Читать книгу The Complete Short Stories: Volume 2 - Adam Thirlwell - Страница 6

There is no single way of talking about the collected stories of J. G. Ballard. They are so various that no one reading will contain them. When talking about this giant oeuvre, it’s better to borrow terms from geology, and other sciences of natural phenomena; better to talk of strata, or of eras.

And a preliminary summary of these epochs in one paragraph might go something like this …

First there is the era of what might be called, for useful shorthand, science fiction: where the nature of Nature has undergone sinister changes, and become strangely technological. In these stories, many of which take place in a warped version of Palm Springs, the reader will find sonic sculptures, and singing flowers, among other curiosities. In the second era, the modulations Ballard enjoyed performing on the natural world became grander: now these modulations affected the deep conditions of being: his material became time and space. In the third era, his imagination became more and more apocalyptic, replete with visions of environmental disaster. And all these eras were ones of dense and hectic composition – the 750 pages of this complete edition’s first half move only from 1956 to 1964. Its second half, of equal length, takes in the greater time span of 1964 to 1992. And it was somewhere in the late 1960s that a new and final era emerged: where the cosmic alterations now took place in an atmosphere of late modernity – computerised finance, terror, dictator politics, and flat pornography. It was this landscape that formed the last and longest era of Ballard’s stories – a shiny, dilapidated vista of motels, space voyages, assassination attempts.

In other words, Ballard’s stories constitute a corpus that is unlike anything else in twentieth-century British fiction. This corpus is unique.