Product Description

Vermilion Sands - populated only by forgotten movie queens, solitary impresarios, beachcombers and malignant obsessions - is a fully-automated desert resort languishing in uneasy decay: a place where psychosensitive houses are driven to murder by their owners' neuroses, and love palls before evil.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #18117 in Books
• Published on: 2001-10-04
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 208 pages

From the Publisher
'Ballard is a magician and a literary saboteur' Guardian
‘One of the brightest stars in post-war fiction’ Kingsley Amis

‘He is one of the few genuine surrealists this country has produced, the possessor of a terrifying and exhilarating imagination – and a national treasure’ Guardian

Vermilion Sands is a fully automated desert-resort designed to fulfil the most exotic whims of the idle rich, but now languishes in uneasy decay, populated only by forgotten movie queens, solitary impresarios and the remittance men of the artistic and literary world. It is a lair for beachcombers, hangers-on and malignant obsessions – a place where sensitive pigments paint portraits of their mistresses in a grotesque parody of art; where prima donna plants are programmed to sing operatic arias; where dial-a-poem computers have replaced poets; where psychosensitive houses are driven to murder by their owners’ neuroses; and where love and lust, in the hands of jewel-eyed Jezebels, pall before the stronger pull of evil.

‘A writer of enormous inventive powers, Ballard has a remarkable gift for filling the empty, deprived spaces of modern life with invisible cities and the wonder worlds of the imagination’ Malcolm Bradbury

‘Ballard is amongst our finest writers of fiction’ Anthony Burgess

'One of the grand magicians of modern fiction' Brian Aldiss

About the Author
* #17 in the Millennium SF Masterworks series, a library of the finest science fiction ever written * 'One of the brightest stars in post-war fiction' -- Kingsley Amis * 'There are those (I am among them) who would back Ballard as Britain's number one living novelist' -- John Sutherland, Sunday Times * 'This novel, with its brilliant descriptions of an inundated London and an ecology reverting to the Triassic, gained Ballard acceptance as a major author' -- Encyclopedia of Science Fiction

Customer Reviews

Luminous tales of a glittering, dry and decadent future
This book collects Ballard's stories about Vermillion Sands, an artists' colony maroooned in a languid future of unlimited leisure, high technology, and mysterious, jewel-eyed women. Half-sentient buildings drift in and out of the encroaching desert, art projects threaten the nature of reality, and the inhabitants pursue their obscure enthusiasms, all against the numbing blue skies and the desolate sands. In common with many of Ballard's books, it's emotionally cold, but full of sharply brilliant ideas and vivid, over-saturated images. The characters drift throught their plots as if stunned, chasing art projects, ideas and each other with the bewildered air of actors thrust suddenly into a world without motives. Here the desolate air of coming disaster which characterises Ballard's early work has made a place where people can live without regrets or consequences, where any idea can be pursued, or any fate risked, because nothing really matters. Somewhere the world is grinding to a halt, but not here, in this remote world of privileged eccentrics. Lonely, strange and startlingly beautiful, the book has the warm laziness of a luxurious sea-side town, caught endlessly in late summer, between the tourists leaving and the autumn storms.

A remarkably polished set of nightmares...
I love this book - its twisty darkness, wide-ranging ideas, and bizarre, campy satire. In fact, this is my favorite Ballard - for all his fame and critical success, his books seem to me often too predictable, too idea-driven. In this one he was willing to have fun, and the result is as though Fellini made a horror movie.

The most wonderful and memorable of his collections
This was the first J G Ballard work I ever read, some fifteen years ago now. On the strength of it I have read perhaps twenty of his other works; novels, biography and short fiction but for me this remains the most beautiful, mysterious and memorable of them all. Buy it, read it!