The crystal world

(em português: sol2070.in/2026/02/ballard-crystal-world/ )

The Crystal World (1966, 210 pages) is another of the British writer J.G. Ballard’s apocalyptic novels.

Although less frequently cited among the celebrated author’s works, his output in the 1960s and 70s includes some of the finest stories of New Wave science fiction.

A doctor specializing in leprosy travels to a village in Cameroon to try to find a friend. There is a forbidden, isolated forest, which he gradually enters and discovers an annihilating, cosmic, overwhelming phenomenon.

I love this archetypal tradition about the journey into threatening nature toward deep mystery. It was popularized by the classic Heart of Darkness (1899), by Joseph Conrad. The work was honored and expanded by Coppola, who transposed the jungles of the colonized Congo to Vietnam and Cambodia during the war of the 1970s in the film Apocalypse Now (1979). More recently, there is the Southern Reach quadrilogy, by Jeff VanderMeer, which seems to openly pay homage to The Crystal World.

Ballard seems to have anticipated the emergence of the New Weird genre by several decades. Almost everything is already there: the invasion of the unknown, a transcendental layer, social aspects, the grotesque alongside the sublime. One aspect in particular is pure Ballard: the fascination with the abyss. He created an art out of this inner landscape, highly relevant today, in times of polycrisis and existential threat.

Initially, the reading was not easy, in the sense that I was distracted all the time. The characters were not capturing me. But then I reached the heart of the phenomenon, when everything begins to make sense. It is not hard sci-fi, concerned with scientific coherence. The coherence is internal, philosophical.

Some scenes hit hard with horror, such as those involving people with leprosy. This is then multiplied, as if the tiny human point of view glimpsed a vast universal illness, from which all afflictions are pale reflections. Yet, as an essential part of a cosmic order, it inevitable fascinate and even overwhelm.

This is one of the disturbing centers of Ballard’s work.

These early stories by the writer, including some of his short fiction, reveal his entropic cosmology, of a natural world inevitably moving toward annihilation. The internal logic is that, if the universe is this, it makes sense to surrender to the final fusion with the abyss. It is the end of the known world, yet still a long-awaited, transcendent, cosmic relief.

Ballard manages to create overwhelming beauty and anguish, especially in this apocalypse full of lights and impossible refractions. Leaves, plants, animals, and people merging into nature in its final transfiguration, in gleaming and eternal colors. Mineral, vegetal, and animal have their artificial boundaries broken. “Time becomes space,” even in the starry sky.

At the end of the edition I picked up, from Harper Collins, there is an interview with the writer. He says that spending three years of his childhood in a Japanese concentration camp in Shanghai made him see everything this way, in a quest to try to understand what the world is, why the destruction, suffering. Taking into account his early science fiction work, he must have arrived at a rather somber vision. Then he transformed it into exemplary art, of hypnotic subjectivity and lyricism.