The two children had now scaled the ear and were pulling themselves into the right orbit, whose blue globe, completely occluded by some milk-colored fluid, gazed sightlessly past their miniature forms. Seen obliquely from below, the face was devoid of all grace and repose, the drawn mouth and raised chin propped up by gigantic slings of muscles resembling the torn prow of a colossal wreck. For the first time I became aware of the extremity of this last physical agony of the giant, no less painful for his unawareness of the collapsing musculature and tissues. The absolute isolation of the ruined figure, cast like an abandoned ship upon the empty shore, almost out of sound of the waves, transformed his face into a mask of exhaustion and helplessness.
As I stepped forward, my foot sank into a trough of soft tissue, and a gust of fetid gas blew through an aperture between the ribs. Retreating from the fouled air, which hung like a cloud over my head, I turned toward the sea to clear my lungs. To my surprise I saw that the giant’s left hand had been amputated.
I stared with shocked bewilderment at the blackening stump, while the solitary youth reclining on his aerial perch a hundred feet away surveyed me with a sanguinary eye.
This was only the first of a sequence of depredations. I spent the following two days in the library, for some reason reluctant to visit the shore, aware that I had probably witnessed the approaching end of a magnificent illusion. When I next crossed the dunes and set foot on the shingle, the giant was little more than twenty yards away, and with this close proximity to the rough pebbles all traces had vanished of the magic which once surrounded his distant wave-washed form. Despite his immense size, the bruises and din that covered his body made him appear merely human in scale, his vast dimensions only increasing his vulnerability.
His right hand and foot had been removed, dragged up the slope, and trundled away by cart. After questioning the small group of people huddled by the breakwater, I gathered that a fertilizer company and a cattlefood manufacturer were responsible.
The giant’s remaining foot rose into the air, a steel hawser fixed to the large toe, evidently in preparation for the following day. The surrounding beach had been disturbed by a score of workmen, and deep ruts marked the ground where the hands and foot had been hauled away. A dark brackish fluid leaked from the stumps, and stained the sand and the white cones of the cuttlefish. As I walked down the shingle I noticed that a number of jocular slogans, swastikas, and other signs had been cut into the gray skin, as if the mutilation of this motionless colossus had released a sudden flood of repressed spite. The lobe of one of the ears was pierced by a spear of timber, and a small fire had burned out in the center of the chest, blackening the surrounding skin. The fine wood ash was still being scattered by the wind.
A foul smell enveloped the cadaver, the undisguisable signature of putrefaction, which had at last driven away the usual gathering of youths. I returned to the shingle and climbed up onto the winch. The giant’s swollen cheeks had now almost closed his eyes, drawing the lips back in a monumental gape. The once straight Grecian nose had been twisted and flattened, stamped into the ballooning face by countless heels.
When I visited the beach the following day I found, almost with relief, that the head had been removed.
Some weeks elapsed before I made my next journey to the beach, and by then the human likeness I had noticed earlier had vanished again. On close inspection the recumbent thorax and abdomen were unmistakably manlike, but as each of the limbs was chopped off, first at the knee and elbow, and then at shoulder and thigh, the carcass resembled that of any headless sea animal—whale or whale shark. With this loss of identity, and the few traces of personality that had clung tenuously to the figure, the interest of the spectators expired, and the foreshore was deserted except for an elderly beachcomber and the watchman sitting in the doorway of the contractor’s hut.
A loose wooden scaffolding had been erected around the carcass, from which a dozen ladders swung in the wind, and the surrounding sand was littered with coils of rope, long metal-handled knives, and grappling irons, the pebbles oily with blood and pieces of bone and skin.
I nodded to the watchman, who regarded me dourly over his brazier of burning coke. The whole area was pervaded by the pungent smell of huge squares of blubber being simmered in a vat behind the hut.
Both the thighbones had been removed, with the assistance of a small crane draped in the gauzelike fabric which had once covered the waist of the giant, and the open sockets gaped like barn doors. The upper arms, collarbones, and pudenda had likewise been dispatched. What remained of the skin over the thorax and abdomen had been marked out in parallel strips with a tarbrush, and the first five or six sections had been pared away from the midriff, revealing the great arch of the rib cage.
As I left, a flock of gulls wheeled down from the sky and alighted on the beach, picking at the stained sand with ferocious cries.
Several months later, when the news of his arrival had been generally forgotten, various pieces of the body of the dismembered giant began to reappear all over the city. Most of these were bones, which the fertilizer manufacturers had found too difficult to crush, and their massive size, and the huge tendons and disks of cartilage attached to their joints, immediately identified them. For some reason, these disembodied fragments seemed better to convey the essence of the giant’s original magnificence than the bloated appendages that had been subsequently amputated. As I looked across the road at the premises of the largest wholesale merchants in the meat market, I recognized the two enormous thighbones on either side of the doorway. They towered over the porters’ heads like the threatening megaliths of some primitive druidical religion, and I had a sudden vision of the giant climbing to his knees upon these bare bones and striding away through the streets of the city, picking up the scattered fragments of himself on his return journey to the sea.
A few days later I saw the left humerus lying in the entrance to one of the shipyards. In the same week the mummified right hand was exhibited on a carnival float during the annual pageant of the guilds.
The lower jaw, typically, found its way to the museum of natural history. The remainder of the skull has disappeared, but is probably still lurking in the waste grounds or private gardens of the city—quite recently, while sailing down the river, I noticed two ribs of the giant forming a decorative arch in a waterside garden, possibly confused with the jawbones of a whale. A large square of tanned and tattooed skin, the size of an Indian blanket, forms a back cloth to the dolls and masks in a novelty shop near the amusement park, and I have no doubt that elsewhere in the city, in the hotels or golf clubs, the mummified nose or ears of the giant hang from the wall above a fireplace. As for the immense pizzle, this ends its days in the freak museum of a circus which travels up and down the Northwest. This monumental apparatus, stunning in its proportions and sometime potency, occupies a complete booth to itself. The irony is that it is wrongly identified as that of a whale, and indeed most people, even those who first saw him cast up on the shore after the storm, now remember the giant, if at all, as a large sea beast.
The remainder of the skeleton, stripped of all flesh, still rests on the seashore, the clutter of bleached ribs like the timbers of a derelict ship. The contractor’s hut, the crane, and scaffolding have been removed, and the sand being driven into the bay along the coast has buried the pelvis and backbone. In the winter the high curved bones are deserted, battered by the breaking waves, but in the summer they provide an excellent perch for the sea-wearying gulls.
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* * * *
This is the first time I have used two stories by one author (knowingly—but that is another Annual, and another author). Not that I have opposed the practice on principle: In fact, if I were to lake my title literally, most of the Annuals would be limited to the work of five or six authors; it is a rare, happy year when any more than that can be said to be writing the best.
In a given year, I may find anywhere from a handful to a dozen of truly e
xceptional stories (by perhaps two-thirds as many authors). Beyond that, there may well be four or five times as much good interesting material as I can use.
This collection represents a field of writing: the field as well as the writing. Even if there existed some scale of critical absolutes against which a story might be measured for literary merit, I would have little interest in sifting out individual candidates according to decimal-point distinctions of near excellence. I am more concerned with “representativeness.”
Who are the new writers? Which magazines are most interesting? What are the new concepts and foci of interest? How do they relate to current work in other fields of writing? To current thinking in science and philosophy? To world events? S-f is speculative writing, after all, as significant for its statements (and its questions) as for its means of expression.
But only as significant; not more so. S-f is a specialized way of writing about ideas. The development of techniques for the expression of new concepts—new modes in language, narrative, and structure—are an essential part of what (ever it is that) we mean by S-F.
All these factors, then, must be considered in weighing the (merely) very good stories against each other—and against the inclusion of two (or more) selections by a single author from the smaller group of outstanding stories. Ordinarily, they operate in favor of variety. This time—
As it happens, Ballard published only one new short story during 1965. “The Volcano Dances” appeared originally in Gollancz’s 1964 collection. Terminal Beach—which I did not see until the fall of 1965. “Giant” was the obvious “qualified” choice—but I could not get “Volcano” out of my mind, once I saw it, and it had never been published here at all, whereas “Giant” had been in Playboy, and was scheduled for SFWA’s Nebula Awards anthology as well—for excellent reason; leaving it out of a 1965 “best” collection was simply absurd. It kept going back and forth like that, until the new Ballard stories started appearing in early ‘66 issues of Impulse, New Worlds, and Ambit.
This is truly new work for the author as well as the field, it is experimental in style, controversial in content, provocative, evocative, and unforgettable. It establishes Ballard clearly as the significant author in the field today, in all the ways I try to consider. In all likelihood, it will also establish him as a storm-center of critical controversy—but that will be small change from last year.
Not everyone likes Ballard’s work; no one can ignore it, or ignore his impact (as writer and angry critic, both) on other Writers in the field. No serious critical consideration of s-f last year failed to make pointed reference to him (Amis in Holiday, Aldiss in SF Horizons, Butler in Spectator, etc.). His loudly pronounced notions on “inner space” were so widely echoed that he himself stopped using the phrase. He was compared by reviewers to Conrad, Kafka, Bradbury, and Burroughs (William).
It would be as easy, and as inapplicable, to compare him with Camus, or Poe, or Ionesco, or C. S. Lewis. What he has most in common with any of them is best stated in Aldiss’ summing up, in a lengthy comparative critique of three British writers: Other writers . . . are copying. Ballard is originating.
Certainly, he is s-f’s most-published author right now (bar the perennial re-re-re-issues of Asimov, Bradbury, and Clarke).
Doubleday last year reprinted his first two novels. The Drowned World and The Wind from Nowhere in a combined hardcover edition, at about the same time that the third one. The Drought, was published by Jonathan Cape in England, and (as The Burning World) in a Berkley paperback here—and the first three chapters appeared in Ambit, a highly regarded British literary magazine. Berkley reissued an early collection, and Gollancz reissued their Terminal Beach (slightly different in contents from the Berkley edition), while the title story (an obscure, difficult, demanding piece which violated almost every convention of s-f writing) was widely reprinted (including in the 10th Annual).
As I write, Ballard’s newest novel. The Crystal World, is about to appear in both countries (Cape and Farrar), and Berkley has just released a new collection. The Impossible Man, and other Stories. Another collection is forthcoming from Cape, and Doubleday is planning the first American hardcover collection.
Meantime, reviews and critical writings by the author have been appearing in The Guardian and Ambit, as well as in New Worlds. Perhaps the best clue to Ballard the writer is to be found in Ballard the critic, who asked impatiently about one book:
. . . one seriously wonders whether the author has any idea of the real nature of his subject matter. What is the point of this book? Does it have any relevance to anything except itself?
From the critic too, presumably, came the tearsheets of George MacBeth’s poem, which I would otherwise never have seen.
* * * *
CIRCE UNDERSEA OR A CRY FROM THE DEPTHS
N.B. This tape found floating in an antimagnetic metal capsule by the first Venusian astronauts, 2020 A.D., was forwarded from the future to us by:
GEORGE MACBETH
* * * *
The note about George MacBeth from the editor of Ambit said in hasty script: . . . like many Scots, has lived most of his life in England. He is a BBC producer for the Third Programme . . . Much of his poetry is about the violence associated with fascism. He also has a major interest in experimental writing, and has written one poem in the form of a card game and another in the form of an encyclopedia. He is tall, dresses very correctly in dark-blue English suits with white collar. Sports a small ginger mustache, likes cats and women, etc.
Almost on the heels of that note came another, telling me MacBeth was on his way to the States. (Turned out he was here on a cultural-exchange thing, on the invitation of the Council on Leaders and Specialists of the Experiment in International Living: State Dept.)
We had a fast-talking lunch, and I acquired some further vital statistics. He was born in Lanarkshire, Scotland, in 1932; is married to a geneticist. Two volumes of his own poetry in print: The Broken Places and The Doomsday Book (Scorpion Press, London, 1963 and 1965). Also edited two anthologies for Penguin: Sick Verse (1963) and Animal Verse (1965). In 1964, he wrote, produced, financed, and acted in [I transcribe here from table-napkin notes] “The Doomsday Show”—-a post-nuclear poetry cabaret show at the Establishment Club in London—See poetry and s-f as sharing a common imagination—Admire “calamity fiction” of John Christopher (particularly The Death of Grass) and see Jules Verne as one of the greatest of Victorian writers—Think poetry can take over the plots and imagery of s-f and give it new emotional depth—and it can offer new techniques (e.g. Ballard’s short-paragraph, cut-up sequence pieces which go back ultimately to the American poet Brion Gysin, who influenced Burroughs)—Best s-f poet so far is the English writer D. M. Thomas, author of (as yet on published) Launching Pad.
I understand a copy of launching Pad is on its way to me; in return, some recommendations for Mr. MacBeth—high grade “calamity fiction” from last year’s New Worlds: Charles Platt’s “Lone Zone,” James Colvin’s “The Mountain,” and Colin R. Fry’s “The Night of the Gyul.” And Gerald Kersh, coming up—
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* * * *
SOMEWHERE NOT FAR FROM HERE
GERALD KERSH
When i say that where I come from is neither here nor there, I mean exactly that, for my family’s place is dust and ashes. And there are thirty-two winds. As the Dumb Ox once said, “Neither here nor there is everywhere. You are a citizen of the world, young Martin. Cheer up!”
I have nothing but my name, Martin, and I do not rate. I never had a woman. My ambition was to grow a mustache. I never shall. In another month I should be fifteen years old, but that month is not for me. Tomorrow or the day after even my name will be lost. Why should anybody remember me?
Perhaps one of my friends will manage to live until there is peace and quiet. I have never known such a time. But it may come, and somebody might say, “Those, children, were the days when we learned to throw a bomb as you learn to throw a ball. The boy
Martin was there at that time, and he played the man among us men . . .”
It may be. I hope so. You are, actually, only as you are remembered. I did my best and I fought with the rest. I have to go now where most of my friends must be. But who will recognize poor Martin in the dark?
That night I was with the guerrillas—I was one of the free men—and Mike was leading us; a good man. There were thirty of us with him that night. We had to raid an enemy dump for dynamite, fuses, detonators. When we went through the woods the rain beat on the leaves so that nobody could hear us. It was late when we got out of the trees and crawled up the slope. Mike cut the wire and stabbed a sentry in the throat with a broad-bladed butcher’s knife. Do this right and a man’s lungs fill up with blood. He dies with nothing more than a cough.
The sentry’s number two came by, and the Dumb Ox killed him with a handkerchief. It is an old trick. You tie something heavy into the corner of your piece of cloth and swing it backhand about your man’s neck; catch the swung end and get your knuckles into the base of his skull. I have done it myself. The principle is that if you use a noose, even of thin wire, it must go over the other man’s head and he, being on the alert, will see that wire pass his eyes, and turn or duck. The Ox weighed three hundred pounds. The sentry died in silence. So we crept through the gap.
The Year's Best Science Fiction 11 - [Anthology] Page 29