Ballard, J G - The Terminal Beach ##VERIFIED##
A giant is washed up on the beach. Over the succeeding days and weeks the unnamed narrator visits and revisits the beach and watches the amazement of the huge crowds soon give away to bored vandalism, then the dismemberment of the huge body to be used for fertiliser and the enormous bones re-used as archways into scrap yards or even houses.
Ballard, J G - The Terminal Beach
Too weak to walk any further, 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.
He woke the next morning into bright sunlight, lying halfway down the slope of a wide concrete beach. This ringed an empty reservoir or target basin some two hundred feet in diameter, part of a system of artificial lakes built down the centre of the atoll. Leaves and dust choked the exit grilles, and a pool of warm water two feet deep lay below him, reflecting a distant line of palms.
On either side of him, muffled by the dunes, came the sounds of waves, the great rollers on the seaward side breaking over the reefs, and on to the beaches within the lagoon. However, he avoided the sea, hesitating before any rise or dune that might take him within its sight. Everywhere the camera towers offered him a convenient aerial view of the confused topography of the island, but he avoided their rusting ladders.
In the ever-expanding field of Ballardian criticism, The J. G. Ballard Book is a refreshingly unique and eclectic contribution to the field. The editor, Rick McGrath, a native Canadian and former rock journalist, is a longstanding aficionado of the author who runs JGBallard.ca and frequently contributes to Ballardian.com, two definitive websites that together offer a sprawling repository of information on the Ballardosphere. McGrath is also the editor-in-chief of The Terminal Press, a name that references Ballard's story "The Terminal Beach" and, more broadly, the condition of terminal identity that pervades his oeuvre. The J. G. Ballard Book is an anthology of interviews, articles, bibliographies, ephemerae, and thought experiments that feature color photographs and illustrations in addition to original correspondences and hand-written notes and annotations. Ballard scholars will recognize the lineup of contributors, several of whom have written important books on Ballard, including Peter Brigg (author of the Starmont Reader's Guide J. G. Ballard), Samuel Francis (author of The Psychological Fictions of J. G. Ballard), and James Goddard and David Pringle (co-editors of J. G. Ballard: The First Twenty Years). All of the contributors, however, are bona fide Ballardians who know their stuff, rendering this collection valuable for its inimitability as much as its depth of knowledge, history, and insight. 041b061a72