castle of illusion

The first sentence of “The Voices of Time” (1960) is the first of many great opening sentences from the author of perhaps more great opening sentences than any other author in the field. As far as the chronological ladder of Complete is concerned, it all comes from nowhere: Later Powers often thought of Whitby, and the strange grooves the biologist had cut, apparently at random, all over the floor of the empty swimming pool. We could unpack the cargo of this sentence for days; the heart of its burden, for me, of course lies in its assertion of a world that has already been spent. It is a sentence in which the passage of time is as detached as a loose retina, for its first word refers to a recollection that will either come later in the tale, or maybe not until the tale, which is about re-enacting the past, has been told. Belatedness piles on belatedness, under the eye of an implied author who is clearly omniscient but (like god) lets us guess. Then there is the empty swimming pool: an artifact of 20th-century Lonely Crowd culture that cannot any more hold water. And there are the strange grooves, runes as unheimlich as the carved faces that shout out the vacancy of Easter Island, in dead silence. And then, for the first time in the chronology of stories here assembled, we are given to understand that the protagonist is a becalmed professional—a doctor or a scientist of some sort, there will be dozens of him in later Ballard stories, the kind of man who, like a shark, must swim constantly to keep from choking in the obsolescence of his skills kit—and we suspect that his deepest gesture in “The Voices of Time” will reiterate the insectile obedience of Whitby: that both men carve glyphs as ultimately unreadable as termite droppings. (via 98 stories! 1,216 pages! Is the complete J.G. Ballard worth it? | SCI FI Wire by John Clute)