Not surprisingly, our latest research confirms that the imminent threat to which their computers alerted us was in fact represented by the existence of these people. They constituted the danger that was about to overwhelm their planet, and it was to save themselves that the computer networks summoned us from the far side of the universe.

The deadline set by the computers, the crucial hour when one millennium gave way to another, perhaps explains the reason for their alarm. Given these people’s hunger for violence, it may be that they saw the birth of a new millennium as a licence for an even greater carnival of destruction. They waited at the threshold of space, a barbaric horde with the secret of immortality within their grasp, eager to play with their own psychopathology as the ultimate game.

The prospect of this virulent plague spreading across the universe must have prompted the planet’s computers to call a halt. But the ultimate mystery remains of where the inhabitants have disappeared. If they have been physically annihilated in an act of planetary hygiene there is no trace of the billions of corpses or of the vast necropolis needed to inter them.

A possible explanation occurs to us as we prepare to return to our home star. Driven by the need for a more lifelike replica of the scenes of carnage that most entertained them, the people of this unhappy world had invented an advanced and apparently interiorised version of their television screens, a virtual replica of reality in which they could act out their most deviant fantasies. These three-dimensional simulations were generated by their computers, and had reached a stage of development in the last years of the millennium in which the imitation of reality was more convincing than the original. It may even have become the new reality to the extent that their cities and highways, their fellow citizens and, ultimately, themselves seemed mere illusions by comparison with the electronically generated amusement park where they preferred to play. Here they could assume any identity, create and fulfil any desire, and explore the most deviant dreams.

But at some point in the new millennium they might well have decided to return to the world and test it against those dreams, ready to destroy it like a child bored with an unresponsive toy. Is it possible that the computers of this planet, having welcomed the population into this cave of illusion, then made a desperate decision and entombed them magnetically, translating them by some as yet undiscovered science into a memorised version of their physical selves? Once inside the cave, the door of virtual death was sealed and encrypted behind them, leaving the computers alone and safe at last.

If so, we arrived some moments too late. As we leave, the computers have calmed themselves, and are singing quietly in unison. Perhaps they miss their former companions, however brutish. Our concluding survey indicates that they have invented God, perhaps an idealised image of the race they entombed. As we set out into space we can hear them praying.

About the Author

J.G. Ballard was born in 1930 in Shanghai, China, where his father was a businessman. Following the attack on Pearl Harbor, he and his family were placed in a civilian prison camp. They returned to England in 1946.

After reading Medicine at Cambridge for two years, he worked as a copywriter and Covent Garden porter before going to Canada with the RAF. His first short stories appeared in 1956, and after working on scientific journals he published his first major novel, The Drowned World, in 1962. His acclaimed 1984 novel Empire of the Sun won the Guardian Fiction Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. It was later filmed by Steven Spielberg. His 1973 novel Crash was also made into a film, directed by David Cronenberg.

J.G. Ballard’s most recent novels are Cocaine Nights and Super-Cannes.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The stories in this collection first appeared in the following publications:

‘Prima Belladonna’ Science Fantasy 1956

‘Escapement’ New Worlds 1956

‘The Concentration City’ (as ‘Build-Up’) New Worlds 1957

‘Venus Smiles’ (as ‘Mobile’) Science Fantasy 1957

‘Manhole 69’ New Worlds 1957

‘Track 12’ New Worlds 1958

‘The Waiting Grounds’ New Worlds 1959

‘Now: Zero’ Science Fantasy 1959

‘The Sound-Sweep’ Science Fantasy 1960

‘Zone of Terror’ New Worlds 1960

‘Chronopolis’ New Worlds 1960

‘The Voices of Time’ New Worlds 1960

‘The Last World of Mr Goddard’ Science Fantasy 1960

‘Studio 5, The Stars’ Science Fantasy 1961

‘Deep End’ New Worlds 1961

‘The Overloaded Man’ New Worlds 1961

‘Mr F. is Mr F.’ Science Fantasy 1961

‘Billennium’ New Worlds 1961

‘The Gentle Assassin’ New Worlds 1961

‘The Insane Ones’ Amazing Stories 1962

‘The Garden of Time’ Fantasy and Science Fiction 1962

‘The Thousand Dreams of Stellavista’ Amazing Stories 1962

‘Thirteen to Centaurus’ Amazing Stories 1962

‘Passport to Eternity’ Amazing Stories 1962

‘The Cage of Sand’ New Worlds 1962

‘The Watch-Towers’ Science Fantasy 1962

‘The Singing Statues’ Fantastic Stories 1962

‘The Man on the 99th Floor’ New Worlds 1962

‘The Subliminal Man’ New Worlds 1963

‘The Reptile Enclosure’ (as ‘The Sherrington Theory’) Amazing Stories 1963

‘A Question of Re-Entry’ Fantastic Stories 1963

‘The Time-Tombs’ Worlds of If 1963

‘Now Wakes the Sea’ Fantasy and Science Fiction 1963

‘The Venus Hunters’ (as ‘The Encounter’) Amazing Stories 1963

‘End-Game’ New Worlds 1963

‘Minus One’ Science Fantasy 1963

‘The Sudden Afternoon’ Fantastic Stories 1963

‘The Screen Game’ Fantastic Stories 1963

‘Time of Passage’ Science Fantasy 1964

‘Prisoner of the Coral Deep’ Argosy 1964

‘The Lost Leonardo’ Fantasy and Science Fiction 1964

‘The Terminal Beach’ New Worlds 1964

‘The Illuminated Man’ Fantasy and Science Fiction 1964

‘The Delta at Sunset’ The Terminal Beach 1964

‘The Drowned Giant’ The Terminal Beach 1964

‘The Gioconda of the Twilight Noon’ The Terminal Beach 1964

‘The Volcano Dances’ The Terminal Beach 1964

‘The Beach Murders’ (as ‘Confetti Royale’) Rogue 1966

‘The Day of Forever’ The Impossible Man 1966

‘The Impossible Man’ The Impossible Man 1966

‘Storm-Bird, Storm-Dreamer’ The Impossible Man 1966

‘Tomorrow is a Million Years’ Argosy 1966

‘The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race’ Ambit 1966

‘Cry Hope, Cry Fury!’ Fantasy and Science Fiction 1967

‘The Recognition’ Dangerous Visions 1967

‘The Cloud-Sculptors of Coral D’ Fantasy and Science Fiction 1967

‘Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan’ International Times 1968

‘The Dead Astronaut’ Playboy 1968

‘The Comsat Angels’ Worlds of If 1968

‘The Killing Ground’ New Worlds 1969

‘A Place and a Time to Die’ New Worlds 1969

‘Say Goodbye to the Wind’ Fantastic Stories 1970

‘The Greatest Television Show on Earth’ Ambit 1972

‘My Dream of Flying to Wake Island’ Ambit 1974