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i finished "the best short stories of j.g. ballard" some time ago. i have to return it to the library soon, so i had better finish the blog analysis (blogalysis?) which i started earlier.
***********spoiler warning*****************
after getting through the experimental novelty stories at the back of the book, i started again at the beginning.
"concentration city", one of ballard’s first stories from 1957, forced me to re-adjust my map of speculative genre with ballard re-cast as the panamanian junction. it encapsulated elements which i had begun to identify with the far more modern NEW WEIRD(tm):
1.) improbably ornate public works.
2.) the city as farce.
3.) myopic urban perspective which cannot comprehend the basic facts of its own existence.
it reminded me of iain bank’s the bridge. in both stories the hero takes a train ride to discover the boundaries of his world, only to find himself, shockingly, back at the start of his journey.
ballard’s "the drowned giant" captures the atmosphere of dispassionate and surreal angst which will later be the calling card of m.john harrison and mieville. the giant rotting on the beach, a spectacle for the masses until it is quietly appropriated for the rendering plants, feels much like harrison’s "settling the world" where flatbed trucks tow the severed limbs of a giant out of the sea.
for this collection i see two separate themes; apparently in opposition to each other. there are the stories where the pressures of society squeeze the male protagonists bit by bit — hedging them into a corner. in "the overloaded man" it is the epistimological stimuli of an artifical landscape, in "the subliminal man" it is the pressures of consumerism, and in "billenium" it is the very space one needs to live.
and opposed to that are the apocalyptic landscapes of "the terminal beach", "deep end", and "the cage of sand". the imagery is beachlike, but not terribly gidget-ish. there the characters are set free from the goals and guidelines of the civilized world, resulting in aimless existential brooding.