"The Terminal Beach" by J.G. Ballard is about my favorite short story of all time. It was written in the mid-sixties and was part of what was called "The New Wave" of science fiction. Like a lot stories of that genre, it is much more focused on character and theme than on science. When I read it in college for the first time it left me in shock.

It is the story of a man who has come to one of those remote islands in the South Pacific where they used to test Atomic bombs. They built fake villages filled with manikins at or near the testing spots to see what sort of damage the bombs would do, and placed huge slabs of concrete at calculsted distances away from ground zero. The main character in this story does nothing more than wander over the island and slowly starve to death. A scientific team runs across him briefly, but he is not interested in rescue, and they leave him there. The story ends with the man on the delusional and on the verge of death.

Not very appetizing, eh? It's very powerful though. The man has come to the island because he lost his wife and child in a car crash. Like an atomic bomb going off in his life, the event has left his mind desolate. The landscape of the test site and the landscape of the man's are shown as mirrors of each other. The inner and the outer landscapes are both human created, the outer world of this destroyed island a result of processes of the human mind and the inner labyrinth of the main character's despair. Even though we know our own minds and the island itself was created through very deliberate processes, both the island the main character's mind reflect patterns of unconscious, mysterious impulses. Despite the despair, the story filled me with a sense of wonder and awe.

The only futuristic element of the "The Terminal Beach" is that it was set in world where the hostilities between the U.S. and the Soviet Union had ended, which in the sixties when the story was written, was indeed a bit of fantasy. It tied in with the theme because although the world had moved on and avoided nuclear holocaust, the main character's personal disaster made him need to seek a place where it seemed that the destruction had occurred.

Instead of using the term Cold War, the people of "The Terminal Beach"'s future called the period of tension before the peace "The Pre-Third". I like the term because although World War Three never took place, there were high expectations that sooner or later it would happen, and visions of the potential horror of that war were present in everyone's minds.

(More in part II in about a week)