Who Goes There?

J. G. Ballard was born in 1930 in Shanghai, to British parents, and his experiences in a Japanese POW camp during World War II would much later be dramatized in Empire of the Sun. Before Empire of the Sun brought Ballard mainstream attention, though, he was a controversial figure, and before that one of the architects of the New Wave. He debuted in 1956, simultaneously in New Worlds and Science Fantasy, and while he wouldn’t be published in the American magazines for several more years, his early work quickly got reprinted in American reprint anthologies. The closest American equivalent to Ballard I can think of at the time might’ve been C. M. Kornbluth, who sadly was unlikely to have heard of Ballard before his death. Ballard later became a kind of writer’s writer, the kind of genre writer who gained acceptance with the literary crowd with provocative but only borderline SFnal novels like Crash and High-Rise. He was one of the field’s great misanthropes. “The Voices of Time” was published right before Ballard’s thirtieth birthday, being very much a story that anticipated the New Wave—not the sex and violence of the New Wave, but rather the attempts at literary intricacy, the psychology of the New Wave. This is a deceptively complex story with a black hole for a heart.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the October 1960 issue of New Worlds. It has been reprinted in Spectrum III (ed. Kingsley Amis and Robert Conquest), One Hundred Years of Science Fiction (ed. Damon Knight), Alpha Two (ed. Robert Silverberg), Modern Science Fiction (ed. Norman Spinrad), The Great SF Stories #22 (ed. Isaac Asimov and Martin H. Greenberg), The Big Book of Science Fiction (ed. Ann and Jeff VanderMeer), and of course in The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard.

Enhancing Image

Robert Powers used to be a neurologist at “the Clinic,” but has since resigned on account of falling victim to a “narcoma syndrome” which has, over the past five years, sent thousands of people into comas from which there doesn’t seem to be hope for recovery. The Clinic itself has practically been overrun with hundreds of sleeping beauties, and as Powers sleeps more and more each day on average (something like eleven or twelve hours), he knows the time will come when he becomes one of the comatose. Subjectively he may as well have a terminal condition. Anderson, former colleague at the Clinic and now Powers’s own doctor, takes pity on him but notices there’s also a serene quality about Powers, as if he has become “like a Conrad beachcomber more or less reconciled to his own weaknesses.” Of course this is a reference to Joseph Conrad’s seafaring stories, like Lord Jim and Almayer’s Folly, and like the protagonists of those novels Powers is a doomed man—although unlike his predecessors he pretty well knows it. He might be following the footsteps of Whitby, a biologist at the Clinic who recently committed suicide, leaving his lab unattended and after having carved an elaborate symbol at the bottom of a drained swimming pool near the lab. There’s also Kaldren, a patient at the Clinic whom Powers had experimented on such that he has the opposite problem of everyone else: he never sleeps. And there’s Kaldren’s girlfriend, who he calls Coma (I have to think that’s not her real name), “the girl from Mars,” who befriends Powers.

“The Voices of Time” has been reprinted many times and seems to be one of those stories that exists as fodder for classroom discussions (assuming the teacher/professor is based enough to be teaching classic SF), partly I think because of its symbolic density. There are a lot of symbols shoved in here, some obvious, some not as obvious. “Coma” is obviously meant to be ironic, as she’s one of the few people at the Clinic who’s still awake; but then you have Kaldren, which sounds like cauldron—like a witch’s cauldron. Kaldren is perhaps the most aloof character in this small ensemble, as he’s kind of a mischievous figure, passively tormenting Powers, the Dr. Frankenstein who had messed with his brain. Kaldren passes the time by doing several things, one of them being that he likes to draw a series of numbers, apparently taken from a recording of a lost moon expedition, the last digits revealing the long series of numbers to be a countdown. According to Kaldren’s study of the recording, “by the time this series reaches zero the universe will have just ended.” (By the way, the Mercury Seven, the moon expedition which had apparently encountered alien life on the moon and went missing thereafter, is named after a real group of astronauts, called the Mercury Seven, which would’ve been announced probably a few months before Ballard wrote this story. One of the Mercury Seven, Gus Grissom, would later die in the Apollo 1 disaster.) We never do find out what happened to Mercury Seven, or where the aliens went, but we get the impression that whatever message they had for us was not a good one. Kaldren plays with the recording to kill time, while Powers does the same by venturing into his dead colleague’s lab and seeing what he had been working on—which may turn out to be a mistake, given the irradiated horrors awaiting him.

“The Voices of Time” has multiple moving parts, but if I had to boil it down to one word it has to be “entropy.” Entropy is a pretty hard word to define, and as a layman I’m not really qualified to get knee-deep in it, but in the context of Ballard’s story it has to do with the winding-down of the universe—not an explosion or even a crunch, but a very slow lapsing into eternal slumber. The universe is slowing down into lethargy, and this extends to not just humanity but all life on Earth. Whitby had experimented on animal and plant life with X-rays, irradiating these forms and awaking what he called a pair of “silent genes,” whose effects would be unpredictable but very interesting. The life forms Powers encounters in the lab, from a hyper-intelligent chimp who nonetheless has to wear a special helmet to avoid migraines, to an overgrown frog with a leaden shell which “vaguely resembled an armadillo’s.” In a more conventional SF story of the time these creatures would have at least been blessed with powers and a certain resiliency, but alas they are in pain, and dying. Whitby’s experiments with radiation had apparently fostered a little circus of freaks, the animals’ painful existence making them nightmarish but also pitiable. The “silent genes” unlocked previously untapped potential, sure, but this turned out to not be for the better. Whitby himself seemed aware of his mistake, and while we’re not told why he committed suicide, it’s not hard to guess, going off recorded convos between him and Powers.

“It’s always been assumed that the evolutionary slope reaches forever upwards, but in fact the peak has already been reached, and the pathway now leads downwards to the common biological grave. It’s a despairing and at present unacceptable vision of the future, but it’s the only one. Five thousand centuries from now our descendants, instead of being multi-brained star-men, will probably be naked prognathous idiots with hair on their foreheads, grunting their way through the remains of this Clinic like Neolithic men caught in a macabre inversion of time. Believe me, I pity them, as I pity myself.”

I shouldn’t have to tell you that this story is hard to read, partly because of the ideas Ballard plays with, but it’s also insanely depressing. I had read “The Voices of Time” a few days ago but waited to write about it, so I could take more notes but also it’s such a miserable fucking time. This is not unusual for Ballard, although even the dark humor that would define his most (in)famous work is mostly absent here. This is a story about life in the universe becoming old and tired, but it’s also a curious subversion of what would’ve been, even in 1960, a very old topic: the forced evolution of life via radiation. On paper “The Voices of Time” would have been nothing out of the ordinary for 1940, or even 1930. The notion that humans could become “enhanced” via radiation goes back to the time of Edmond Hamilton’s “The Man Who Evolved,” in 1931, and goes back even further. Ballard would’ve been keenly aware of his genre’s history in the 20th century; despite being claimed by the literary crowd as one of their own he really was a student of genre SF. The thing is that Ballard, even at this early stage, was a much more sophisticated writer than Hamilton, or basically anyone who wrote genre fiction in the ’30s and ’40s. He hunted intellectual big game with extreme prejudice, and I have to admit there are passages in “The Voices of Time,” such as the above quote from Whitby, that are quite haunting—for their implications but also the beauty of their language. This is the kind of story I ideally should’ve read more than once before reviewing it.

There Be Spoilers Here

Powers spends much of the story retracing Whitby’s steps with his experiments, as something to do while he still has the capacity to stay awake; but he has also taken on an even weirder project: recreating the “mandala” at the bottom of that drained swimming pool on a larger scale, by using an abandoned airfield. (It’s unclear where this story takes place, but given the largely desert landscape it could be California or Nevada. It certainly doesn’t sound like anywhere in England that I can think of.) Something that has only just occurred to me, and it embarrasses me a bit to say this, is that while we’re given an SFnal explanation for Powers’s decline, it’s pretty obvious to me now that he suffers from clinical depression. Lethargy is a common symptom of depression, and while Powers never brings up suicide with regards to himself, it’s apparent from the beginning that he has resigned himself to what would be, at least from his perspective, the end of his life. It shouldn’t be surprising, then, that at the end of the story, after having replicated Whitby’s mandala, Powers takes his own life in a rather unique fashion—by using Whitby’s experimental radiation on himself. To cop the final words from Herman Melville’s “Benito Cereno,” Powers “did, indeed, follow his leader.” One can only hope he felt as little pain as possible. It’s a fittingly bleak ending to one of SF’s bleakest stories, and a taste of the more explicit dystopias Ballard would become known for.

A Step Farther Out

I enjoyed thinking about this story more than actually reading it, although a big reason for that is the fact that I’m a dumbass and that I had to reread certain passages to get even a clue of what Ballard was doing. I always take notes when reading stuff for this site, but “The Voices of Time” is more demanding than most of what I’ve covered on here; indeed it demands that one take notes and try to think about it. It borders on “pretentious,” but it’s also easy to see how this would’ve been mind-bending for genre readers in 1960. At first you think you’re getting a standard “mad scientist” narrative, possibly even a throwback, but Ballard is five steps ahead of you and so delivers something that doesn’t quite read like anything else from the time—at least not in the genre magazines.

See you next time.