Perhaps it would be even more valid to say that Zelazny— and Ballard, who follows here—are the kind of writers working in and out of SF, who are making the idea of a separate “field” disappear.
Writers outside SF have begun to discover the uses of extrapolative and speculative writing. Inside SF the best people—like Zelazny, like Ballard—are reaching toward poetry, metaphysics, religion, psychiatry, symbolism, and myth as systems through which to explore the nature of man; and reaching, too, for the new techniques of expression being explored in the experimental and avant-garde fringes of the “mainstream.”
James Ballard has, I think, been more successful in this effort than anyone else writing “inside SF” today—comparable perhaps to Jorge Luis Borges on the “outside.” Ballard says of this story:
“ “Terminal Beach’ represents the most extreme expression to date of what I have called ‘ inner space’—that area where the outer world of reality and the inner world of the psyche meet and fuse. Only in this area can one find the true subject matter for a mature science fiction.”
THE TERMINAL BEACH
J. G. Ballard
At night, as he lay half-asleep on the floor of the ruined bunker, Traven heard the waves breaking along the shore of the lagoon, reminding him of the long Atlantic rollers on the beach at Dakar, where he had been born, and of listening in the evenings for his parents to drive home along the corniche road from the airport. Overcome by this forgotten memory, he woke uncertainly from the bed of old magazines on which he slept and hurried toward the dunes that screened the lagoon.
Through the cold night air he could see the abandoned Superfortresses lying among the palms beyond the perimeter of the emergency landing field three hundred yards away. Traven walked through the dark sand, already forgetting where the shore lay, although the atoll was little more than half a mile in width. Above him, along the crests of the dunes, the tall palms leaned into the dim air like the symbols of a cryptic alphabet. The landscape of the island was covered by strange ciphers.
Giving up the attempt to find the beach, Traven stumbled into a set of tracks left years earlier by a large caterpillar vehicle. The heat released by one of the weapons tests had fused the sand, and the double line of fossil imprints, uncovered by the evening air, wound its serpentine way among the hollows like the footfalls of an ancient saurian.
Too weak to walk any farther, Traven sat down between the tracks. Hoping that they might lead him to the beach, he began to excavate the wedge-shaped grooves from a drift into which they disappeared. He returned to the bunker shortly before dawn, and slept through the hot silences of the following noon.
As usual on these enervating afternoons, when not even a breath of on-shore breeze disturbed the dust, Traven sat in the shadow of one of the blocks, lost somewhere within the centre of the maze. His back resting against the rough concrete surface, he gazed with a phlegmatic eye down the surrounding aisles and at the line of doors facing him. Each afternoon he left his cell in the abandoned camera bunker among the dunes and walked down into the blocks. For the first half an hour he restricted himself to the perimeter aisle, now and then trying one of the doors with the rusty key in his pocket—he had found it among the litter of smashed bottles and cans in the isthmus of sand separating the testing ground from the airstrip—and then inevitably, with a sort of drugged stride, he set off into the center of the blocks, breaking into a run and darting in and out of the corridors, as if trying to flush some invisible opponent from his hiding place. Soon he would be completely lost. Whatever his efforts to return to the perimeter, he always found himself once more in the center.
Eventually he would abandon the task, and sit down in the dust, watching the shadows emerge from their crevices at the foot of the blocks. For some reason he invariably arranged to be trapped when the sun was at zenith—on Eniwetok, the thermonuclear noon.
One question in particular intrigued him: “What sort of people would inhabit this minimal concrete city?”
“This island is a state of mind,” Osborne, one of the scientists working in the old submarine pens, was later to remark to Traven. The truth of this became obvious to Traven within two or three weeks of his arrival. Despite the sand and the few anaemic palms, the entire landscape of the island was synthetic, a man-made artifact with all the associations of a vast system of derelict concrete motorways. Since the moratorium on atomic tests, the island had been abandoned by the Atomic Energy Commission, and the wilderness of weapons aisles, towers and blockhouses ruled out any attempt to return it to its natural state. (There were also stronger unconscious motives, Traven reflected: if primitive man felt the need to assimilate events in the external world to his own psyche, twentieth-century man had reversed this process; by this Cartesian yardstick, the island at least existed, in a sense true of few other places).
But apart from a few scientific workers, no one yet felt any wish to visit the former testing ground, and the naval patrol boat anchored in the lagoon had been withdrawn three years before Traven’s arrival. Its ruined appearance, and the associations of the island with the period of the Cold War—what Traven had christened “The Pre-Third” —were profoundly depressing, an Auschwitz of the soul whose mausoleums contained the mass graves of the still undead. With the Russo-American détente this nightmarish chapter of history had been gladly forgotten.
The actual and potential destructiveness of the atomic bomb plays straight into the hands of the Unconscious. The most cursory study of the dream-life and fantasies of the insane shows that ideas of world-destruction are latent in the unconscious mind. ... Nagasaki destroyed by the magic of science is the nearest man has yet approached to the realization of dreams that even during the safe immobility of sleep are accustomed to develop into nightmares of anxiety.
Glover: War, Sadism and Pacifism.
The Pre-Third: the period was characterized in Traven’s mind above all by its moral and psychological inversions, by its sense of the whole of history, and in particular of the immediate future—the two decades, 1945-65—suspended from the quivering volcano’s lip of World War III. Even the death of his wife and six-year-old son in a motor accident seemed only part of this immense synthesis of the historical and psychic zero, the frantic highways where each morning of his life they met their deaths on the advance causeways to the global armageddon.
He had come ashore at midnight, after a hazardous search for an opening in the reef. The small motorboat he had hired from an Australian pearl-diver at Charlotte Island subsided into the shallows, its hull torn by the sharp coral. Exhausted, Traven walked through the darkness among the dunes, where the dim outlines of bunkers and concrete towers loomed between the palms.