Uncle Theodor (who was also injured in the car accident, losing two fingers) takes Conrad to see a friend of his long-dead mother’s, another doctor, Dr Matthews, who is in an advanced state of decay, but makes the case to a reluctant Conrad that he and many others like him, refuse the restorative medicine.
We value our lives so much that we refuse to diminish them. (p.189)
Six months later Conrad has had a new leg grafted onto his stump and is walking down along the beach, near the road where the accident happened. He and his stump have never gelled. He resents it. At night they lie in bed silently like a married couple who aren’t getting on. Now he hears the scream of the gulls just like on the day of the accident. He sees a truck thundering down the sandy road, trailing a storm of dust behind it, just like on the day of the accident. And drawn by a compulsion he can’t explain Conrad runs out into the road and towards the oncoming traffic.
Commentary
1. Lots of doctors. This is doctor-heavy fiction, stories
- the police surgeon who interviews Franz M
- Dr Robert Franklin
- Professor Goodhart
- Dr Mellinger, Dr Normand, Dr Redpath and Dr Booth
- Bayliss the psychologist
- Dr Neill
- Dr Nathan, Dr Knight and Dr Matthews
2. Wives
- Judith
- Miriam
- Catherine York
- Mrs Hinton
- scary Mrs Freeman
Credit
‘The Disaster Area’ by J.G. Ballard was published by Jonathan Cape in 1967. Page references are to the 1985 Triad/Panther Books paperback edition. All quotations are used for the purpose of criticism and review.
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