Memories of the space age

by J. G. Ballard

This is a collection of eight stories by Ballard set in and around Cape
Canaveral in the post-Space Age. While Ballard writes well, he is a better
poet than a scientist (boy, there's an understatement!) and his attitude to
space travel and science in general is liable to turn off the readers who
would be most attracted to a work of this description--those interest in
space and space travel.

n "The Cage of Sand," for example, Ballard postulates that people
become so worried about the amount of material being shot off into space
that they start bringing back sand from Mars as ballast so that the Earth's
gravity doesn't change. This sand, however, turns out to contain bacteria
which destroy all plant life they come in contact with, although they live
in symbiosis with human intestinal bacteria. This is discovered when
Florida is laid waste, and so Florida is quarantined, thus saving the rest
of the Earth (and providing the setting for the story). Of course, all the
tourists who acquired the bacteria in Florida and excreted it elsewhere are
ignored. So, for that matter, is the fact that it is impossible to bring
back enough material to make up for what is fired off, since the latter
includes all the fuel. To bring back more requires firing off more fuel to
do it. Assume that you launch a 100-pound rocket which is 10 pounds
payload, 60 pounds fuel to get to Mars, and 30 pounds fuel used to get back.
(And these are extremely optimistic figures.) If you try to bring back 90
pounds in sand, then you need another 270 pounds of fuel to bring it back.
But then you need to bring back another 270 pounds of sand, .... If we
could ship as much sand as Ballard suggests around as ballast, we'd have one
hell of a space program!

But according to Ballard, we won't. Each story deals with its own
disaster brought about by the space program. In one, those who travel into
space (and eventually others) become susceptible to fugue states, in which
they blank out for hours at a time. In another, they become susceptible to
just the reverse--relative to them, everything else slows down. This in
fact is one of the major faults of this collection: as a collection, it
lacks continuity. Each story contradicts the others. In "The Cage of
Sand," there is Martian sand surrounding the Cape; in "The Dead Astronaut,"
there is no Martian sand. In one it's fugue; in another it's time-dilation.
Sometimes it's one set of dead astronauts circling the globe, sometimes
another. Ballard really likes the image of dead astronauts circling the
globe in their capsules, especially when he can have them achieve flaming
re-entries as needed for the plot--always landing at the Cape, of course.
It's not clear how this is accomplished, though one story mentions radio
beacons in passing. Right--the whole Cape is deserted and covered by sand,
but the beacons still work.

There are a few stories that do not harp on the theme "there are some
things man was not meant to tamper with." "A Question of Re-entry" is sort
of your basic cargo-cult story. The final story, "The Man Who Walked on the
Moon," is the most interesting, in that it doesn't try to slam the space
program, but rather examines our need for heroes and myths and who we fill
that need.

Now all this sounds very negative, and to a certain extent it is. But
there is no denying that Ballard can write poetic and vivid prose (when not
sabotaged by poor copy-editing that talks about "the siting [sic] of a
satellite"). And I suppose it's reasonable that even pro-space advocates
need to read the material of the opposition to be able to understand and
counter it, though Ballard's total disregard for science or scientific law
makes it difficult to discuss the issues raised logically. And the cover by
Max Ernst and interior illustrations by Jeffrey K. Potter are much better
than a lot of the artwork one seems on and in books these days. (Potter's
illustrations go particularly well with the stories they illustrate,
indicating a real effort on his part and on the part of the publisher to
produce a coherent piece.)

While I was putting this review together, I serendipitously ran across
the following quote from Algis Budrys, which sums up much of what is wrong
with these stories and Ballard's stories in general:

A story by J. G. Ballard, as you know, calls for people who don't think. One begins with characters who regard the physical universe as a mysterious and arbitrary place, and who would not dream of trying to understand its actual laws. Furthermore, in order to be the protagonist of a J. G. Ballard novel, or anything more than a very minor character therein, you must have cut yourself off from the entire body of scientific education. In this way, when the world disaster-be it wind or water--comes upon you, you are under absolutely no obligation to do anything about it but sit and worship it. Even more further, some force has acted to remove from the face of the world all people who might impose good sense or rational behavior on you, so that the disaster proceeds unchecked and unopposed except by the almost inevitable thumb-rule engineer type who for his individual comfort builds a huge pyramid (without huge footings) to resist high winds, or trains a herd of alligators and renegade divers to help him out in dealing with deep water. [GALAXY, December 1966]

And that says it all.