Comments on: Simon Brook's Minus One

By: world clock

world clock — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 23:35:32 +0000

Ballardian
» Simon Brook's Minus One – just great!

By: daveg

daveg — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 14:20:48 +0000

i’m not sure “Minus One,” the story, really has a true “twist” in the way “Concentration City” does. Ballard’s last line is just sort of a clever throw-away here, I think. Robert Block’s “Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper” — now THAT’s a twist!!

By: Ian Parkinson

Ian Parkinson — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 21:24:55 +0000

It’s the truth about Richard Gere buying the rights for Unlimited Dream Company! Maybe I read it in User’s Guide to the Millenium or one of the ReSearch books. Maybe JGB was joking… I laughed out loud when I read it. It is an unlikely pairing, but I would definately pay to see it.

By: Simon Sellars

Simon Sellars — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 21:30:53 +0000

Good point about Clockwork Orange, the actor playing Dr Mellinger seems like he’s trying to do a Patrick Magee. As for Richard Gere, no you didn’t read that here!

Are you serious? You’re sure you’re not misrembering some other actor? Richard Gere and UDC? Really?? Come on, are you having me on?

By: Ian Parkinson

Ian Parkinson — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 21:19:56 +0000

The film seems a bit slow to me – probably because it’s trying to follow the verbal narrative of JGB’s story. It looks like Brook was aiming at Clockwork Orange but ended up with something a bit Murder She Wrote. The film I want to see is the Unlimited Dream Company directed by and starring Richard Gere. I think it was probably on this site that I read that he’d taken out the rights for it in the ‘seventies or ‘eighties. Surely a comedy of the year has fallen by the wayside….

By: Simon Sellars

Simon Sellars — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 00:20:37 +0000

no one’s denying that was the style of the times. and even so, i don’t think anyone could say ‘now: zero’ or ‘minus one’ are among jgb’s finer efforts. just because they were written 40 years ago doesn’t mean they are exempt from analysis.

my point is that jgb seemed to me to be a little inconsistent compared with his later standards, and that ‘minus one’ was one of his weaker efforts, and therefore a strange choice for a film.

what did you think of the film, by the way?

By: Crashman

Crashman — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 19:22:09 +0000

A coda to my previous comment: in the SF- pulp-magazine -publishing world of the late 1950s or the 1960′s, the “surprise twist” or “last-sentence surprise-ending” was almost a prerequisite to successful-and reader-satisfying short SF stories, and was very much in vogue and looked on with much favor by the editors of the pulp SF publications. It was the style of the time, which ANY short-story SF author would VERY likely include to assure himself of his manuscript’s acceptance by the editors of the pulps. This device was, in a way, almost expected by the readers. The readers in the SFF-pulp market of the time would have felt cheated without it!

The “surprise twist” at the end of the fantasy/SF pulp short story was therefore almost mandatory for any (especially new) writer who hoped to sell his work in that tight half-century-old SF-pulp niche-market.

And now of course, almost 50 years later – yes, it is looked at as a “corny” and quite outdated literary device. Times DO change- along with the reader’s markets and expectations. We have come quite a long way in 50 years now, to the point where the SF short-story format (and market) is almost nonexistent…. how many SF pulps containing short stories do YOU see on the stands? I see VERY few here in the USA. It was a quite different SF and fantasy-story literary era then… and JGB knew that his reader-market and his editors would expect -indeed, demand- the “surprise-twist ending”. So I believe it is rather unfair in that sense to judge JGB’s early work by our contemporary literary standards. He was only writing what would sell, and what the editors and readers demanded… and wholly supporting oneself in that era by writing for the SF pulps was a VERY precarious living! Most other successful SF authors back then had a “day job” – Like Isaac Asimov’s professorship! (And JGB’s own stint with that Chemical markets commercial trade-magazine!)

By: Crashman

Crashman — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 18:38:01 +0000

I find little fault with Ballard’s early novelettes and short stories – and I was introduced to them as a teenager in the 1960s by the pulp SF magazines like IF, Astounding Stories, Magazine of F&SF, etc. The problem with *The Wind From Nowhere* is that it is a novel or novelette, but would have been MUCH better as a short story.

In Larry Niven’s (American VERY successful SF writer)’s memorable statement: “You have to write a certain amount of utter garbage at the beginning – just to get it out of your system and learn the craft.” How can we fault Ballard for doing exactly that at the beginning of his career? It was his writing- apprenticeship. As Ballard learned the subtle craft of writing novels, his early weak short stories began to develop and even metamorphize into novels – in the way the short story “The Crystal Man” (which I read in the SF pulps around 1965) was later developed into a full novel, *The Crystal World*. Writing is HARD WORK! And like carpentry, you have to hit your thumbs and damage some wood and nails before you can become a Master Carpenter of your craft – which JGB certainly is today – and will be forever.