"The Voices of Time" is a dystopian science fiction short story by British author J. G. Ballard. It was first published in the October 1960 edition of New Worlds (Volume 99, Number 33), and later in the 1962 collection The Voices of Time and Other Stories. It is an early example of the Inner Space type of story which drove the New Wave movement in the 1960s. Its primary theme is one which was common in the New Wave, that of entropy and the breakdown of all things. Plot summary The story has little or no obvious plot. It follows a neurosurgeon, Powers, who is in a state of mental and physical decline. He works at a research clinic in a landscape of hills and dry salt lake beds somewhat like that of the deserts of California. Powers has resigned, as he finds his hours of wakefulness getting shorter and shorter. He seems about to become yet another Sleeper, one of an ever-increasing number of people who lapse into a coma from which they cannot be roused. Many Sleepers are housed at the clinic. Powers records his feelings, and his last interviews with his therapist, in a journal in which he also records strange epigrams, such as "Goodbye, Eniwetok" – an allusion suggesting that increased levels of background radiation from nuclear weapons testing may somehow be responsible for mankind's predicament. Along with excerpts from recordings of interviews, such entries drive the story forward and provide a counterpoint to the standard third-person narrative. Powers had a colleague, a biologist called Whitby, who committed suicide, but not before carving an elaborate mandala into the bottom of an empty swimming pool. As we find from Powers' replaying of recordings of interviews, Whitby was convinced that life itself was in decline, that evolution had peaked. Life, and particularly humans, would become simpler as time went by: Five thousand centuries from now, our descendants, instead of being multi-brained star-men, will probably be naked prognathous idiots ... grunting their way through the remains of this Clinic ... Whitby's own research involved using highly tuned X-rays to selectively activate the so-called "silent pair" of genes in animals and plants. The results are bizarre creatures that can directly "sense" time and pace their metabolism to the geological age of their surroundings, can "see" in gamma radiation wavelengths, and exhibit grotesque changes like an external nervous system that can