You'd think they'd be running in fear from the destruction. Sanders and the adventurers he gets involved with on his quest into the continent are oddly not freaked out by the changes taking place, as trees, alligators, birds, dwellings and people turn to crystal around them. The doctor Edward Sanders is going in search of his aptly surnamed, former lover Suzanne Clair and her husband, who have been working with lepers. Again we are following a river into the African interior, in search of a figure who has been lost to the strange dark forces-although in this case the forest, bedecked with new jewels, is glowing with compressed light. It's a terribly beautiful and impersonal phenomenon.Īs should be obvious to any English literature student, The Crystal World evokes Joseph Conrad's The Heart of Darkness, starting with an homage of sorts in the opening line. The important thing is, unlike in most apocalyptic fiction, the seeming disaster is neither caused by human activity nor stoppable by human intervention.

Something about a process beginning in distant galaxies, of matter colliding with anti-matter, causing a leaking of time from the universe and the super-saturation of our own world. Scientific-sounding explanations are given for the phenomenon. This isn't a story of man against nature, but of man against himself. For they seem to be both repulsed and attracted by it, as if the external transformation happening to the world reflects something taking place within their own hearts and minds.

And how they do is almost as bizarre as the strange phenomenon itself. The central conflict in The Crystal World has to do with how certain powerless characters in one place respond to it psychologically. There may be authorities somewhere trying to defeat the transformation spreading across our planet from three locales, but that isn't part of this story. The crystallization threatening our planet has been working through the entire universe and is inevitable.

Ballard's world, however, that isn't the drama which unfolds. If The Crystal World were a typical science fiction novel about an impending global disaster, it'd have scientists and military heroes working against the clock in suspenseful attempts to stop the apocalypse.

The crystal world by jg ballard