Volume 25, Number 21 & 22 · January 25, 1979
'This is not the end of the world'
By Michael Wood
The Best Short Stories of J.G. Ballard
by J.G. Ballard
Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 302 pp., $7.95 (paper)
The Best American Short Stories 1978
edited by Ted Solotaroff, edited by Shannon Ravenel
Houghton Mifflin, 398 pp., $10.95
I, etcetera
by Susan Sontag
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 246 pp., $8.95
There was a time, some ten or fifteen years ago, when the notion of 'inner space,' usually associated with the writings of J.G. Ballard, threatened to change the direction of science fiction. The mind, it was suggested, was the genre's true subject. Down here in the human head, away from the galaxies, was virgin land, Freud's new frontier. Hamlet would no doubt have been surprised to learn that the mind was a fresh topic for literature, but the arriving slogan did bring an altered emphasis, since, effectively, it entangled certain fading symbolist doctrines with certain strands of contemporary psychology. Verlaine, so to speak, was revisited by R.D. Laing, and 'every landscape is a state of mind' became 'most states of mind can be depicted as eerie landscapes': the objective correlative turned to nightmare. Surrealist painting also lurks somewhere in the background here.
Review, 3677 words
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