Vermilion Sands

Vermilion Sands
by J. G. Ballard

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Book Summary Information

Author: J. G. Ballard
Edition: Mass Market Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1988-09
ISBN: 0881844225
Number of pages: 208
Publisher: Carroll & Graf Publishers

Book Reviews of Vermilion Sands

Book Review: The clouds hold too many memories...
Summary: 4 Stars

The Cloud Sculptors of Coral D opens this impressive collection, and sets the tone for the nine stories of a deserted interior beach, this decadent and decaying Vermilion Sands. No story here is weak or simply filler. Ballard weaves fascinating pseudo-biological origins of singing plants, he writes descriptively and harmoniously of the derelict statues with their elusive sonic cores that screech and whine, half buried in the sand. Ballard has the daily stuff of our lives--clothes, houses, even paintings-- transform themselves in response to unconscious moods and desires, no longer everyday commonplaces but disguised totems, consuming their owners in a strange reversal of the consumer paradise. And he stretches the physics of cloud phenomena in his best story where daredevil flyers control tornadoes. All the places where the imagination wrestles freedom for itself from quotidiana and hard reality, Ballard stocks with jewels and insects and the playthings of a degenerate latter-day aristocracy--film stars mostly, but also visionary artists. Everything that makes the inventory of an Egyptian crypt fascinating to us three millennia later, Ballard re-creates by excavating the archaeological artifacts of the here and now. The only things in his world that seem unchanged are the vices of humanity--vanity, vengeance and cruelty, which are the most durable. Ballard writes in the preface (circa 1970) that this is his vision of the future. There are too too many bloated novels, too few short story collections like this.

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Summary of Vermilion Sands

Ballard's genius for imagining exotic places appears again in Vermilion Sands where he creates a fantasy landscape of the future. These stories feature forgotten movie queens and guilt-ridden femmes fatales who exercise their every whim in a culture of unlimited technology.

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