The Voices of Time

[Comment by Christopher Priest, on The Guardian's website] Voices of Time by JG Ballard (1960)

> When he died two years ago, JG Ballard was widely celebrated for his novels, and rightly. [Empire of the Sun][2], an account of his wartime internment in Shanghai, brought him a Spielberg movie and a worldwide audience, but he also wrote the remarkable novels [Crash][3], [High-Rise][4], Cocaine Nights and many more. Inspired by Dalí, De Chirico, William Burroughs and Jean Genet, his talent was unique: his vivid, surprising and often beautiful prose was put to the creation of dreamlike and sometimes shocking images, while telling a deceptively straightforward narrative.

> Ballard began writing in 1955 (he was in his mid-20s) and his first serious novel, [The Drowned World][5], did not appear until seven years later. Before that he produced a stream of astonishing short stories, which to long-term admirers of Ballard's writing are among his finest fiction. In them he explored for the first time many of the themes which in new guises were to coil their way through his better known later work. Supreme in these stories is an extraordinary novella, *The Voices of Time*, first published in 1960 and later the title story of a collection.

> The plot almost defies summary.