From his balcony Mallory watched
the ancient biplane circle the
rusty gantries of Cape Kennedy.
—J. G. Ballard, “Memories of the Space Age” (1982)

I FIRST ENCOUNTERED J. G. BALLARD in the epigraph to an essay by Robert Smithson. “Quasi-Infinities and the Waning of Space,” which appeared in the November 1966 issue of Arts Magazine, begins with a brief but intriguing quote from “The Overloaded Man,” a story in Ballard’s 1962 collection The Voices of Time: “Without a time sense consciousness is difficult to visualize.” Such titles weren’t easy to find in the San Francisco area of the late ’60s, but