Horror: The 100 Best Books by Jones Stephen && Newman Kim

Horror: The 100 Best Books by Jones Stephen && Newman Kim

Author:Jones, Stephen && Newman, Kim
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Collection.Anthology, Literary Criticism, Essays & Letters, Reference, Non-Fiction
ISBN: 9780786705528
Publisher: Carroll & Graf
Published: 1988-01-02T00:00:00+00:00


63: [1966] J. G. BALLARD - The Crystal World

Dr. Edward Sanders travels to West Africa to investigate reports of a strange phenomenon. He discovers that a growing expanse of the jungle has been turning crystalline, fusing the flora and fauna into a glittering mineral formation. Finally, Sanders is compelled to travel into the abstract sculpture jungle himself, hoping to merge with the landscape. The Crystal World follows Ballard's The Wind from Nowhere (1962), The Drowned World (1962) and The Burning World (1964) (a.k.a. The Drought), and forms the final part of a loose quartet of disaster novels dealing with the four elements. While the first book in the sequence was conventional SF in the John Wyndham vein, the later books are increasingly bizarre, surreal and unclassifiable.

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Disaster is a proud tradition in fantastic literature, from H. G. Wells' Martian invasion to such modern-day bestsellers as Swan Song and War Day. The fifties and the early sixties were a particularly fertile time for disaster novels, what with new awareness of atomic bombs and ecology, producing such end-of-the-world (or end-of-humanity) classics as John Wyndham's Day of the Triffids and Richard Matheson's I am Legend. It is in this tradition that J. G. Ballard began writing his book-length fiction, culminating in his fourth novel, The Crystal World. The central disaster in Ballard's book is quite simple. Something is happening in remote tropical sections of the world. The landscape is transforming, changing from lush, humid vegetation, to cold, arid crystals. But how Ballard handles this disaster is quite atypical. Instead of fighting the disaster with non-stop action or the latest scientific marvels, his characters act almost as if the change wasn't even taking place, and in a way that is most certainly secondary to their immediate emotional concerns. Death and decay are everywhere in The Crystal World. The opening image in the book is one of rotting vegetation along black river water. The protagonist, Dr. Sanders, a specialist in leprosy, searches for a former lover who has, herself, contracted the disease. In the book's most dramatic sub-plot, two men fight violently over a woman who is dying of some wasting illness. And, moving slowly but unstoppably, is the crystalization of the jungle and the world. Ballard describes this transformed jungle as a place of great beauty -- the crystals pulse with a light of their own -- but it is a place without heat, and a place of total silence. Everything, vegetation, water, birds, animals, humans, perhaps even air, is being turned to crystal and frozen in place. Ballard sets up the universe of The Crystal World as a place of opposites, foremost among them the living/rotting jungle versus the dead/magnificent crystals. The protagonist has two loves: Suzanne, who contracts leprosy and is drawn to the crystal world, and Louise, a journalist investigating the phenomenon, who wants to return to the unaffected outside world with Sanders. But Sanders cannot resolve either of his love affairs, and all the opposites in the book seem equally unresolvable. Life goes on, for the most part passively, as the crystals approach.



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