BOOKBUSTER REVIEW: Terminal Transmissions
By Paul Green
Published by Terminal Press, 2025, rrp £9.99
REVIEW BY TIM BARTON
This new book by locally based author and poet Paul Green channels the spirit of J G Ballard. It features seven stories, and three essays. Paul is a few years older than myself, but we share considerable cultural influences. These might be described rather simplistically as encompassing elements of sixties counter-culture, eighties cyberpunk and nineties ‘Mondo2000’ alternative tech-oriented culture, all subsumed in the nineties, by, I believe, Forbidden Planet bookshop in, then, New Oxford Street, under the banner ‘Slipstream’. Authors in this category, which spans fiction, non-fiction, and pseudo-fiction, include: William Burroughs, Noam Chomsky, Brian Aldiss, Timothy Leary, Iain Banks, Bruce Sterling, William Gibson, William T Vollmann, Robert Anton Wilson, and even perhaps Erich von Daniken.
And, of course, Jim Ballard. Paul and I were both influenced by Ballard. This shows in much of Paul’s writing, but comes to the fore in this excellent new collection. One of the essays looks at some of the tropes that appear in Ballard’s work, through the lens of one of his early novels, The Wind From Nowhere. Paul thanks David Pringle, former editor of the great UK SF magazine Interzone, a worthy successor to New Worlds, for his feedback on the essay. In the early nineties I had read a piece on Pringle’s fascination with Ballard. Interzone ran a competition, which I entered, to ‘rewrite Alien as if novelised by Ballard instead of Alan Dean Foster’. I pitched my entry towards Pringle’s take on Ballard, coming, as I recall, second in the competition – my entry is buried in a box somewhere in the Interzone archives at Liverpool University. The winning entry was printed, it took a minor liberty, adding ‘…and directed by David Cronenberg’ and was very good.
PAUL COVERS THESE TOUCHSTONE TROPES WELL
Reading Paul’s stories reminded me of my own tribute to Ballardian obsessions. Few have captured his tone and ecology of ideas as well as Paul has. Some of the early stories of Eric Brown, in his The Time-lapsed Man come to mind.
Ballard was a bit of an existentialist. His leading, male, characters reflect this philosophy. His female characters are of his time; in my imagination they are often highly-strung and faded, clinging to an outmoded comfort-zone, looking perhaps a bit like Nanette Newman. They are usually living in suburbia, or post-apocalyptic hotels, amongst jaded middle-class professionals. There is often an eccentric public school antagonist. The time-space the main character occupies is as much the ‘inner space’ of the mind as it is the external environment, and the latter is often arguably an existential extrusion of that mind.
It is often assumed that Ballard’s childhood, interred by the Japanese in Shanghai during the war, followed by post-war London, and in later life suburbia in the form of Shepperton is the key to his mentality. No doubt there is more to it than that, but his memories of the camp and of the austerity of post-war England are I think central to the atmosphere of novels, such as The Drought, The Crystal World, and The Drowned World – perhaps, too, in some aspects of one of my favourite Ballard novels, Hello America. One way or another, deserts are the heart of his most elemental novels and stories. Paul covers these touchstone tropes well in his stories, and explicates them in his essay on ‘The Poetics of ‘Studio 5, The Stars’, which inhabits the ambience of the collection Vermilion Sands. One of my favourite shorts appears here, The Cloud-Sculptors of Coral D.
A CLASSIC TAKE ON BALLARDIAN APOCALYPSE STORIES
Paul channels other threads in Ballard’s work, especially in his story Monaco, which has shades of Crash, The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race, though he doesn’t go so far out as the Ballard of The Atrocity Exhibition here.
I think my favourite stories here are The Final Analysis, The Seismic World, and Shadow People. The former inhabits an alternate reality where the UK has joined the war in Vietnam, and the Russians have also arrived there, Profumo is PM, and characters include Jim and his friend Christopher Evans, in Wimbledon instead of Shepperton, but in different roles to our world, and a very Jim-esque lead in David Carlson. Carlson works for a trade rag, ‘Plastic World’, whereas Ballard worked for the trade rag, ‘Chemistry and Industry’. Paul has placed a number of amusing parallels amongst his work here. Seismic World is a classic take on Ballardian apocalypse stories, especially, perhaps, The Wind from Nowhere. The latter story, Shadow People, I like because I find it redolent of classic paranoid kids’ TV such as Time-Slip, Quatermass, and Children of the Stones, as well as of Ballard himself. It may recycle 70s TV, but ‘hauntology’ and ‘psychogeography’ have rendered nostalgia for that era current once more.
Highly recommended.
Terminal Transmissions is available from Bookbuster, 39 Queens Road, Hastings TN34 1RE
We hope you have enjoyed reading this article. The future of our volunteer led, non-profit publication would be far more secure with the aid of a small donation. You can also support local journalism by becoming a friend of HIP. It only takes a minute and we would be very grateful.
Leave a Reply