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EMPIRE OF THE SUN by J G Ballard [message #91866] Wed, 26 June 2013 01:04
donn is currently offline  donn
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Message-ID: <1260@utah-gr.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 2-Dec-84 19:36:27 EST
Article-I.D.: utah-gr.1260
Posted: Sun Dec  2 19:36:27 1984
Date-Received: Fri, 7-Dec-84 02:14:52 EST
Organization: CS Dept., University of Utah
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Xref: watmath net.books:1092 net.sf-lovers:5334

A lot of sf readers profess not to enjoy the work of J G Ballard.  His
stories are often cold and pessimistic, built around metaphors instead
of plot or character development; his anti-heroes behave irrationally
at best; his universes are usually brutal and indifferent to human
struggles.  I sometimes think these things, and it's true that I
haven't bought very much that Ballard has done recently, but I find
that many images from Ballard stories stick with me and that upon
rereading they seem to mean different things.  Novels like THE CRYSTAL
WORLD, THE DROUGHT, stories like 'The Terminal Beach', 'Chronopolis',
'The Voices of Time' or (my favorite) 'Build-up', have dream-like
settings which appeal strongly to me when I'm in the right mood.  Why
is Ballard's fictional space so strange?  It's not because he indulges
in fashionable technophobia and world-weariness; in Charles Platt's
interview with Ballard in DREAM MAKERS we hear: 'I'm completely out of
sympathy with the whole antitechnology movement...  [A]ll these
doom-sayers and echo-watchers -- their prescriptions for disaster
always strike me as simply wrong, factually, and also appallingly
defeatist, expressing some sort of latent sense of failure.  I feel
very OPTIMISTIC about science and technology.  And yet almost my entire
fiction has been an illustration of the opposite.  I show all these
entropic universes with everything running down.  I think it has a lot
to do with my childhood in Shanghai during the war.'

EMPIRE OF THE SUN (Simon and Schuster, 1984; 279 pp.) is a novel which
deals with Ballard's wartime experiences in excruciating detail.  It is
unlike anything of Ballard's that I have ever read before; in fact it
(deceptively) reads like a straightforward mainstream novel, but it
really is an exhaustive catalog of all the images and characters which
Ballard has used in his work.  The drained swimming pools, the wrecks
of aircraft, the inhuman protagonists, the Kafkaesque agents of
authority: they're all here, and it's exceedingly disturbing that they
can't be dismissed as figments of nightmares as they sometimes can in
Ballard's stories.  They are all real, terrifyingly real, all evidences
of a basic disturbance in the universe which has caused the rind of
culture and civilization that we take for granted to be peeled away.
Young Jim is eleven years old in December, 1941, when the novel opens;
he lives a comfortable existence as the son of a well-to-do English
mill owner in Shanghai.  Across the Yangtze the Japanese gather for
their final assault, but life among the expatriates proceeds as usual.
On the morning of December 8 (December 7 across the date line in
Hawaii), the ships in the Shanghai roads are bombed by the Japanese,
and in the ensuing panic Jim is separated from his parents.  He manages
to find his way back to his house in the British quarter, but his
parents never return...  Jim's world begins to bend, then crack under
the weight of events; his childish outlook is never shaken, however,
and it adapts in a remarkable way to account for a life of eating
weevils for protein, volunteering for kitchen duty in order to steal
sweet potatoes, watching Chinese beaten to death for sport by guards,
stripping bodies of salable possessions.  In short he becomes a classic
Ballard character: someone whose soul has died but whose body lives
on.  This is not a novel for people who maintain that war brings out
heroism in the common man.  In EMPIRE, war is simply an efficient way
of converting common men and women into bloated, fly-spotted corpses.

EMPIRE OF THE SUN is not a book for the squeamish, but it is an
effective book: it achieves its narrative purpose, it shocks you from
your complacent existence, showing you just how little experience you
may have of the way the world operates outside your comfortable pocket
in it.  It is not technically a science fiction novel, but its world is
as alien to ours as any distant planet, and it is an encyclopedia of
images from Ballard's sf.  Despite my lingering revulsion, I'm glad I
bought the book.

Donn Seeley    University of Utah CS Dept    donn@utah-cs.arpa
40 46' 6"N 111 50' 34"W    (801) 581-5668    decvax!utah-cs!donn
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