I'm back at last, and have decided it's high time to make a start to a project I've been planning: individual posts on classic science fiction stories (and perhaps sometimes fantasy; conceivably even horror).
The idea is to seek out stories that I've often heard about, and that seem intriguing or promising for one reason or another, and then to go and read the suckers. I have hundreds of short story anthologies or magazines, and the time has come to acknowledge that I'm probably never going to read them all, so it's time for some cherry picking.
Ballard's "The Terminal Beach" is from the sixties New Wave period (first published in New Worlds, March 1964, and included in a collection of the same title that same year). I chose it after reading Barry N. Malzberg's essay "The Cutting Edge", in which he sticks his neck out and names his top 10 SF stories. Of Malzberg's top 10, it's the only one I could find, but hadn't read, so here goes ...
A midnight read of this classic story yielded more perplexed
wonderment than storytelling fulfilment. Ballard has connected with me on other
occasions – notably “The Drowned Giant” and “The Cloud Sculptors of Coral D”,
both of which were weirdly wonderful.
The central character, Traven, is stranded on an atoll
previously used for nuclear testing, but now deserted. He roams the symmetric,
completely artificial landscape, among bunkers and blockhouses – in search of
what, is not at all clear. He has visitors after a light aircraft lands there,
but the scientist and his companion seem to find Traven’s presence only mildly
remarkable.
The story itself oscillates between familiarity and hallucinogenic
dissonance – the situation seems at once clearly delineated, yet simultaneously
blurry and dreamy, an effect further established by the slightly reshuffled
order of events. Osborne, one of the visitors, comments in a single telling
remark that our hero may be a beer short of a six-pack, and indeed, Traven’s
repeated sightings of his wife and child (he tells Osborne he is there to find
them) seem to arise from his fevered imagination. But what is he doing on the
island? At first he seems to have been shipwrecked or stranded, but later
evidence is that he is there on purpose.
Clearly, the story deals with a state of mind rather than
with a physical location. Equally clearly, Traven’s surroundings are a metaphor
writ large – not too far off from the surrealistic “Drowned Giant” described in
another memorable tale in the same original story collection. Do we discern in
Traven’s futile meanderings the existential despair of a society flirting with
nuclear annihilation? A dead end for mankind coinciding with that of the
trapped hero?
The story is certainly evocative and involving, but you
can’t shake the feeling that you’re missing most of it. I’m filing this one in
a drawer where I still have some room among all those Gene Wolfe stories …
