THE TERMINAL BEACH (Indigo 1997 £5.99 pp221) THE VOICES OF TIME (Indigo 1997 £5.99 pp197) |
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Starting from the outside in, these new softbacks have some of the finest original covers I've seen on Ballard and the trade-size shows them off. The 1994 Phoenix edition of VOICES OF TIME had a Salvador Dali cover, and designers used Max Ernst on his early Penguin copies, but the Gary Day-Ellison covers on the two short-story collections VOICES OF TIME and THE TERMINAL BEACH are superb. Although Ballard is an authority on the surrealists, Day-Ellison's style is closer to the pop artists such as Richard Hamilton. (Ballard would recognise this anyway, through his own work with the Institute of Contemporary Art where he held his own exhibition of crashed cars). There is a page of bibliographic information about the publishing history of the stories in VOICES OF TIME, but none in TERMINAL BEACH. Unfortunately, the bibliographic information is inaccurate, unlike that 1994 Phoenix edition. When VOICES OF TIME first appeared, Ballard had not collected all his tales of Vermilion Sands and two of them appeared in the original VOICES in 1964, which was called THE FOUR-DIMENSIONAL NIGHTMARE. Later, he took the two stories out and replaced them with two new work. And it is that de-Vermilionised collection printed here dspite the implication otherwise. The inspired covers lead to the inspired contents. There is an early chapter in THE DROWNED WORLD called "Towards a New Psychology", and in many ways the two short story collections are the best way into Ballard's appreciation of it. But you can also do the opposite, because while these three books from 1962, '63 and '64 give you clues to Ballard's world-picture, they do not give the solution to his puzzling attitudes. Ten years after these stories, you could see a continuum through to THE ATROCITY EXHIBITION and CRASH, but it is not apparent in them. But then take chapter titles such as "The Causeways Of The Sun" and "The Paradises Of The Sun", and cross them with the story "The Reptile Enclosure", which is set on a summer beach as the crowds wait like Gadarene Swine. In the story the waiting is satisfied by the launch of the last of the Comsats that will cover the Earth, and the crowds walk into the water as these satellites form an Innate Releasing Mechanism which the crowds cannot resist. The seabed becomes the ultimate dumbing down of the media revolution. And then this is the sort of beach to which Ballard would return, not just once as a "Terminal Beach" where nuclear nightmares are worked out, but also as the concrete dystopia of COCAINE NIGHTS - the holiday beaches seen from another angle. If you have read Ballard then re-read him, and see all these different approaches joining and forming a bigger picture. If you have not read Ballard then this novel and two collections are a great way to start
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© L J Hurst 2007