Minus One (short story)
short story by J. G. Ballard
"Minus One" is a short story by British author J. G. Ballard; it was first published in the June 1963 edition of Science Fantasy (Volume 20, Number 59). It was later reprinted in the 1967 collection The Disaster Area, and then later in the larger The Complete Short Stories of J. G. Ballard: Volume 1 anthology (2006).
Plot summary
"Minus One" is set in Green Hill Asylum, whose motto is "There is a Green Hill Far, Far Away". It provides a private prison where the rich can incarcerate "miscreant or unfortunate relatives whose presence would otherwise be a burden or embarrassment". Security rather than treatment comes first and the asylum boasted that no-one had ever escaped, that is until the disappearance of a patient called Hinton. Thorough searches are conducted and staff questioned but no trace of him can be found. Dr. Mellinger, the director of the asylum leads the investigation and it transpires that nobody can remember much about him at all. Dr Mellinger realises that the patients are not being treated as individuals and decides that from then on the regime of Green Hill will change to take more interest in the individual. Still the disappearance of Hinton remains unexplained; Dr.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 4, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q16387032. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1963, 1967 and 2006.
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This entry incorporates text from “Minus One (short story)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.