Commentaires client les plus utiles
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2.0étoiles sur 5
Crisp prose but poor story, Aoû 5 2008
Like the jungle slowly being covered in magnificent jewels within the novel, Ballard's dreamy prose and elegant writing style cover a rather banal and uninteresting story that never arrives anywhere. Casually tied to the bones of Conrad's Heart of Darkness, The Crystal World is clearly an early attempt at philosophical introspection by an author whose style would mature much later. The Crystal World's setting is indeed fascinating as a piece of speculative fiction, but not much was done with it except as a background for some thin romance and confused, meandering characters. As noted previously the colonial mindset will also grate on modern PC sensibilities.
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2.0étoiles sur 5
Lost in a Crystal Haze, Jui 30 2004
This brief novel offers a rather pointless speculative fiction take on Conrad's Heart of Darkness. A ridiculous and under-explained premise is used to prop up some equally under-explained ruminations from Ballard on the human condition and spirituality. Here the action takes place in an African jungle that is becoming crystallized, as all objects slowly become encrusted with luminous jewels. Ballard doesn't explain how this process works except for some weak references to the "crystallized" time and space aspects of relativity. This implausible premise leads to curious changes in the people who also find themselves crystallized, with some sort of inner peace and spiritual fulfillment being found in the process, though Ballard leaves this aspect of the story anemic as well, other than some flimsy philosophical ramblings. Meanwhile, the action of the story mostly involves a pointless chase sequence connected to a blood feud between two shallow supporting characters, which is never resolved within the story. Add to all of this the book's outdated colonialist conceptions of the third world and its inhabitants, and the weak premise and theme of this novel retreat further into the crystal haze. [~doomsdayer520~]
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5.0étoiles sur 5
It's barely science-fiction but who cares?, Nov. 28 2002
Even by the most basic definition of "science-fiction" this book barely makes the cut . . . it doesn't really take place in the future, doesn't feature new technology, doesn't try to rewrite the laws of physics, you can even understand it without a degree in higher mathematics. Ballard's always been too concerned with the psychological and what lies inside the human heart to be a real SF writer but in the end, it's the story itself that counts, whatever genre label you want to slap onto it. What makes this book so effective is the calm contrast of the utterly unfathomable with the completely normal. Dr Sanders receives a letter from friends in a part of Africa saying really weird stuff about everything turning to crystal . . . curious, he travels there and finds that there weren't speaking metaphorically . . . everything, trees and all, are slowly being converted to crystal, and there's mounting evidence that the rest of the world is going to soon follow suit. Against this backdrop Ballard lets Sanders attempt to make some sense of what's going on. The unwaveringly calm tone of the novel only accents the subtle creepiness of the whole affair and every time you think Ballard's run out of ways to describe crystals and jewels, he figures out yet another one. Symbolism and imagery run amok in this story, there's definitely some sort of quasi-religious (or at least good/evil) aspect to all the crystalization going on but I'll be darned if I can figure it out. Which is another good thing about the book, unlike most SF writers Ballard doesn't take the conceit that everything we encounter in this Universe we can understand and while possible explanations for what's happening abound (most of which don't make any sense anyway) there's never a definitive reason given, so at the end of the book you're left with a lot of questions, but the good kind, the kind that make you think. Thus readers expecting neat and tidy endings are advised that will be disappointed if they go into this book with that sort of attitude. In the end it's Ballard's realistic tone set against fantastic events and his ability to draw the reader into his world and make it come alive (even while the world itself is fossilizing) that causes the book to linger in your mind. His haunting depiction of a crystal world won't be something you'll easily forget.
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