ι< contents | < previous page | home | contact us | next page > | index >ι |
![]() |
Slip-case with a painting by David Pelham for a boxed set of J G Ballard reprints in 1974. |
An American bomber lies half-buried in the shifting sands on the slip-case while its payload – a sister to the atom bomb that destroyed Nagasaki, and the mother of all UXBs – rests nose down in the sand flats of The Terminal Beach. The bomb's tail-box tilts skywards like the flower of a strange fruit whose hard shell hides an exotic interior. In the belly of the bomb are the seeds of mass destruction, two stones of a ripening plutonium core waiting for the conditions that will trigger them to germinate. But unapproachable and unknowable the bomb is quantum uncertainty writ large; it is Schrödinger's cat inside Pandora's box. This atom bomb sitting in the sand is as surreal as the relativity of time and space or Salvador Dalí's melting clocks, for all are part of the same chain reaction. As mankind cowers with his fingers in his ears and his eyes squeezed shut, so the bomb and slip-cased Superfortress have their heads buried in the sand, as if in denial of this nightmarish world and the roles they have played in its creation. |
|
![]() |
The Terminal Beach (2499) by J G Ballard April 1974 reprint with a cover painting by David Pelham. |
MORE COVERS >> | |
![]() |
The Drowned World (2229) by J G Ballard April 1974 reprint with a cover painting by David Pelham. The Chrysler Building is based on a photograph by Evelyn Hofer in New York Proclaimed (1964) >> |
MORE COVERS >> | |
The Drowned World presents a peaceful enough scene. The surface of the water is flat as a millpond, a sea of tran- quillity broken only by the art deco spire of the Chrysler Building which, like the crown of a colossal King Canute, bears silent witness to the deluge that has turned Manhattan into a man-made reef and New York into a new Atlantis. |
|
![]() |
The Wind From Nowhere (2591) by J G Ballard April 1974 reprint with a cover painting by David Pelham. |
MORE COVERS >> | |
The Wind From Nowhere flips a tank while The Drought transforms a Cadillac into a memorial of chrome and streamlined angularity, its rocketship rear styling and flared tail fins an epitaph to the flamboyance of the American automobile. |
|
![]() |
The Drought (2753) by J G Ballard April 1974 reprint with a cover painting by David Pelham. The Cadillac Coupe de Ville is based on a photograph by Evelyn Hofer in New York Proclaimed (1964) >> |
MORE COVERS >> | |
By the time The Four-Dimensional Nightmare was reissued with a Pelham cover painting the icons were on tv: "Howdy all you folks out there and welcome to tonight's simulcast, where we'll be serving y'all up a rib-ticklin' double bill of comic capers. On one channel we've got your old pal Mickey Mouse, while on the other we'll be beaming you live footage of cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin's quest to become the first man in space. That's right folks, the Ruskies are finally uppin' sticks and headin' home to the 'red' planet!" [canned laughter] "Will he do it? Who cares! It'll be a laugh a minute..." The machine spools the tape to the end and then rewinds and starts again, filling the airwaves but watched by no one. |
|
![]() |
The Four-Dimensional Nightmare (2345) by J G Ballard Reissued November 1977 with a cover painting by David Pelham. The Overloaded Man and Thirteen to Centaurus replace Prima Belladonna and Studio Five, The Stars in the previous edition. • The Voices of Time • The Sound-Sweep • The Overloaded Man • Thirteen to Centaurus • The Garden of Time • The Cage of Sand • The Watch-Towers • Chronopolis |
MORE COVERS >> | |
The use of artifacts to depict apocalyptic ruination has of course been done before. The Statue of Liberty has been left in various stages of burial, collapse or decapitation by numerous cataclysms (including Ballard's Wind From Nowhere), while the Statue's cameo in the final scene of the 1968 movie Planet of the Apes is one of the most memorable denouements in cinematic history, a classic twist in the tail that still cools the blood today. Such images may thrill and perhaps even shock but the explanation is invariably straightforward because the machine, the artifact, the icon is in ruins. Where Pelham's images differ is that they defy such explanation. The scene is apocalyptic but the machine is immaculate, and the two are not easily reconciled. |
|
![]() |
The Artist in Science Fiction Science Fiction Monthly September 1974 |
READ ON >> | |
![]() |
Landscapes From a Dream Vector Autumn 2009 |
READ ON >> | |
![]() |
Surrealist Sci-Fi Creative Review March 2012 |
READ ON >> |
ι< contents | < previous page | home | contact us | next page > | index >ι |
website design and text © James Pardey |
![]() ![]() |