J.G Ballard's Concentration City, Venus Smiles and Track 12

Concentration City

The  dystopian world of encroaching and bewildering mega cities has always seemed fascinating for me, cities are the most dangerous places on Earth and that is because of the sheer number of dangerous humans that call cities their homes. The Concentration City (CC) is the first short story to appear in my collection discussing this contemporary urbanized onslaught and it is easy to see why cities are becoming uncontrollable entities. Right now there are around 400 cities worldwide that contain at least one million people, and it is claimed that by 2050 two thirds of the world's population will reside in urban settlements.     

Humans now flock to settlements of their own making while they disregard the natural origin that was the countryside and rural pastures. This phenomenon is not new, we have always sought the safety of walls, togetherness and closeness such as castles, strongholds and townships but these were for a much smaller population. It should then be obvious that with an ever increasing population these hotbeds will also grow and drain the inhabitants away from rural areas with the promise of opportunity. Today it can be argued that it is more advantageous to live in a city than it is not to, that cities are the next leap forward and are essential for forward progression and dynamism. Not only are these urban areas expanding but the relatively new concept of suburban areas are also growing and stretching further into the surrounding landscape. It is a vicious cycle that the more advanced and  prosperous the city becomes, the more that people flock to it from more rural areas. 

CC starts off by giving some snippets of daily life in the sprawling city, we hear directions such as take an elevator up "a thousand levels to Plaza Terminal", or how Pyromaniacs are attempting to burn the city down and break free from the confines of the cramped spaces. This opening paragraph is book-ended by auction like dialogue, people trying to cash in and exploit the fact that space is so treasured in the city that real estate sells by the cubic foot. This catapults the reader straight into the thick of the action and we are presented with a dystopian, dismal and multistory city. 

The protagonist is called Franz and is in police custody as the story begins, he is charged with riding on the super speed trains that are called Supersleepers without sufficient tickets. He tells them he had a dream about being suspended in open space and this encourages him to both build a flying craft and to find wide open space to fly this craft but this journey then causes him to question whether his city has an end and what is outside the city. As he is riding on the Supersleeper he discovers that  he has made a complete circle and arrives back where he started from. To makes things even more confusing for the poor chap, the date he came back was the same that he left on but he left three weeks ago. There could be the possibility that this city covers the entire planet and Franz just simply went around the world, but why is the date the same? Franz spent most of the time aboard these Supersleepers, could they travel at the speed of light, are they the cause for the time lapse? 

Once again the bending of time is addressed in Ballard's stories and he is well adept at staging these trickeries of time. If in Escapement the prison was time itself, here it is the city and in the city time seems to have warped, the sheer numbers and levels of people have crumbed or upset the scales of time. 

Venus Smiles

I shall move swiftly on to Venus Smiles (VS), or as swiftly as possible for my typing ability anyway! This story also takes place in Vermilion Sands and it very much similar to Prima Belladonna (PB) in its structure and its character designs, for example we have the mysterious and cataclysmic female being introduced shortly after the story has begun and we have the vaguely named protagonist who is initially overwhelmed by this new female presence but becomes increasingly cautious of her. I will also assume that the urban disaster short stories like CC and Billennium are more concerned not with the characters but the cities themselves while the Vermilion Sands stories do have more character interaction and these characters can be related to psychological classifications such as Freudian or Jungian.  

Music plays an important part just like it did in PB and music yet again leads to the main conflict of VS. The singing statue that Vermilion Sands commissions turns out to emit irritating sounds
and it soon grows to a threatening size. There is nothing too remarkable I admired about this story, perhaps for the classical music aficionado there would be moments when the statue's ability to churn out masterpieces would be pleasant to read. There is a slight plot twist at the end that could hint at the destruction of Vermilion Sands and possibly even the planet but it's nothing some earphones wouldn't solve really.   


Track 12

And now we arrive at this ugly duckling among the pristine, future bright swans that are the better Ballard stories. There is a retired athlete called Maxted (his dad must have been called Ted and the father wanted to spice up the name) who is at the house of a scientist bloke who has the strange affliction of being interested in very boring stuff, like amplified, minute microsonic sounds such as a pin dropping or the sound of someone's face tightening at the insanity of the very idea. Maxted was a very naughty fellow and slept with this man's wife so revenge is carried out and Maxted dies, by drowning in fresh air.

 The death scene is melodramatic but enjoyable and a little confusing because I didn't have a clue what was happening at first. The insane sound technician wannabe is shouting out "In a kiss ... a kiss" which brings the song 'It Started With A Kiss' to mind, maybe the scene would have benefited from a hearty rendition of the classic through his loudspeakers. These is a sense of an impending climax throughout the story and the way the affair between Maxted and the madman's wife revealed itself was subtle and chilling. It is a short read but just because it is short, that doesn't mean it will be sweet. It is not scary enough for me to skip through a track 12 from albums any time soon nor is it entertaining enough to make me want to finish writing about it. I guess the point of the story was really      

J.G Ballard's Prima Belladonna and Escapement

Prima Belladonna

I have expertly decided to include the first two stories into this post and in my next I'll include the next two, or even third story, Track 12 as it's quite short and not deserving of much praise or attention, at least for a Ballard story. Prima Belladonna (PB) seems to have been one of Ballard's first published short stories and as such it won't share the same cutting finesse or transfigured modernity as his later installments but it paves the scene and mood for later stories that also take place in the Vermilion Sands resort town, home to many strange and disastrous happenings.

 One of the principle ways to discover the meaning behind the term Ballardian is not to look at one or two of his stories but his whole arsenal of work. So far I have read four of his novels; The Drowned World, High Rise, Concrete Island and Crash, this short collection I have read encompasses the entire Urban Disaster trilogy and one from the Ecological Disaster trilogy (The Drowned World). Tales from Vermilion Sands would fall in to the bracket of themes and settings such as from Cocaine Nights, so this convoluted roundup of the different sagas spawning from the Ballardian universe makes it clear that the author has a few general themes and landscapes running throughout many of his books. 

This can often inflict the reader with Deja Vu on a grand scale, like hasn't the world been taken over by vegetation before? Yes but this time it's happening in America only... so we encounter subtle differences like this. However when reviewing or analyzing something, we all like to compare it with something else and Ballard's style of reintroducing themes and ideas can cause the reader to more quickly settle in with these ideas and to accept them. Maybe because I have already become familiar with Ballard's take on urban chaos that stories such as Concentration City and Billennium would appeal to me more, this is the reoccurring beauty of his work.  

PB starts with introducing us to a 'mutant' looking yet beautiful woman called Jane and this introduction also signals the start of a reoccurring line of distant femme fatals entering Ballard's short stories, usually they seem to bring nothing but bad luck for the residents of Vermilion Sands. She hastily starts courting Steve, the owner of a local singing flower shop, as she happens to be an entertainment singer and is fascinated by the exotic cultivated plants and carnivorous oddities belting out classical symphonies. The artistic theme of this story seems to be music and if nothing else you can finish the story and arrogantly boast to your friends how the melodies of Mandel are far superior to those of Tchaikovsky, who is only for beginners and 'tourists'.  

The major conflict of the story comes when Jane challenges Steve's prized singing flower, something called a Khan-Arachnid to a singing contest of sorts, this causes the viscous flower to triple in size and tower over Jane and attempt to eat her but Steve steps in to save her, kind of, being the type for chivalry and all that. Ballard makes it more or less clear that he doesn't care for his characters, he prefers to mold his characters around the story and we have these people only as a means to an end. Steve's name is mentioned maybe once or twice in the whole piece and this is common with the protagonists of Ballard's short stories. 

So what can I say about the messages that these characters stand for, perhaps Jane was fighting to take back music, she wanted music to belong to the human world and not the plants or was she just a sacrificial succubus playing out men's sexual desires for a woman with self destructive needs. Steve emerges from the whole ordeal with little scars, emotional or physical, and seemed to have shed his admiration for Jane just as quickly as he found it, he gives some advise to other men who happen to have a singing flower shop that she could pop in to visit them but he leaves them with the warning that she can cheat. He is referring to a game he used to play with her but there is also the connotation that she would cheat on the love of a man with the love of her hobby, singing. So while Jane's urges and sexual merits were powerful, her urges towards music scared Steve and left him feeling cheated. 

Escapement

I guess I must now talk about Escapement, this is a run of the mill science fiction story about time travel and time loops. I enjoyed it more than PB simply because the idea was well implemented and the same gripping tension and shortening of time stayed with the story right to the final sentence. Basically a man is watching TV with his wife and notices the same programs are repeating themselves, he is stuck in a time loop going from 9 p.m to 9.15 p.m but gradually this time span shortens yet this man is the only man in the entire world to know about this time anomaly. The excitement come in how this man (I don't want to look up this name nor would knowing it strictly matter anyway) trying to figure how what to do in order to fix this anomaly and how he can make the most of it, at one point he muses that he has infinite alcohol woohoo, but that he will never be able to feel drunkenness inside this time loop awww. 

He refers to his time loop as a merry-go-round, he rings his friends to find out what it going on but they are carrying on as normal and he tried to convince his wife, all to no avail. In the end the time loops shrinks to nothing for our hero and he reverts to normally perceived time yet he then hears his wife mention that the same program is repeating itself and he knows she is now experiencing what he just went through and says to her, "This is the merry-go-round. And you're driving", which is an amazing closing sentence and caused me to shout out in delirium but it still raises so many questions. Is the husband also now stuck in this time loop with his wife or is the wife only experiencing it while the husband's memory reverts back every fifteen minutes? Are we living the same fifteen minutes over and over until the divine direction we are heading in has become satisfactory? Why does this time loop happen, is it so they can realize the correct path to live in or is it just a cruel game designed to sharpen the mind? I'm sure many different time travel stories also raise these mind boggling questions and that is what makes Escapement a fascinating read. To tie things up I will mention that Ballard gives the name of the play that the husband and wife are watching as 'My Sons, My Sons', so much repetition, so much repetition.     

  

J.G Ballard's The Waiting Grounds

The Waiting Grounds

In my collection, The Complete Short Stories: Volume 1, which came out in 2006, the next story after Manhole 69 comes the less raunchy title of Track 12 but I will discuss The Waiting Grounds here. It seems my writing scheme will be to start not on the first story I read from the collection but from the first story I read and then had the delightfully scholarly task of basing a blog around those very stories. I will eventually bring my self to recount back on those first stories starting with Prima Belladonna and working up to my present state of affairs. I'm sure I could hide all this amateurism in some attempt at following in some Ballardian time frame of no beginnings, or no discernible past, present and future, some absurd notion of unconventional time keeping anyway, but for now let's just put it down to ineptitude.

As with my previous blog, or honoured article if you will, I will continue to painstakingly draw out the meaty deliverance of the actual analysis of my understanding of Ballard's short story but instead go on about other less pressing matters, such as, waiting around. Let me explain my reasoning behind discussing this short story in preference over Track 12, you must understand that both Manhole 69 and The Waiting Ground are longer stories so I simply chickened out and read the measly six page Track 12 first, then I went into the other two longer stories. I'm sure it's more a psychological way for my head to get around reading this sizable collection of Ballard's without losing heart and reverting back to scrolling through unfunny Memes online...

Anyway, what are you waiting for, and what am I waiting for, let's get to The Waiting Grounds and try to guess what strange alien races presented in this story are watching over us and waiting for something exciting, or catastrophic, to happen to the universe. The story begins with our main character, Quaine (they must have ran out of good names in the future) arriving at a sparsely populated mining planet called Murak to take over the position at a radio observatory. The previous sole worker at the isolated observatory, called Tallis, seems a bit fishy about some aspects of the job and what might be outside the observatory in that hot desert landscape yet Quaine seems to only become more interested by the prospect of a mystery, he'll have to have something to do for the next two years working there alone.   

The mystery transpires to involve two missionaries who arrived to the planet in search of some ancient celestial structure who sought Tallis to help them but soon they disappeared without any trace and Tallis has kept this a secret ever since. Quaine finally discovers this structure for himself on top of a rock plateau, it seems to resemble something like a circular Stonehenge and carved onto the Stones are names, places and dates, ranging from Biblical time up to their present time of 2217. At this point of the story things appear to be heating up and the promise of the alien owner of these stones arriving seems imminent  however no aliens come and instead Quaine has an outer body experience and sees the universe go through a life cycle and senses this alien race possessing the ability to manipulate time and become one with the universe. It's all rather grand and very heavy to take in, it reminded me of some video games where characters could maybe harness the power of the universe and do silly things with it, or perhaps one day humans can toy around with the universe and play a game of cosmic soccer with pocked moons. Ballard was trying to convey the never ending cycle of the universe or something like infinite Big Bangs. Anyway he calls a mining friend over to confirm what he saw, the friend goes berserk and Quaine incinerates him with a flare gun, this being the first primary murder in the collection was amusing, stories always benefit from killings but the fight does seem a little manufactured for the plot to have some meaning, I think it had something to do with the theme of death bringing life and that continuous cycle. I think I should throw in some quotes from the book now too, just because I have the book in front of me and it will look like I picked them out specially for this.

"Tell me, Quaine, where would you like to be when the world ends?"

 Here's another,

'I looked numbly at my wristwatch'

And one more,

'I am certain that whatever we are waiting for will soon arrive ... Whatever it is, it must be worth waiting for.'

Ballard doesn't flat out tell us what we should be waiting for, that would be too easy (or too damaging to our health) but he hints that it's important, nevertheless this is a fascinating story much along the line of a Lovecraft story about the fears of other mysterious intelligence among the stars or other dimensions. Another interesting quirk of the story is that Ballard refers to one language on the stones as Earth's language, maybe by the 22nd century we all speak English?

It's a different story for Ballard and I'm glad because of it, It would never do for him to be only known for a second rate Lovecraft but Ballard has stated he wanted his characters to have a sense of the enormity of the universe and to be humbled that what is out there, only by remaining still can we comprehend the endlessness of space, or you can go on a long walk, whatever suits you.  

         

J.G Ballard's Manhole 69

J.G Ballard's Manhole 69. A Brief surmising of his short story.

I shall begin by introducing this blog, perhaps it isn't the right setting to do so but keeping it within this brief piece on a short story should ensure it is kept to a minimum and without pomp and boastfulness, something of which I hold no purposeful claim to in the first place. Having not consciously read or scrutinized any blog before writing my maiden sentences, I hope this should dissolve any imitation or cliches, yet the mind has that habit of lazily returning to cliches. As had happened to many budding bloggers before my blog title stumped me, from where to I find inspiration? How can I summarize my feelings and intents by a single sentence. However the very act of a title misled me into thinking that the title referred to the title of this piece on Manhole 69 and not my blog as a whole. Don't worry I shall get around to talking about the short story eventually, I'll even include a shortcut to those unwilling to drudge through egotistical whinging before arriving at the meat of the article, so the part about Ballard really begins on the third paragraph. I believe I've thumped out enough words and quarter original ideas by this juncture to refer to my piece as an article, please don't be surprised if by the conclusion I'm thanking my parents and saying I'll come back even stronger next year, with that forced tear sprinkling from my eye. Regarding myself on this introduction to the blog I shall not give out specifics on my character, after all, on the interwebs one can take on any form and to put limits on my character would ruin your personal and wild imaginations. The words I use alone can help to form a fuller picture for that is all you have to go by and by starting from the beginning and creating anew, the possibilities are far greater for what a person can become. 

The very nature of blogs in this computerized and instant one week celebrity generation is the nature of selfishness, unjust, unearned pride and the illusion of power. The power and possibility of reaching the whole audience of those knowledge and entertainment hungry internet users is very much so the appeal of these blogs, that gamble and earnest plea to be heard by thousands, nay millions of people, all absorbing and learning from your work. This gamble is like winning the lottery twice using only one lottery ticket, yet there are some who achieved something close, for example... well I can't think of any right now because my entire brain capability is focused on the work of Ballard's short stories but I'm sure if I had some machine to search information quickly I would be able to think of at least fourteen examples. The formula needed to attain such worldwide heights is very particular, maybe not particular in your subject matter because the more specialized one becomes the less likely you are to attract the interests of all tastes but particular in a broad range of topics, humour and general likability. I will initially begin with discussing some of J.G Ballard's short stories and perhaps some of his novels as I've read a few so far and plan to open some more in the future. I plan to continue this blog also, or at least I say that to keep you hoping for more of this prattling banter to come in this talked about future of mine. Ballard is one of my three favourite authors right now and I understand he will not appeal to all, there are close to maybe two million other novels out there so finding a Ballard among them and actually deciding to read it can be a rare thing. I think it's time to move this most honoured article further towards the British author and completely zoom in on his work, themes and frightening, recessional and ugly future.

Ballard is famous for being a writer. OK, now my readers know at least close to what I know about the man. To know more all you need to do is read this stuff that he writes, such as Manhole 69, I'm starting with this story because I just read it yesterday, I'm going to read the next one in my collection later this evening and the following story tomorrow, my life should continue something like that for the next while, including all that eating and sleeping business. This story involves two scientists, Neill, the 'boss' who masterminded this experiment to eliminate the need for humans to sleep, and then the other scientist, Morley, a meeker and more friendly chap whom the reader can associate with and experience things through his eyes. The story is told in third person however and we are soon introduced to the three guinea pigs for this experiment, Ballard tries to give each one a unique personality but if Ballard has thought us anything, it's that experiments and the subjects involved will not meet a happy ending, so the need to familiarize ourselves with these guinea pigs is less advantageous. As the experiment begins there is an uncanny feeling for the reader, I have survived through one whole All Nighter and I can safely say it's not an experience I'd like to repeat two or three times in a row so I can only imagine the strains and the artificial mechanics working inside these subject's bodies and minds. This whole feeling that the reader gets and the vibe that Ballard describes makes us unsettled, even his setting is sterile and cavernous, leaving no sense of familiarity or naturalism. The subjects are kept in a high walled gymnasium with little furnishings, at the start described with having many windows and doors from which they can be monitored but as the subjects lose their sanity and are left alone to drown in their own thoughts the gym shrinks around them and the doors and windows vanish as their external space mirrors their internal mind and the walls implode into each other.  

There are some clever musings regarding death in this story, the main guinea pig, Lang, has a few talks with Morley over both death and life after death, this being the life of other humans and the evolutionary grind. Lang asks Morley what is the next progression up the "evolutionary slope" and Morley responds by dismissing that their experiment is truly helping mankind evolve and that humans still carry around remnants of our earlier species that emerged from the sea. This theme of devolution or instinctual regression is seem in other Ballard stories such as The Drowned World or The Crystal World. Lang also has the notion that sleep is just the bodies way of preparing us for death, that each time we sleep we go into a sort of death, we do not consciously know what is happening and get transported away to dream lands separate from our worldly body. However this separation from mind and body can have its benefits, the final reason that this experiment fails can be because the subjects were overloaded with themselves, 24/7 mental activity cannot be sustained in that mighty brain.