Incomparable dreams of the future
Robert Edric
THE COMPLETE STORIES by J. G. Ballard
Flamingo, £25, pp. 1189, ISBN 00007124058
As a child growing in the terraced streets and willow-herb wastelands of 1960s Sheffield. there was never any doubt in my unformed. juvenile mind that, should I so desire — and, of course, I would so desire — I might spend my later years — those effortless years of reward and careless luxury — beneath a giant glass dome on the moon: or that I might travel on a silent, hovering skateboard around the outer realms of my homespun galaxy — Rotherham, say, or Barnsley, or even Doncaster; that I would eat three coloured pills a day instead of endless potatoes plus gravy; and that. vest. I would marry (or, as I would futuristically imagine, mate with) a woman in a silver mini-skirt (called a tunic) whose alluring eyes were ringed with blue, and whose every thought was transmitted to me in breathless waves of sensuous, echoing silence. The future never seemed so beguiling, so desirable or so almost-within-reach as it did then.
But, of course, the future became the present. became a reality (it happened, as the pundits delight in saying). and that dreaming, expectant boy awoke and dwelt forever in the swirling disappointment of his dream come true. Pelican crossings on empty roads stopped me rushing ahead: automatic doors broke my stride; a man played golf on the moon. Golf! Black Holes appeared and Big Bangs sounded. The future stopped being within reach or even comprehensible. Worse — much worse — it stopped being necessary and enticing.
So thank God for J. G. Ballard and his ten collections of short stories in which wonder and awe never fade, and in which the dreaming boy dreams forever. It is no exaggeration to say that, in their scope and depth, in the single-minded achievement they represent — in their ability to keep alive those hopeful, needed futures while at the same time creating and dwelling within a 'visionary present' — Ballard's stories are beyond compare, and to regard the 90 works collected here purely as science fiction is to misunderstand completely what he has accomplished over half a century.
He has watched that same future, and our wonder in it, evaporate, and he has chronicled our losses and occasional gains with a perceptive and understanding eye. Ever since the early stories of The Voices of Time and The Terminal Beach, Ballard has created a route through the endlessly (and often pointlessly) diverging pathways of English fiction along which he alone has walked — a writer of science fiction occasionally denigrated for writing within the perceived constraints of the form; a writer of serious, 'literary' fiction who pushed beyond the boundaries of the genre, and who never once compromised or jeopardised a vision that remains uniquely his own.
These are stories of men and women, coping with the present and forever reaching for what lies beyond their grasp, imagining the unimaginable and then living with the consequences when the unimaginable becomes reality. This is a collection of tales and fables to be savoured by admirers and newcomers alike. Ballard remains one of the most interesting, unpredictable and vital writers in English fiction.
I queued for three hours at the Weston Park Museum to look, briefly, and with dismay, at a moon-rock brought back by that golfer. And afterwards I knew that there would be no glass dome on the moon; that when skateboards were invented they would remain obstinately earthbound or else endlessly plummet painfully back to earth; that there would be no women in their silver tunics, no silent transference of longing or desire — only, later, much later, and far too late for me, the porn-obsessed internet with its 'interactive' nothingness for the terminally inactive. No little green men on Mars, either — only canals. Canals! We had canals in Sheffield, and Rotherham, and, yes. even in Doncaster.
Previous page
