JG Ballard extract

JG Ballard has just passed away. Described by the New York Times suchly: Ballard would eventually be deemed worthy of his own adjective, “Ballardian,” defined by the Collins English Dictionary as “resembling or suggestive of the conditions described in Ballard’s novels & stories, esp. dystopian modernity, bleak man-made landscapes & the psychological effects of technological, social or environmental developments.”

It is always difficult to get a sense of an author from a short passage, but this is from a short story, Voices of Time:

The dome was in darkness, all the windows shuttered, but the generator still hummed in the X-ray theatre. Kaldren stepped through the entrance and switched on the lights. In the theatre he touched the grilles of the generator, felt the warm cylinder of the beryllium end-window. The circular target table was revolving slowly, set at 1 r.p.m., a steel restraining chair shackled to it hastily. Grouped in a semi-cicle a few feet away were most of the tanks and cages, piled on top of each other haphazardly. In one of them was the enormous squid-like plant had almost managed to climb from it vivarium. Its long translucent tendrils clung to the end of the tank, but it body had burst into a jellified pool of globular mucilage. In another an enormous spider had trapped itself in its own web, hung helplessly in the centre of a huge three dimensional maze of phosphorescing thread, twitching spasmodically.

All the experimental plants and animals had died. The chimp lay on its back among the remains of the hutch, the helmet forward over its eyes. Kaldren watched it for a moment, then sat down on the desk and picked up the phone.

While he dialed the number he noticed a film reel lying on the blotter. For a moment, he stared at the label, then slid the reel into his pocket beside the tape.

After he had spoken to the police he turned down the lights and went out to the car, drove off slowly down the drive.

When he reached the summer house the early sunlight was breaking across the ribbon-like balconies and terraces. He took the lift to the penthouse, made his way through into the museum. One by one he opened the shutters and let the sunlight play over the exhibits. Then he pulled the a chair over to a side window, sat and stared up at the light pouring through into the room.

Two or three hours later he heard Coma outside, calling up to him. After half an hour she went away, but a little later a second voice appeared and shouted up at Kaldren. He left his chair and closed all the shutters overlooking the front courtyard, and eventually he was left undisturbed.

Kaldren returned to his seat and lay back quietly, his eyes gazing across the line of exhibits. Half asleep, periodically he leaned up and adjusted the flow of light through the shutter, thinking to himself, as he would do in the coming months of Powers and his strange mandala, and of the seven and their journey to the white gardens of the moon, and the blue people who had come from Orion and spoken in poetry to them of the ancient beautiful worlds beneath golden suns in the island of galaxies, vanished for ever now in the myriad deaths of the cosmos.

JG Ballard, The Voices of Time, 1960.