The Terminal Beach

Ballard is distinct in a way that few authors can ever dream of being, so much so that the word Ballardian feels as apt to use as words like Kafkaesque or Lynchian. His sense of style, his subject matter, and the perspective of his voice are so uniquely his own. Reading The Terminal Beach has solidified Ballard's place in my mind as one of the masters of SF.

I say that, but The Terminal Beach has a lot of stories that I wouldn't even classify as SF at all. Ballard consistently rides the intersection between science fiction, fantasy, and literary fiction. These stories are bleak, misanthropic, pessimistic about human behavior and the influence of technology. Often they set a singular, broken man amid an antagonistic landscape, who's mental state slowly degrades over time. There are a lot of beaches and outdoor environments in this collection, but I find Ballard at his best when he works in the urban or suburban. My inherent pessimistic side connects a lot with these themes, but reading Ballard can often be depressing.

Standout stories include:

The Drowned Giant, an engaging description of the body of a gigantic humanoid decaying on a beach. A critique of our collective memory and commodification of the mystical.

Bilennium, a surprisingly humorous (for Ballard) overpopulation dystopia that is primarily focused on the division of personal living space. A reminder that despite what we tend to think, most of our most problems are self inflicted, and we tend to become what we hate. Possibly an inspiration for Harrison's Make Room! Make Room!.

The Terminal Beach, the headliner, about a lone figure, diseased and dying, as they wander through a landscape disfigured by atomic bomb testing. Perhaps the most challenging and opaque story of the lot.

The Reptile Enclosure, the most standard SF short of the bunch, set on a beach where the seething mass of human flesh that lays baking in the sun is herded like cattle to the slaughter. Short, lurid, and memorable.

There's also a Heart of Darkness pastiche that finds space to include critiques of technology, and a Kafkaesque story that was perhaps a bit less subtle than Ballard usually is.

That all being said, The Terminal Beach didn't exactly blow my socks off. While the floor for quality is pretty high here, it does come with some of the baggage that all collections/anthologies come with; some of the stories are better than others, and reading so many short stories back to back can make some of them get lost in your mind. I wasn't particularly moved by any of these stories, probably in part due to Ballard's detached, emotionally vacant style. Ballard's humans aren't the most convincing, even if he mostly makes up for it with environments and psychology that languish in detail. Honestly I was expecting to enjoy this collection more than I did, but I think that must be a product of the high bar he has already created in my mind, which I suppose isn't a bad thing.