Thy Will Be Done

Kingdom Come is the latest novel by the great J. G. Ballard. It’s yet another of his dystopian visions of our society, very much following in the footsteps of Cocaine Nights, Super-Cannes and Millennium People. Actually, much of his later writing strikes me as either skirting dystopia or plunging headlong into it and splashing about gleefully. By contrast, some of his early writing is positively elegaic; the short story The Garden of Time, for example. Written in 1963, and read by me in the same year, it’s a story that has stuck with me ever since. It’s worth tracking down – it was described by Brian Aldiss as ‘a wonderful fantasy, the most magical of metaphors’, and by Anthony Burgess as ‘one of the most beautiful stories of the world canon of short fiction’. It can be found in Ballard’s first collection of short stories, originally titled The Fourth-Dimensional Nightmare, but reissued under Ballard’s preferred title of The Voices of Time. 

 

Now, thanks to a tip in BLDBLOG, I’ve found a long and interesting interview with the man himself. It’s worth reading.