The Swayze Diaries

"The chair...is against the wall. John has a long mustache."

This cryptic message to Americans in occupied territory crackles over the radio in the mountain camp led by Patrick Swayze in John Milius' Red Dawn (1984). An incitement to revolt, one that mirrors the banner seen across the music store-turned Soviet-American Friendship Center just before it blows up: "People of America, Rise and Join the Revolution!"

I recently had the fortune to see a special Swayze memorial screening of Red Dawn at Austin's Alamo Ritz. I don't think I had seen the film since the collapse of the Soviet Union. And once you stop laughing at the Brat Pack interpretations of Milius' napalm-perfumed Nietzschian dialogue, it's interesting to experience the movie at a long distance from its Cold War context. And realize that the movie is an alt-history fantasy of twentieth century American revolutionaries.



A couple of days later, I literally bumped into Austin-based conspiracy theorist Alex "Infowars" Jones coming out of an elevator in an underground parking garage (very Deep Throat). I had heard about the latest story Alex was following, regarding the apparent takeover of the town of Hardin, Montana (including the town's abandoned prison) by a private military contractor operating under the name American Police Force.



The story, initially picked up in regional media, was perfect material for Alex's master narrative of the imminent imposition of martial law by the incipient world government, complete with FEMA-style permanent "emergencies" and prison camps for those with the will to resist:

- In a remote part of the country, a previously-unheard of private company called "American Police Force" arrives to take over the local prison, which has been abandoned for two years. News searches reveal a CNN report from April that Hardin and the local "Two Rivers Authority" is proposing to establish a Gitmo-style detention camp for enemy combatants: "Guantanamo Bay West."

- In the town, black Mercedes SUVs appear with "City of Hardin Police Department" logos.

- The logos feature a coat of arms of a very Old Europe-looking double eagle. Upon investigation, it turns out the logo is an exact copy of the Serbian coat of arms!

- A similar logo is found on the website of American Police Force, which reads like material created as backstory for the new season of 24 (except for the very odd touch of a continuous loop of Ravel's Bolero on the home page), full of pictures of European-looking soldiers in action poses and lots of riot control gear.

- Reports indicate APF is somehow affiliated with Blackwater/Xe.

- The chief executive of American Police Force turns out to be a mysterious Montenegran, Michael Hilton, also known as Miodrag Mic Djokic.

- A sign posted on the inside of the detention center reads "NO HOSTAGES WILL BE ALLOWED THROUGH THESE DOORS."

As the story develops, it becomes apparent that "Michael Hilton" has an extensive criminal history as a fraudster, suggesting that the conspiracy is an elaborate con of a a bunch of rube local pols. Hardin as Poisonville?



Which makes me imagine what should have been the last Patrick Swayze movie, one that would have married his talents for action and song and dance: a 21st century post 9/11 remix of The Music Man. Harold Hill=Michael Hilton, selling the folks of Two Rivers City on the idea of paying his imaginary Blackwater affiliate to turn the town jail into a lucrative government detention camp for terrorists and traitors. Envision a massive Bollywood techno mix of "Seventy-Six Trombones," with the marching band replaced by mercenary riot police, a whirling dervish mob of Central Asian terrorists, and chorus of fat and happy Montanan townspeople.



And then I read that somebody is already filming a remake of Red Dawn. Currently in production in Michigan, Red Dawn 2010 involves a Chinese invasion of suburbia, with Chris Hemsworth (Capt. Kirk in the Star Trek reboot, and the upcoming live action Thor) in the Swayze role and Jeffrey Dean Morgan (The Comedian) in the Powers Boothe jet pilot role. Suburban 21st century analogs to drinking the blood of a fresh-killed deer TBD.



Red Chinese invasion? I suppose 20th century thinking is to be expected from a remake of a movie whose plotline was rendered obsolete in 1989, but this is even worse, Yellow Peril stuff worthy of some vintage pulp like The Spider.

A more attuned remake for the post-9/11 world would retain Alex Jones as a consultant, and feature an occupation of America by our own government in league with multinational forces and the gnomic cabal of the Bilderberg Group — perhaps tapping that scary thread of The Turner Diaries running through a lot of the Tea Party rhetoric. Imagine our high school jocks going underground in the abandoned Circuit City, becoming guerillas fighting the invasion of their town by FEMA, the National Guard, and Belgian Blue Helmets. Imagine a Hollywood movie that takes on as its plot an actual near-future American revolution.

Great Neighborhood

To the astonishment of many, the American Planning Association's 2009 list of Great Neighborhoods in America includes Montrose in Houston. The surprise comes when "Houston" and "planning" occur in the same sentence. Houston is a sprawling unzoned bricolage of people, places, industry, commerce, arts, and academia. Planned it is not. It may not even be a city, if you define city as an urban entity where there is sensible zoning and mass transit such that you don't absolutely have to own a car.

The APA designating Montrose a great neighborhood was reported in the Houston Chronicle this week. "One of Houston's original streetcar suburbs..." says the APA. "Eclectic and urbane, the neighborhood is a fusion of architectural styles, land uses, and people."

Enormous credit goes to the gay community, which has made Montrose its Houston heartland since the 1970's. Countless gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered people and groups poured their creativity, labor and money into these city blocks over the years, because they felt they had a right to live in a classy and congenial area. Along the way, a number of remarkable institutions decided they could coexist with the GLBT community and practiced vital commitment to the neighborhood too. These were museums, schools, businesses, and churches (one of which I belong to - St. Stephen's Episcopal Church.) All of these stakeholders together proved capable of planful urban vision in the absence of same at the city level. The APA designation bestowed on Montrose should not be seen as sanction for Houston's general planlessness, which much of the time has dreadful results. No, it's a salute to Montrose!

For more details on the 2009 Great Neighborhoods visit the APA Website.

MEMORY: 41

First
Previous

Flavius cautiously backed away. The black pupil, taller than Flavius by half, narrowed, straining to focus on his too-close form. The lid slid down smoothly, shifting spheres out of the way as it moved, closing with all the gentleness of a steel door.

Flavius sat in the dark, barely breathing, praying the Ketza'qua would go back to sleep... or whatever the gigantic serpent did.

The eye snapped back open, the strange, emerald glow spilling over Flavius. A subsonic rumble rose up from deep inside the Ketza'qua. Its massive scales clattered against themselves like a cavalry charge across a field of cobblestones. The buoyancy spheres shifted again, and Flavius hastily considered the inherent instability of his footing. All around, the protesting groans and whines of cables and scaffolding reverberated through the spheres.

The Ketza’qua sensed opportunity amid the chaos. The opportunity for freedom.

Flavius clambered between the translucent spheres, away from the Ketza’qua. The glow from the beast’s eye cast an odd illumination, reflected and diffracted in unnatural ways by the spheres. The beasts rumbled again, and the spheres resettled, threatening to alternately crush Flavius between them or pitch him away entirely.

His boots struggled for traction on the hard shells. The spheres weren’t slick, but they were smooth, offering little upon which to grip. He wriggled and heaved himself up through the ever-shifting gaps, smaller spheres slipping between the house-sized ones, obstructing his way and forcing him to retreat to find a different route. Steadily, he put as much distance between himself and the Ketza’qua as possible. Every so often, he heard Acaona call out for him. He shouted in reply, but amid the incessant chiming of the spheres, clattering of the Ketza’qua scales and distant explosions and alarms, he had no hint that she’d heard him.

He reached up and sought a hand-hold against one sphere, a smaller one that spanned maybe twice the width of his outstretched arms, and froze. It hadn’t chimed when his palm struck it as the others had. He rapped it with his knuckles and got a dull, hollow echo in reply. Quickly he ran his fingers across the surface in the weak light. Were those cracks he felt? Flavius peered through the surface, but could see nothing. He looked over the top of the sphere. Nothing. He slithered down onto his belly--grunting in the tight confines, and craned his neck to see the underside. There, at the very edge of his line of sight, he could just make out a sword pommel adorned with the whortleberries.

“So there’s where ya got yerself.” Flavius tried to squeeze through the gap, but his shoulders wedged hard against the abutting spheres and blocked any further progress. He pulled back and reached for it, straining with one arm, but Memory remained a good arm-length away from his grasp.

“Come on, come on, ya bugger,” he muttered, climbing atop the sphere. A larger one blocked his way directly across the top, but he worked his way around the side enough to peer down through a narrow gap. He had a clear view of Memory now, just a couple of feet away. The sword had buried itself up to the hilt in the sphere, and a spider web of cracks radiated out from it.

A deep-throated growl burst from the Ketza’qua just then, and a violent shudder jolted Flavius as the creature strained against its bonds. The spheres shifted, and he barely avoided having a leg pinned as one large sphere shifted enough to allow a smaller one slide closer to Flavius’ perch.

Breathing heavily, he turned back to Memory. “Bastard,” he muttered through clenched teeth. The sphere had rotated, carrying the sword just out of reach. “Why is it that these things can never, ever work out easily? That’s what’d I’d like to ken.”

He tried a different angle, then looked for a different vantage with no luck. Memory was well out of his reach, and unless the spheres shifted again, it would remain so.

Of course, another shift could just as easily crush him into pudding.

Somewhere above, Acaona was calling his name. For a moment, he marveled at the fact she hadn’t been devoured by the moironteau yet, and then a rage at the injustice of his situation welled up so that he felt he’d burst. For lack of ability to do anything else, Flavius kicked, bringing his boot down onto the sphere. A dull snap answered, and he heard a new fissure snake across the surface.

That gave him pause. He pursed his lips in thought, then checked Memory again, shifting so that he wasn’t directly over where he judged the blade to be. Then he kicked again. And again.

Suddenly, with a crisp report, the sphere shattered. Flavius dropped with the shards as the spheres rushed to fill the void. He grasped wildly for Memory, his left hand closing over the end of the blade. Flavius cried out as the edge bit into his palm, but he refused to loosen his grip, even as spheres battered him from below.

He lay gasping, finally, wedged between two spheres, blood from nicks and scratches streaking his forearms and face. Ever so carefully, wincing from the pain, he reached over and grabbed the flat of the blade with his free hand.

"Ya damn near got away from me that time, dinnae ya? Donnae try that again," Flavius said, lifting Memory over himself and wedging it securely beside him. He then tore several strips from his tattered sleeves and tied a makeshift bandage over his wounded hand.

The Ketza'qua rumbled. Flavius could no longer see the creature, or its eye, but the menacing green glow cast a faint sheen over everything.

"Right. Time to find our way out," he said. "I cannae be far enough away when that beastie breaks--"

The Ketza'qua snarled, thrashing against its bonds more violently than before. The spheres lurched and shuddered. They shifted and rotated, two coming together to press Flavius between them like a vice. He struggled to squirm away, but their grip was too tight. He gasped for breath, but could not overcome the constriction on his lungs. Desperate, he tried to shatter either sphere with Memory, but could manage barely a tap. His vision began to swim.

From above came a string of high-pitched twangs in rapid succession. Then music.

Soft at first, only a few ethereal notes cut through the cacophony of the Ketza'qua's struggles, moironteau roars and the moaning of abused palace foundations. The music grew, more and more pure notes joining together in a disordered, elegant chaos.

Flavius gulped in air as the crushing sphere lifted from him. He gazed wonderingly as it soared above, joining a cloud of hundreds. Spheres rose all around him, suddenly loose as those holding them down from above soared to freedom.

His sphere hummed softly as it rose up, muted by Flavius perched atop it and weighed down by his bulk. Other spheres bumped them from below. Flavius wobbled, crouching to maintain the best balance possible, and rode the sphere up into the swirl of music.

The restraining netting had completely torn away. The buoyancy spheres were free.

Continued

Shazam?

Billy Batson is dead at 93.



No word about the monkey in the picture.

Hurricane Hole

I suppose I'm not the only one who’s had inhibitions about making nail holes in the walls of a place I own. In previous apartments, I felt rather free to hang pictures and other décor on the walls, but now that I own a condo, it took me fully ten weeks to work up the will to puncture the paint. And then I re-used six nail holes from the previous owner!

This time last year I didn't even imagine owning a place of my own. I was happily ensconced in a two-bedroom apartment in a singularly well-located, congenial and affordable complex only three miles from the library where I work. Unfortunately, late last year the residents got word that developers wanted to buy the complex. In Houston that is a death knell for any extant building. As it happened, the development deal fell apart when the economy did, but the handwriting was on the wall and it was quite legible.

Finding a new place to live was a convoluted process. I looked at comparable rental properties. All of them were either more expensive or less well located or both. Then I entertained the possibility of buying a house. I would have loved a cute little house – but there were none of those to be had close in without paying bucks deluxe or committing to a fixer-upper in a shaky part of town. Townhomes? Either pricey or in questionable condition. Houston saw a boom of quick, inexpensive townhome construction in the boom days of the 1970's. Now a lot of those places – cheaply built to start with, and not carefully maintained over the years either – are NOT what smart money buys. As my buyer's home inspector said, "They have a half-life and it shows."

That left condos. My Realtors showed me a slew of condos and I started warming up to the idea, but with reservations. All along I wanted a place near work, but out in the country. Also, near an airport, or near the water (lake, bayou, or sea), but did I mention, near work? Oh, and I wanted a roomy kind of castle, and I wanted a place low-maintenance enough to let me travel freely and affordable enough that my life wouldn't be wrapped around stretching to make the mortgage payment every month. (2009 would have been a singularly bad year to commit the kind of errors in judgment that led to the mortgage-default fiasco in the first place!) I wanted a light, airy place with a lot of windows. I wanted a place well sheltered in the event of another hurricane: Ike in 2008 sent Houston reeling, and Ike wasn't even the baddest of the hurricane breed.

So I wanted this and that and the other, and about half of the list cancelled the other half out.

Finally I had an Aha! moment and settled on a pleasant condo in the Rice-University/Medical Center area. It's a one-bedroom place, but the bedroom, kitchen, and bathroom are generously sized, and I've commandeered the entire living room for my study. In the future I may look into having another housing option in addition to this, not instead of it. There's always travel. A well-managed condominium community makes it easy to turn the key in the lock and leave without a care. Perhaps I'll someday buy a bit of property way out in the country or contrive a crash pad near an airport. Or even own a shack near the sea. Writers do love to relocate for a season (or just a weekend) and it's even better if the getaway is far away from the usual distractions of city life.

If I ever have a shack by the sea, I'll furnish it with secondhand stuff, and the next time a hurricane coils in from the Gulf of Mexico, I'll wish the place luck and run for the safety of my in-town place. The condo is my hurricane hole.

Friends from Miami introduced me to the idea of a hurricane hole: a sheltered place to tuck your boat, airplane or other property in a hurricane. That works for me. Not just in the event of literal hurricanes, either. Here on the trailing edge of 2009, it's not obvious that we're out of the financial hurricane. I can well imagine economic woe, energy crisis, pandemic, and such yet to come. Calamities can be personal, like a downturn in health, a marriage or partnership that falters, and so on. I finally decided that owning a secure, affordable, centrally located, one-bedroom condo will make sense (and maybe even appreciate in dollar value) for decades. Now that I'm living here, my stress level has dropped and the amount of good sleep I get at night has gone up. For that, I credit moving into a hurricane hole.

It's an exceptionally nice hurricane hole, too. As of yesterday, it's got décor on the walls. Not long ago I saw a newspaper article about research showing that people felt more at home after a move when their paintings were hung on the walls. I didn't quite believe it, except maybe when people move into a new place without many belongings. Then of course paintings gracing the walls would help a lot. When somebody like me moves lock, stock, and barrel, with plenty of furniture and hundreds of books, you wouldn't think wall décor would make much difference. But, magically, it did.

A couple of hours of pondering and tapping tentative nails and hangers, and my place is appreciably more congenial even though my most prized paintings (the original art for two stories published in Analog magazine) are still stowed away in a box. What I put on the walls was just pretty stuff of sentimental value, as were the suncatchers hung up in a window and dangling from two hall light sconces. Very ordinary yet comforting. Need is a funny thing. Do I need a cute garden cottage or an airy palace in which to live? Evidently not. A hurricane hole, complete with items of décor that are my familiar friends – yes: that’s just what I need. Especially right now, in the fall of 2009. Our recently calmer, clearer economy may be the trailing edge of the hurricane . . . but for all we know it's just the eye of the economic storm.

MEMORY: 40

First
Previous

There was no time to tumble, no chance to leap free. The catwalk plummeted. Screams echoed from the sleek walls and shattered gestation tanks, mixing with the roars of the moironteau.

Flavius jerked violently, ripped away from the catwalk. It vanished into the darkness amid a continuing shower of debris. An instant later a pure, bell-like tone washed over him from below.

Flavius shook his head to clear away the fog, then took his bearings. In the feeble light spilling out of the hole above, he saw Acaona dangling beside him. As did the Empress Malinche and Papantzin. Djserka em Naga-ed-der gripped each of them with a long, spindly arm, his own flabby bulk suspended precariously by a single silken thread.

“Er... ’preciate the catch,” Flavius managed.

“You’re welcome. You’re also most unbearably heavy,” Djserka hissed through clenched mandibles. “And, might I point out, that at any moment a sliver of glass may sever my line?”

“Right, right. Parric! Parric!” Flavius called, but the Crafter of Ominik was nowhere to be seen. “Damnit, Parric, nae around when I need you. Acaona! Can ya give us some light with that wee torch of yers?”

She held out her cuyab and a cool green brilliance blazed forth.

Flavius whistled.

“What is this place?” wondered the Empress Malinche.

“The underneath,” answered Acaona. “We’ve gone all the way down.”

Not more than thirty feet below, straining against taut, crystalline netting, gleamed iridescent spheres the size of cottages. The twisted remains of the catwalk impaled one broken, motionless moironteau. Two others lay a short distance away, their splattered blood virtually luminous in the cuayab light. A fourth moironteau twitched feebly, it’s body nearly severed through in several places by the netting. As chunks of shattered glass, peq and other debris rained down, soft, ethereal tones rang out from the spheres as if giants were running fingers across enormous wine goblets.

“Over there,” Flavius said, pointing to a narrow service way with a single hand rail crossing the steep mass of spheres. Along the way, it intersected other service ways cris-crossing the space above the netting. “They mound up toward the center. There’ll be access back inside there, most likely. Djserka, will yer thread hold enough for us to swing over?”

“I’ll have to spin another length or two for us to reach, but yes, my thread will hold our weight.”

“Do ya want us to--”

“Please, no. Just be still and let me do this on my own,” Djserka said, spinning out a length of thread to drop them lower. “If you start thrashing about, you’re more likely to dislocate and arm or three than anything useful.”

Djserka shifted its bulk subtly, and they swung back several feet. A moment later they’d moved twice as far forward.

“You’re good at this,” said Acaona.

“Dear girl, I’ve had plenty of practice,” Djserka answered. “It’s what we do.”

A large block of floor tumbled past, barely missing them. Flavius looked up to see two moironteau climbing through the hole. The beasts hadn’t yet noticed the thread amid the poor light and chaos.

“Let out more thread!” ordered Flavius on the backswing. “Enough to drop me down there without breaking my neck!”

“I do that and we’ll overshoot the service way,” Djserka protested.

“Donnae argue with me! Just do it!”

Djserka let out another ten feet of silk, the lurching extension imparting a wobbly spin to the party. As they swept through the lowest part of the arc, Djserka swung Flavius out and released him. With an involuntary shout, Flavius soared for a moment before planting his feet squarely atop the two dead moironteau.

Djserka fed out more thread as their arcing path carried them along, passing underneath the service way. The thead pressed taut against the bottom support rail, and Djserka’s momentum carried the em Naga-ed-der and passengers up and over the opposite side. Djserka quickly grabbed the safety rail with its hindmost suction pads, balancing precariously before setting Acaona, the Empress and Papantzin down roughly. Djserka hung precariously on the narrow service way, wrapped nearly all the way around it and dwarfing the three women.

“That was...” gasped Malinche, “entirely unacceptable.”

“Donnae just stand there yammering!” shouted Flavius as he clambered down the dead moironteau. “Them beasties are still coming! Get a godamned move on!”

The moironteau had spotted them, letting out squeals of recognition. One pushed off from its jagged perch and dove at Flavius, teeth bared in all eight footheads.

Flavius slashed Memory across the strands of netting. They separated with a whipping snap, and three iridescent spheres burst through like shot from a canon.

The first sphere hit two footheads a glancing blow with a beautiful, ringing tone, enough to send the moironteau spinning. The second struck it more solidly before shattering with the sound of a thousand jingling bells. The moironteau flailed as it fell, crashing through the service way scant feet ahead of Acaona before slamming into the netting below.

The impact caused a lurching shift among the spheres, and two more escaped from the rent in the net.

“Back this way,” Flavius shouted. “We’ll follow the perimeter until we find another connecting service way.

One escaped sphere rolled uneasily upon the ceiling above, its movement hampered by various utility pipes and vents protruding from the palace’s underside. The second moironteau clung to the ceiling, footheads keeping wary watch on both the spheres and Flavius. The third and fourth escaped sphered had found the gaping hole and escaped through into the ruined peq cloning chamber. One took a startled moironteau along for the ride after it chose an inopportune moment to pass through the hole. Through the opening shadows mingled as more moironteau joined the hunt.

The women passed over Flavius, followed by Djserka, almost comical as it clambered along the too-small service way. It dropped a loop of thread down to Flavius as it went.

“Thanks again,” Flavius said as Djserka hauled him up.

“There certainly is a prodigious number of those vile creatures,” Djserka said as they moved. The damaged service way wobbled with every step.

“That there is. And to ken it only took one to kill me before.” Flavius cast a worried glance back. No fewer than six moironteau had gotten through and were following along the roof. “Acaona, lass, can ya give us some cover fire?” he shouted past Djserka.

In answer, Acaona sent a spray of emerald bursts back at the moironteau. A few even struck home, slowing their pursuit noticeably.

“We’re nearly to the perimeter, Flavius,” Empress Malinche announced. “It looks wide enough to land a wej on.”

“I ken Djserka will appreciate--”

The rumble came upon them like rolling thunder, but at a much deeper pitch. Far more menacing. Flavius grabbed at the railing a hair’s breadth too late. The shockwave struck, throwing him from the service way. His innards slammed against his ribcage as he fell. Massive fissures snaked through the underside of the palace. Steam burst from ruptured pipes. Moironteau fell like rag dolls. The cut Flavius had made in the netting zippered open under the strain, and hundreds of buoyancy spheres launched themselves up, some shattering along the way, but all of them singing their ghostly music.

Flavius hit a sphere, snagged his foot on a strand of netting and tumbled. He slipped and slid through the gaps in the spheres, losing his grip on Memory along the way. The thought of skidding all the way through the spheres to fall to his death on the other side flashed through his mind, but he abruptly came up hard against a rough, unyielding surface.

“Ow. Ach,” he muttered, twisting his body a less mangled position. He felt his throbbing forehead and found it wet, hot and sticky. Flavius quickly realized he was thoroughly soaked, and more than a little disconcerted that in the darkness he couldn’t tell if the blood was his, peq or moironteau. As he stared at his hands, a soft green glow illuminated them, black with blood.

“Acaona?” he said, looking up. She was nowhere to be seen. The illumination grew stronger. “Acaona!”

“Flavius!” Her answering call was distant, high above him. “Where are you? What happened?’

Flavius flexed his fingers, intensely aware of Memory’s absence. He swallowed, then deliberately turned to look behind him.

The blazing green eye of the Ketza’qua stared back.

Continued

Apologies for the long delay in this installment. It wasn't intentional, I swear. I've posted some personal thoughts about chapter 40, as well as the whole "Memory" experiment thus far, over at my personal blog for anyone who's interested.

Review: The Complete Stories of J.G. Ballard

“I first met Jane Ciracylides during the Recess, that world slump of boredom, lethargy and high summer which carried us all so blissfully trhough ten unforgettable years, and I suppose that may have had a lot to do with what went on between us.”

So begins the first short story published by J.G. Ballard, “Prima Belladonna,” from Science Fantasy in 1956. It is also the opening of The Complete Stories of J.G. Ballard, finally out in the U.S. from Norton eight years after its publication in the U.K. The only addition appears to be the short personal introduction by Martin Amis, presumably designed to give genteel permission for establishment literary readers in the U.S. to read science fictions.

The canonization of Ballard as a writer who transcended his genre roots reached its apex upon the author’s death earier this year, and the past two weeks' rush of reviews (e.g., Jonathan Lethem in the Times, Michael Dirda in the Post) is the second ripple of the honorific obituaries from all all the papers that had largely forgotten Ballard’s work since Empire of the Sun. The English recognition of Ballard’s literary achievement never seems to have made it fully across the Atlantic. So perhaps the appearance of this definitive collection in an increasingly Ballardian 21st century America of abandoned suburbs, kinky astronauts and serial killers of the week is the perfect opportunity for a reclamation of Ballard by science fiction.

In contrast to Ballard’s more recent works (at least as they are marketed by publishers), every one of the 98 stories in this collection is a work of science fiction. (Granted, a science fiction that is being knowingly repurposed by an outsider who discovered the pulps as a young adult and found in them a perfect medium for underground literary surrealism.) Ballard’s contemporary establishment reputation is built largely on the works that made it socially acceptable to read him: the putatively mainstream novels that followed Empire of the Sun, explorations of contemporary bourgeois Europe like Cocaine Nights, Super-Cannes, Millennium People, Kingdom Come, and the semi-autobiographical Kindness of Women. While he is a seminal influence for many pioneering sf authors of the last 30 years, I think most of the current generation of sf readers, writers and editors, carrying on with a linear evolution of pulp sf and fantasy, don’t really know what to make of Ballard — he’s the Ballard of Crash and The Atrocity Exhibition, an outlier in the New Wave (already generally treated as a kind of dope-fueled footnote to generic history) who really is doing something other than science fiction. Fair enough, I suppose — I'm not holding my breath for the Syfy Channel adaptation of “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan.” But in a genre replete with self-referential manifestos, surely there remains no more cogent call to action for the real potential of sf than Ballard’s 1974 introduction to the French edition of Crash — all the more prescient when read from the perspective of the cyberpunk reality of the 21st century:



The marriage of reason and nightmare which has dominated the 20th century has given birth to an ever more ambiguous world. Across the communications landscape move the specters of sinister technologies and the dreams that money can buy. Thermonuclear weapons systems and soft drink commercials coexist in an overlit realm ruled by advertising and pseudo-events, science and pornography. Over our lives preside the great twin leitmotifs of the 20th century—sex and paranoia. Despite McLuhan’s delight in high-speed information mosaics we are still reminded of Freud’s profound pessimism in Civilization and its Discontents. Voyeurism, self-disgust, the infantile basis of our dreams and longings—these diseases of the psyche have now culminated in the most terrifying casualty of the century: the death of affect.

The demise of feeling and emotion has paved the way for all our most real and tender pleasures—in the excitements of pain and mutilation; in sex as the perfect arena, like a culture bed of sterile pus, for all the veronicas of our own perversions; in our moral freedom to pursue our own psychopathology as a game; and in our apparently limitless powers for conceptualization—what our children have to fear is not the cars on the highways of tomorrow but our own pleasure in calculating the most elegant parameters of their deaths.

To document the uneasy pleasures of living within this glaucous paradise has become the role of science fiction. I firmly believe that science fiction, far from being an unimportant minor offshoot, in fact represents the main literary tradition of the 20th century…

The main “fact” of the 20th century is the concept of unlimited possibility. This predicate of science and technology enshrines the notion of a moratorium on the past—the irrelevancy and even death of the past—and the limitless alternatives available to the present. What links the first flight of the Wright brothers to the invention of the Pill is the social and sexual philosophy of the ejector seat.



After establishing this premise, Ballard gently observes the failure of most sf to realize its potential in this regard, and his own approach to the task at hand:

…[W]hen I first turned to science fiction, I was convinced that the future was a better key to the present than the past. At the time, however, I was dissatisfied with science fiction’s obsession with its two principal themes—outer space and the far future. As much for embleamtic purposes as any theoretical or programmatic ones, I christened the new terrain I wished to explore inner space, that psychological domain (manifest, for example, in surrealist painting) where the inner world of the mind and the outer world of reality meet and fuse.

Primarily, I wanted to write a fiction about the present day. To do this in the context of the late 1950s, in a world where the call sign of Sputnik I could be heard on one’s radio like the advance beacon of a new universe, required completely different techniques from those available to the 19th century novelist. In fact, I believe that if it were possible to scrap the whole of existing literature, and be forced to begin without any knowledge of the past, all writers would find themselves inevitably producing something very close to science fiction.

Science and technology multiply around us. To an increasing extent they dictate the languages in which we speak and think. Either we use those languages, or we remain mute.

Yet, by an ironic paradox, modern science fiction becmae the first casualty of the changing world it anticipated and helped to create. The future envisaged by the science fiction of the 1940s and 1950s is already our past. Its dominant images, not merely of the first Moon flights and inerplanetary voyages, but of our changing social and political relationships in a world governed by technology, now resemble huge pieces of discarded stage scenery. For me, this could be seen most touchingly in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, which signified the end of the herioc period of modern science fiction—its lovingly imagined panoramas and costumes, its huge set pieces, reminded me of Gone With the Wind, a scientific pageant that became a kind of historical romance in reverse, a sealed world into which the hard light of contemporary reality was never allowed to penetrate.



…We have annexed the future into our own present, as merely one of those manifold alternative open to us. Options multiply around us, we live in an almost infantile world where any demand, any possibility, whether for lilfestyles, travel, sexual roles and identities, can be satisfied instantly.

…Increasingly [the] roles [of fiction and reality] are reversed. We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind—mass merchandising, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the instant translation of science and technology into popular imagery, the increasing blurring and intermingling of identitieswithin the realm of consumer goods, the preempting of any free or original imaginative response to experience by the television screen. We live inside an enormous novel. For the writer in particular it is less and less necessary for him to invent the fictional content of his novel. The fiction is already there. The writer’s task is to invent the reality.

I quote the essay at such length because I think it is the missing introduction to the Complete Stories, providing literary context that is barely touched in Ballard’s 2001 introduction to the collection, and entirely missing from Amis’ comments. The pieces collected in this volume are Ballard’s achievement of the mission he set out for himself, more so than his novels. Indeed, Ballard’s best novels really want to be short stories, if not pure conceptual abstracts — the ultimate form for the "literature of ideas." The most acclaimed long works like Crash, The Atrocity Exhibition, Concrete Island, High Rise, are conceptual pieces for whom novel length exposition undermines the raw cogency of the premise, and one wonders if Ballard would have written them as such if market conditions had permitted.



Many of the stories that fulfill this Borgesian potential for narrative condensation do so through Ballard’s masterful appropriation of the tropes of “invisible literature” – clinical notes (“Notes Toward a Mental Breakdown”), research abstracts (“Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan”), pataphysical sports reportage (“The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race”), television transcripts (“Theatre of War”), surveillance transcripts (“The 60 Minute Zoom”), postcards (“Having a Wonderful Time”), exploration logs (“Report on an Unidentified Space Station”), astrological entries (“Zodiac 2000”), biographical indexes (“The Index”), and answers to unknown police interrogation questions (“Answers to a Questionnaire”). Ballard figures out how to mimic the densest academic turge with a Calvino-esque lightness that transforms interoffice memoranda into the richest prose poems, achieving an effect both gravely profound and chortlingly funny. Even more beautiful are the experiments where Ballard’s narratives are more putatively accessible and linear, but subverted by the skilled application of surrealistic logic to produce sublime short epics of the subconcious like “The Drowned Giant.”

The collected stories also reveal qualities that Ballard and the critics don’t really acknowledge — Ballard’s achievement of the modernist agenda more successfully than his mainstream peers. Many of the stories are powerful dramas of the self that transport the interior stage from the bourgeois domicile to the more authentic science fictional settings of the present —abandoned motels and overgrown space launch facilities; alienated resorts occupied by the ennui-drunk elan of the leisure class; zones of transit and disaster where all sense of time and social context is obliterated; and extreme scenarios of social stress that peel back the veneer of civilized behavior to reveal primal instincts laid bare, mutated by their technologically mediated context. In stories like “The Dead Astronaut,” “My Dream of Flying to Wake Island,” “Low-Flying Aircraft,” “The 60 Minute Zoom,” “One Afternoon at Utah Beach,” “Motel Architecture,” “Memories of the Space Age,” “Myths of the Neat Future,” “The Man Who Walked on the Moon,” and the Vermilion Sands pieces, Ballard pioneered the art of using science fictional scenario-building — treating setting and technological McGuffins as tools to transform fictive narrative into socio-psychological laboratory — to better depict the emotional reality of what it feels like to live in the present.

Ballard’s ouevre has throughly infiltrated the intellectual superstructure of contemporary cyberculture, as evidenced in omnivorous weblogs like Geoff Manaugh's BLDG BLOG that filter an aspect of the world like architectural space through a Ballardian prism, or Simon Sellars' Ballardian, which annotates the power of Ballard’s philosophical point of view to understand topics as diverse as Michael Jackson’s plastic surgery, airport terminal design, or the pixellated ultraviolence of autogeddon video games. But his literary influence is more elusive, perhaps because Ballard’s singular voice is so outside the bounds of both mainstream literature and science fiction. As Bruce Sterling remarked when I interviewed him for Ballardian, Ballard borrowed from visual art and conceptual art in a way that I think may be less inimitable than Bruce assumes:

How do you think it is that Ballard transcended the genre in terms of critical acceptance?

Well, mostly because he really knows what he’s talking about. Ballard can write a movie review that I would dare any other science-fiction writer to do. Science-fiction writers can’t write about popular culture, even high culture, without trotting out their own self-importance. Which is sort of humiliating. Ballard never does that. He’s said things that are very affirmative about science fiction, like “it’s the only true literature of the twentieth century,” “Earth is the only alien planet,” and other wise things. Ballard’s the kind of guy – the kind of science-fiction writer – who can put on a performance in a pop art gallery that would cause a riot! If you took most science-fiction writers and dropped them in a pop-art gallery, they’d be saying things like “I didn’t get it about Picasso”, or “I kind of like Bridget Riley op art. Is that her real name, Bridget Riley?” They wouldn’t grab the bit between their teeth and push the world of artistic expression to a place that caused people to freak out.

One can only hope that the U.S. publication of The Complete Stories will bring fresh consideration and fresh readers to Ballard’s work, encourage more “literary” writers to borrow from the sf toolkit, and cause more sf writers to throw out the Clarion handbook in favor of trying to really bite into the copper wire of the science fictional landscape inside and outside our heads. The 21st century could use a few more riots started in art galleries by rogue science fictionalists.



The Complete Stories of J.G. Ballard (Norton, $35.00)

Previously in this space: "Invisible Literature for the Age of Celebrity" (or, "The Assassination Inquest of Diana, Princess of Wales Considered as an Unintentionally Ballardian Remix of the Warren Commission Report").

(Vintage covers courtesy of Rick McGrath's amazing Terminal Collection.)