Vermilion Sands

This collection of short stories has a unifying theme of happening in a very strange desert resort, Vermillion Sands. I read this book maybe twenty years ago, and many of the images have followed through my life since. Enjoyable, going from the level of soap-opera guilty pleasure to the sublime and thought provoking. Ballard is the sober man's Bukowski, laying bare the emotions of the tragedies of everyday life and also putting the extraordinary in the context of normal human experience. My favorite book of his, and one of my favorites overall. "Crash" is my next favorite, so if you like this check it out next...

The beachfront, decadent community of Vermilion Sands is the setting for each of the nine wonderful stories in this collection. Vermilion Sands is where the rich are. They vacation, they play, they search for lost loves, and above all, they are horribly narcissistic.Vermilion Sands is home to the magnificent singing sonic sculptures, tall statues that emit music or atonal sounds when they sense movement. The marvelous sand yachts of the rich, their trained sand rays (giant white manta rays that float through the air), the cloud-sculptors, the living clothes, and the psychotropic houses all live on in the mind long after the stories have been read. Vermilion Sands is a striking setting, one of the more memorable in fiction.The themes of the stories are fairly similar. Most dwell on unattainable or forsaken love. In "Say Goodbye to the Wind", a former model pines for her departed love. In "Studio 5, the Stars" an aspiring poetess dreams of tragic love. And so it goes in each story. But the stories are fresh and have enough energy to overcome a repetitive theme.Ballard's futuristic city stands as a monument to the power of a memorable fictional setting. Indeed, Vermilion Sands is as powerful as Jeffrey Thomas's Punktown or Jeff VanderMeer's Ambergris to use two recent examples. I'm hoping that Mr. Ballad has seen fit to write more Vermilion Sands stories in the 30+ years since this collection was published. I can only hope that I find more.

This magnificent collection of stories was first published in 1971. Although this book frequently shows up on lists of the greatest books of all time in that genre, it is not science fiction so much as a vision of possible forms that the arts could take in the future. It is more futuristic fantasy than science fiction. This volume marked J. G. Ballard's maturation as an author. Before this work, much of his work had been highly inventive but more mainstream science fiction. More specifically, he specialized in novels along the theme "this is the way the world ends." For instance, THE DROWNED WORLD concerns the fate of individuals living in tropical London after the polar ice caps have melted, leaving much of the world underwater. In THE WIND FROM NOWHERE a never-ceasing wind destroys the planet by blowing away all the soil and making agriculture and most other forms of human endeavor impossible. What makes VERMILLION SANDS is the sheer inventiveness of the world he imagines. It is a cheap, tacky world, not unlike a tawdry Las Vegas or Palm Springs, populated by futuristic artists and cultural has-beens. The art forms that Ballard imagines are brilliant, and feel far more familiar thirty years later than they must have felt to those in the early 1970s. After all, computers and the Internet and digitalization has constantly forced us to rethink the possibilities and forms of art. Ballard describes architecture that responds to the emotional experiences of its inhabitants and imparts some of that feeling back to those entering it. He imagines machines rather than people producing poetry, on long ticker tape like rolls of paper. Plants that sing. Sculptors who work with clouds as their preferred medium. And Ballard manages to meld these strange new arts perfectly into the lives of a rich and fascinating, if also rather sad and tragic, group of characters.This book is, at the time that I am writing this, out of print. But it has over the years come back in print on a few occasions. I am certain that it will again. It is without question a much more interesting book than many of his that are currently in print, and if there is any justice it will once again be made available. Until then, it is well worth searching out.

My personal favorite collection of stories from Ballard, and many people I've spoken to also hold a fondness for this group of stories. Although many of the story concepts repeat the theme of the tragic female figure and the tortured man who loves her and gets caught in the dramatic conflict, it is a lush and expansive vision that weaves through the collection. The title refers to a fictional beach resort, a playground of burnt out executives and movie stars at play, or in retreat from the rest of the world. As with most Ballard fiction, you get the distinct impression that these stories are actually taking place somewhere, and perhaps Ballard has just changed the names to protect the decadent. The vivid details of living clothing, cloud sculptors and singing sculptures are so intense, it's a bit of a surprise that Hollywood hasn't adapted some of these stories to the currently CGI movie craze. Then again, like most of what Ballard writes about, that could be coming just around the corner...

This collection of elegant, minatory stories about the has-been resort community of Vermilion Sands and the human flotsam that washes up on its derelict shores comprises some of author J.G. Ballard's most accessible work. His imaginative gifts and jade cool prose are everywhere on display in these stories. Sailplane artists sculpt the clouds into likenesses of their patrons. Psychosensitive houses are driven insane by their owners and bio-fabrics shimmer and pulse to their wearers moods. Ballard likes to create strange, surreal outerscapes and unite these with the straitened innerscapes of his protagonists, then narrate what happens next. In Vermilion Sands he exceeds wonderfully