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The Complete Short Stories #1-2
The Complete Stories of J.G. Ballard
“More than one thousand compelling pages from one of the most haunting, cogent, and individual imaginations in contemporary literature.”—William Boyd
J. G. Ballard should be recognized as one of the greatest and most prophetic writers in the world. Here, in his Complete Stories, readers can finally celebrate the unparalleled range and the mesmerizing cadences of a literary genius, who “like Calvino, [has] a remarkable gift for filling the empty, deprived spaces of modern life” (Malcolm Bradbury). With 92 enthralling and pulse-quickening stories, spanning five decades, and featuring such classics as “Prima Belladonna,” “Dead Time,” and “The Index,” Ballard’s Complete Stories evokes Kafka and Borges with its ability to render psychosis, modern paranoia, and fantastical creations on the page. Whether writing about musical orchids, human cannibalism, or the secret history of World War III, Ballard is one of the most inventive of twentieth-century writers, and has endowed the world with such a humanistic and transcendent vision that his influence will grow in years to come.
1216 pages, Hardcover
First published November 1, 2001
About the author
J.G. Ballard
409 books3,815 followersJames Graham "J. G." Ballard (15 November 1930 – 19 April 2009) was an English novelist, short story writer, and essayist. Ballard came to be associated with the New Wave of science fiction early in his career with apocalyptic (or post-apocalyptic) novels such as The Drowned World (1962), The Burning World (1964), and The Crystal World (1966). In the late 1960s and early 1970s Ballard focused on an eclectic variety of short stories (or "condensed novels") such as The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), which drew closer comparison with the work of postmodernist writers such as William S. Burroughs. In 1973 the highly controversial novel Crash was published, a story about symphorophilia and car crash fetishism; the protagonist becomes sexually aroused by staging and participating in real car crashes. The story was later adapted into a film of the same name by Canadian director David Cronenberg.
While many of Ballard's stories are thematically and narratively unusual, he is perhaps best known for his relatively conventional war novel, Empire of the Sun (1984), a semi-autobiographical account of a young boy's experiences in Shanghai during the Second Sino-Japanese War as it came to be occupied by the Japanese Imperial Army. Described as "The best British novel about the Second World War" by The Guardian, the story was adapted into a 1987 film by Steven Spielberg.
The literary distinctiveness of Ballard's work has given rise to the adjective "Ballardian", defined by the Collins English Dictionary as "resembling or suggestive of the conditions described in J. G. Ballard's novels and stories, especially dystopian modernity, bleak man-made landscapes and the psychological effects of technological, social or environmental developments." The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry describes Ballard's work as being occupied with "eros, thanatos, mass media and emergent technologies".
While many of Ballard's stories are thematically and narratively unusual, he is perhaps best known for his relatively conventional war novel, Empire of the Sun (1984), a semi-autobiographical account of a young boy's experiences in Shanghai during the Second Sino-Japanese War as it came to be occupied by the Japanese Imperial Army. Described as "The best British novel about the Second World War" by The Guardian, the story was adapted into a 1987 film by Steven Spielberg.
The literary distinctiveness of Ballard's work has given rise to the adjective "Ballardian", defined by the Collins English Dictionary as "resembling or suggestive of the conditions described in J. G. Ballard's novels and stories, especially dystopian modernity, bleak man-made landscapes and the psychological effects of technological, social or environmental developments." The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry describes Ballard's work as being occupied with "eros, thanatos, mass media and emergent technologies".
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April 13, 2011
JG Ballard's stuff divides fairly neatly into three phases:
1) 1956-64 - At first he was writing actual science fiction, and he was really cranking it out. There are some beautiful ones in this early part, probably my favourites - "The Sound Sweep", "The Concentration City", "Billenium", "The Voices of Time". It became gradually clear - to JG and to the reader - that he wasn't really able to do the hard-sf thing (extrapolation with a lot of wires and diagrams), but instead, he was developing, slowly, a genuine voice, a way of seeing the present in the guise of the future, and a unique form of poetry. He also wrote a trio of potboiling disaster novels, which are fun for people who like contemplating the destruction of humanity, which I know is a popular form of entertainment.
2) 1965-83 - Something happened. He became noticably strange in 1965, at the exact time when the 60s counterculture was becoming self-conscious. You may be thinking that he would have turned out like the Michael Caine character in Children of Men, all long hair and the best hashish, the poshest, most mature and most well-read hippy, but no, he kept his suit on and his hair was cut every three weeks. Intellectually, he was hurtling towards the outer edge, and then when he found it, he built a further edge on top of it. Falling in with a bunch of other new crazed experimentalists (like Michael Moorcock) he became part of the take-over of the formerly staid British sf mag New Worlds. This mag then became a major platform for cultural madness and outrage in Britain in print for the next five years. (And was duly prosecuted for obscenity.) There was an assumed sf sensibility behind the madness published by New Worlds but often it was hard to see because it wasn't there. This was when sf became "speculative fabulation". I wish I had a collection of New Worlds 1965-1970. Man alive! I would look over them and be amazed – so prescient, and so gone.
So anyway, in this period JG invented "the compressed novel", i.e. the very refined, hyperintellectualised mashup of Hollywood Babylon, the National Enquirer, the facelifts of the rich and famous, the autopsies of the rich and famous, the study of autoerotic fatalities, the architecture of Los Angeles with especial reference to its swimming pools, inner space as alien landscape, the topography of hospitals and beaches, aeronautical engineering manuals, the soundless autogeddon of the near future, the frigid poetry of motorways, decayed technologies, abandoned futures – all rendered into distilled prose in which the more lurid the event being described, the more crystalline became the prose. JG became infatuated by public events like the assassination of Kennedy and the death of Marilyn Monroe. This was not space opera. There were no aliens. Earth is the only alien planet, said JG Ballard, and he meant it.
The apotheosis of this most ballardian phase of Ballard was, of course, Crash. Typical short story titles from this period:
The Terminal Beach
The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race
The Atrocity Exhibition
The Intensive Care Unit
Memories of the Space Age
Myths of the Near Future
3) 1984 – 2009 – With the publication of the non-sf, non-weird The Empire of the Sun, JG suddenly got himself a massive hit, and his long time fans were amazed to see him atop the bestseller lists and being filmed by Spielberg. Couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy but it was like seeing Captain Beefheart at No 1 in the pop charts. Huh? God help anyone who bought Crash after reading Empire of the Sun – “Oh look, dear, this is by the same author as that one you liked” “Oh okay, let’s see – whoah! Engine oil! Semen! Internal organs! Surgery! Deliberate car crashes! Aaaargh!”. So anyway, in his final phase JGB abandoned the short story form (only 80 pages of this 1186-page collection are from this period) and instead cranked out seven dystopian novels of varying qualities, which I confess have never tempted me. Maybe one day. No, what I like is JGB at his most elegiac, which is to say, at his most lethal. It's all in these short stories. Every home should have one.
Random quote generator - from page 817 :
Already other memories were massing around him, fragments that he was certain belonged to another man’s life, details from the case-history of an imaginary patient whose role he had been tricked into playing. As he worked on the Fortress high among the dunes, brushing the sand away from the cylinder vanes of the radial engines, he remembered other aircraft he had been involved with , vehicles without wings.
Some first lines of stories:
In the evening, as Franklin rested on the roof of the abandoned clinic,he would often remember Trippett, and the last drive he had taken into the desert with the dying astronaut and his daughter.
All day this strange pilot had flown his antique aeroplane over the abandoned space centre, a frantic machine lost in the silence of Florida.
At dusk Sheppard was still sitting in the cockpit of the stranded aircraft, unconcerned by the evening tide that advanced towards him across the beach.
Later Powers often thought of Whitby and the strange grooves the biologist had cut, apparently at random, all over the floor of the empty swimming pool.
At sunset, when the vermilion glow reflected from the dunes along the horizon fitfully illuminated the white faces of the abandoned hotels…
These stories are sad, wistful, clinical, upsetting meditations on the future we thought we were going to have and the future we turned out to be having all the while, which were two very different things.
1) 1956-64 - At first he was writing actual science fiction, and he was really cranking it out. There are some beautiful ones in this early part, probably my favourites - "The Sound Sweep", "The Concentration City", "Billenium", "The Voices of Time". It became gradually clear - to JG and to the reader - that he wasn't really able to do the hard-sf thing (extrapolation with a lot of wires and diagrams), but instead, he was developing, slowly, a genuine voice, a way of seeing the present in the guise of the future, and a unique form of poetry. He also wrote a trio of potboiling disaster novels, which are fun for people who like contemplating the destruction of humanity, which I know is a popular form of entertainment.
2) 1965-83 - Something happened. He became noticably strange in 1965, at the exact time when the 60s counterculture was becoming self-conscious. You may be thinking that he would have turned out like the Michael Caine character in Children of Men, all long hair and the best hashish, the poshest, most mature and most well-read hippy, but no, he kept his suit on and his hair was cut every three weeks. Intellectually, he was hurtling towards the outer edge, and then when he found it, he built a further edge on top of it. Falling in with a bunch of other new crazed experimentalists (like Michael Moorcock) he became part of the take-over of the formerly staid British sf mag New Worlds. This mag then became a major platform for cultural madness and outrage in Britain in print for the next five years. (And was duly prosecuted for obscenity.) There was an assumed sf sensibility behind the madness published by New Worlds but often it was hard to see because it wasn't there. This was when sf became "speculative fabulation". I wish I had a collection of New Worlds 1965-1970. Man alive! I would look over them and be amazed – so prescient, and so gone.
So anyway, in this period JG invented "the compressed novel", i.e. the very refined, hyperintellectualised mashup of Hollywood Babylon, the National Enquirer, the facelifts of the rich and famous, the autopsies of the rich and famous, the study of autoerotic fatalities, the architecture of Los Angeles with especial reference to its swimming pools, inner space as alien landscape, the topography of hospitals and beaches, aeronautical engineering manuals, the soundless autogeddon of the near future, the frigid poetry of motorways, decayed technologies, abandoned futures – all rendered into distilled prose in which the more lurid the event being described, the more crystalline became the prose. JG became infatuated by public events like the assassination of Kennedy and the death of Marilyn Monroe. This was not space opera. There were no aliens. Earth is the only alien planet, said JG Ballard, and he meant it.
The apotheosis of this most ballardian phase of Ballard was, of course, Crash. Typical short story titles from this period:
The Terminal Beach
The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race
The Atrocity Exhibition
The Intensive Care Unit
Memories of the Space Age
Myths of the Near Future
3) 1984 – 2009 – With the publication of the non-sf, non-weird The Empire of the Sun, JG suddenly got himself a massive hit, and his long time fans were amazed to see him atop the bestseller lists and being filmed by Spielberg. Couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy but it was like seeing Captain Beefheart at No 1 in the pop charts. Huh? God help anyone who bought Crash after reading Empire of the Sun – “Oh look, dear, this is by the same author as that one you liked” “Oh okay, let’s see – whoah! Engine oil! Semen! Internal organs! Surgery! Deliberate car crashes! Aaaargh!”. So anyway, in his final phase JGB abandoned the short story form (only 80 pages of this 1186-page collection are from this period) and instead cranked out seven dystopian novels of varying qualities, which I confess have never tempted me. Maybe one day. No, what I like is JGB at his most elegiac, which is to say, at his most lethal. It's all in these short stories. Every home should have one.
Random quote generator - from page 817 :
Already other memories were massing around him, fragments that he was certain belonged to another man’s life, details from the case-history of an imaginary patient whose role he had been tricked into playing. As he worked on the Fortress high among the dunes, brushing the sand away from the cylinder vanes of the radial engines, he remembered other aircraft he had been involved with , vehicles without wings.
Some first lines of stories:
In the evening, as Franklin rested on the roof of the abandoned clinic,he would often remember Trippett, and the last drive he had taken into the desert with the dying astronaut and his daughter.
All day this strange pilot had flown his antique aeroplane over the abandoned space centre, a frantic machine lost in the silence of Florida.
At dusk Sheppard was still sitting in the cockpit of the stranded aircraft, unconcerned by the evening tide that advanced towards him across the beach.
Later Powers often thought of Whitby and the strange grooves the biologist had cut, apparently at random, all over the floor of the empty swimming pool.
At sunset, when the vermilion glow reflected from the dunes along the horizon fitfully illuminated the white faces of the abandoned hotels…
These stories are sad, wistful, clinical, upsetting meditations on the future we thought we were going to have and the future we turned out to be having all the while, which were two very different things.
January 3, 2019
Perfection! & indispensable--I must own it when I have enough cashola.
A "summer project" that took an eternity to "rip" through, "The Complete Stories of J.G. Ballard" is an often-recommended collection of 96 little capsules of SF, horror & fantasy. If you want to become a writer (one who usually starts off writing superb short stories), then Ballard is your main man.
I thought of the cover page (of the American Edition) while trying to formulate a cohesive review (which I probably failed at already)--a monolith of a man staring straight at you and little dots floating around him, like atoms or molecules. No, I think they represent bubbles, as in EVERY SHORT STORY IS A BUBBLE THAT DEVIATES FROM THE FOUNTAIN-BRAIN-- some closely resemble reality, like mirrors, and some stray so far off that they seem galaxies away... but they all have an auteur's signature. Ballard, in each tale, immerses you into foreign (but not altogether alien) atmospheres where everything is authentic. All plots seem to be going on RIGHT NOW, somewhere else. His themes, well-tackled and fascinating, range from supremely male symbols: brand-name cars, airplanes, buildings, landscapes, motorcycles, mysterious femme fatales, overpopulation, rarely-sex and libido (strange for the man who wrote "Crash"!!!) to other themes: deserts, beaches, dunes, sand. Ballard at times is a kid playing with a train set, though his settings are enormous in scale-- Gotham cities. He plays with LEXICOGRAPHY in tales like "Notes Toward a Mental Breakdown", "The Terminal Beach" & "The Index"... which is always refreshing. There are killer enormous birds, dead astronauts, watches, jewels, hotel rooms, American cities of tourism...Las Vegas, Florida. Some of the bubbles seem to pop unexpectedly & almost prematurely, while others rove in the brain, persistent and glossy.
What Ballard's short stories are about: zero.
Trying to lasso the emptiness of everything is a majestic feat.
Since you asked here are the TOP 13 (therefore, essential) Short Stories of J.G. Ballard (I did the work for you, but they are not in particular order):
1)Chronopolis
2)Billenium
3)Studio 5, The Stars
4)Minus One
5)Time of Passage
6)The Air Disaster
7)The Life and Death of God
8)The Dead Time
9)The Intensive Care Unit
10)Love in a Colder Climate
11)The Secret History of World War III
12)The Enormous Space
13)The Largest Amusement Park in the World
A "summer project" that took an eternity to "rip" through, "The Complete Stories of J.G. Ballard" is an often-recommended collection of 96 little capsules of SF, horror & fantasy. If you want to become a writer (one who usually starts off writing superb short stories), then Ballard is your main man.
I thought of the cover page (of the American Edition) while trying to formulate a cohesive review (which I probably failed at already)--a monolith of a man staring straight at you and little dots floating around him, like atoms or molecules. No, I think they represent bubbles, as in EVERY SHORT STORY IS A BUBBLE THAT DEVIATES FROM THE FOUNTAIN-BRAIN-- some closely resemble reality, like mirrors, and some stray so far off that they seem galaxies away... but they all have an auteur's signature. Ballard, in each tale, immerses you into foreign (but not altogether alien) atmospheres where everything is authentic. All plots seem to be going on RIGHT NOW, somewhere else. His themes, well-tackled and fascinating, range from supremely male symbols: brand-name cars, airplanes, buildings, landscapes, motorcycles, mysterious femme fatales, overpopulation, rarely-sex and libido (strange for the man who wrote "Crash"!!!) to other themes: deserts, beaches, dunes, sand. Ballard at times is a kid playing with a train set, though his settings are enormous in scale-- Gotham cities. He plays with LEXICOGRAPHY in tales like "Notes Toward a Mental Breakdown", "The Terminal Beach" & "The Index"... which is always refreshing. There are killer enormous birds, dead astronauts, watches, jewels, hotel rooms, American cities of tourism...Las Vegas, Florida. Some of the bubbles seem to pop unexpectedly & almost prematurely, while others rove in the brain, persistent and glossy.
What Ballard's short stories are about: zero.
Trying to lasso the emptiness of everything is a majestic feat.
Since you asked here are the TOP 13 (therefore, essential) Short Stories of J.G. Ballard (I did the work for you, but they are not in particular order):
1)Chronopolis
2)Billenium
3)Studio 5, The Stars
4)Minus One
5)Time of Passage
6)The Air Disaster
7)The Life and Death of God
8)The Dead Time
9)The Intensive Care Unit
10)Love in a Colder Climate
11)The Secret History of World War III
12)The Enormous Space
13)The Largest Amusement Park in the World
February 2, 2013
I've been immersing myself for spells within Ballard's fictive environ, and I fucking love it there. Beautiful and limpid lyrical prose in the less-is-more vein so often found amongst those who comprise the ne plus ultra of the writer's art. I'm currently over a third of the way through it, and every single story is, in my estimation, at least good, and not infrequently ascends near or unto the rarefied airs of Hot Damn! And although the combined effects might fairly be labelled as being rather stark and existentially aseptic, the characters and motive forces somewhat thin and reoccurring, this is yet so in the absolute best of ways—for their primary fuel is Ballard's spatial and (dis)harmonic genius, his near limitless capacity for conjuring environments, architecture, sonic, temporal and energy scapes, Escheresque geometries, in tandem with the contents of the human id, and working them, via his cool appraisal of human nature and fertile strands of imaginative straighteners, into an affective symbiosis of extrapolated interiority and projected exteriority, the essential and accidental, simultaneously lovely and alien, stimulating and anaesthetizing. He prefers men to women, whites to non-whites, the elusive to the grounded—and all within a quite British sensibility, which indeed delimits the ambit of his authorial orbit; but the stories that attend this life's work of avant-garde science fiction are propulsive, they are prescient and perceptive, entertaining and edgy, humorous and haunting, and he is unafraid to diagnostically explore the ways in which our technologically magnitudinous society is fracturing, forming, and (re)framing both the physical world and human culture, together with the individuals within them, through the gelidly surreal lenses of his creative apperception.
A great example of his craft is the 1962 beauty Billennium, in which a pair of friends buried within the cramped metropolitan quarters of a 20 billion person Earth—where, by law, living quarters cannot exceed four meters squared—discover, against all odds, a comparatively vast chamber sequestered behind drywall and plaster, its forgotten roomy expanse bearing prized antique furniture. What happens subsequent is brilliant, as Ballard plays against all expectations, counter-intuitively delivering the goods with his trademark surprise and satisfaction. It's the kind of sly story shaping that Asimov could manage only by attending to the science; with Ballard, it's that mysterious arcanum called human nature that he pivots his short fiction around, even those most bearing the tropes of science fiction. Fantastic little tale.
Another earlier one that sticks in my mind is The Cage of Sand , in which, via relentlessly lovely language deployed with the surety and skill of a world-class painter, Ballard brings tens of millions of tons of red Martian sand—bearing its own unanticipated microbial floratoxins—to land square upon and bury the Florida peninsula, whilst simultaneously decorating the nighttime sky with seven new sepulchral dancers stellarly cast by the technologically assured and envisioned hand of man. In its emptiness of all but a smattering of human outliers driven by the harrowing ghosts of past loss and current obsession, its science-ensorcelled nature, its seizing of the reins of chaotic energy, its driving of entropically-(un)charged spears of decay and (un)natural intrusion into the living heart of the remnants of once proud civilization, it resonated with the same literary frequencies that abound within the work of Steve Erickson. Neither better nor lesser in conception and execution, but a progression in mutual thought, vision, intention, and imagination, with the elder Ballard more in control of his pen and people, the American adept drawing from a well whose waters bear heavier traces of the elements of identity and disorder.
A great example of his craft is the 1962 beauty Billennium, in which a pair of friends buried within the cramped metropolitan quarters of a 20 billion person Earth—where, by law, living quarters cannot exceed four meters squared—discover, against all odds, a comparatively vast chamber sequestered behind drywall and plaster, its forgotten roomy expanse bearing prized antique furniture. What happens subsequent is brilliant, as Ballard plays against all expectations, counter-intuitively delivering the goods with his trademark surprise and satisfaction. It's the kind of sly story shaping that Asimov could manage only by attending to the science; with Ballard, it's that mysterious arcanum called human nature that he pivots his short fiction around, even those most bearing the tropes of science fiction. Fantastic little tale.
Another earlier one that sticks in my mind is The Cage of Sand , in which, via relentlessly lovely language deployed with the surety and skill of a world-class painter, Ballard brings tens of millions of tons of red Martian sand—bearing its own unanticipated microbial floratoxins—to land square upon and bury the Florida peninsula, whilst simultaneously decorating the nighttime sky with seven new sepulchral dancers stellarly cast by the technologically assured and envisioned hand of man. In its emptiness of all but a smattering of human outliers driven by the harrowing ghosts of past loss and current obsession, its science-ensorcelled nature, its seizing of the reins of chaotic energy, its driving of entropically-(un)charged spears of decay and (un)natural intrusion into the living heart of the remnants of once proud civilization, it resonated with the same literary frequencies that abound within the work of Steve Erickson. Neither better nor lesser in conception and execution, but a progression in mutual thought, vision, intention, and imagination, with the elder Ballard more in control of his pen and people, the American adept drawing from a well whose waters bear heavier traces of the elements of identity and disorder.
September 23, 2016
Took me a year. Yes, a year. I spaced out the stories so I wouldn't get too Ballarded-out, but man, some of these pieces are off the charts good. Some are weird for sure - but they always made me pause to think. This happened with "Why I want to Fuck Ronald Reagan" and "The Index," both of which are surprisingly structured. Enough has been written about Ballard that I don't really want to write an extensive review, except to say that "The 60 Minute Zoom" and "My Dream of Flying to Wake Island" are absolute gems, revealing the heartbeat of psychological obsession. Crazy good.
Ballard's writing is gorgeous yet spare, creating atmosphere without theatrics. In "Say Goodbye to the Wind," we have: "The villa was silent. Mlle Fournier had gone to Red Beach for a few days, and the young chauffeur was asleep in his apartment over the garages. I opened the gates at the end of the dark, rhododendron-filled drive and walked towards the nightclub. The music whined around me over the dead sand." Simple. Powerful.
Out of 98 short stories, only a few felt clunky to me. What a collection! The stories here are so much better than anything I've read in The New Yorker in the past five years. Many are short enough to be read in fifteen minutes or less, so if you're a train/subway commuter with an e-reader, and can read on the way to work, they'll stick with you all day. All damn day.
Ballard's writing is gorgeous yet spare, creating atmosphere without theatrics. In "Say Goodbye to the Wind," we have: "The villa was silent. Mlle Fournier had gone to Red Beach for a few days, and the young chauffeur was asleep in his apartment over the garages. I opened the gates at the end of the dark, rhododendron-filled drive and walked towards the nightclub. The music whined around me over the dead sand." Simple. Powerful.
Out of 98 short stories, only a few felt clunky to me. What a collection! The stories here are so much better than anything I've read in The New Yorker in the past five years. Many are short enough to be read in fifteen minutes or less, so if you're a train/subway commuter with an e-reader, and can read on the way to work, they'll stick with you all day. All damn day.
March 14, 2020
It took me a month, but I eventually managed to finish this humongous tome! Yes, that's the feeling that comes to one after the last story has been read. No elation, no sense of wonder, no laugh or horrified expression - just a sense of grim achievement.
Ballard wrote stuff which varied dramatically in terms of quality. Considering his output that was bound to happen. But strangely enough, despite being full of failed hard-sf, open-ended weird tales and tale-after-tale involving the enemy within, the stories left a lingering sense of unease.
He didn’t care much about the sf tropes, but he appears to be rather knowledgeable as far as human beings are concerned.
And THAT makes these stories, and hence the book, special.
Recommended.
Ballard wrote stuff which varied dramatically in terms of quality. Considering his output that was bound to happen. But strangely enough, despite being full of failed hard-sf, open-ended weird tales and tale-after-tale involving the enemy within, the stories left a lingering sense of unease.
He didn’t care much about the sf tropes, but he appears to be rather knowledgeable as far as human beings are concerned.
And THAT makes these stories, and hence the book, special.
Recommended.
February 26, 2018
Telling Stories: The Case of J.G. Ballard and Robert Sheckley
Can you write short stories without recognizable characters, coherent plot, or realistic dialogue?
Of course you can.
That's why God invested modernism. The list of writers who have produced such works is long and distinguished: Jorge Borges, David Barthelme, David Foster Wallace, Italo Calvino, et. al.
But what happens if you're writing in a specific genre like science fiction? Which brings us to the problem of J.G. Ballard, whose massive volume of complete stories was recently published.
I read a fair amount of SF growing up, and over the years, I've discovered the stories and images that remain most indelible come from two writers: J.G. Ballard and Robert Sheckley.
Ballard today is lionized as one of the most innovative SF and post-modern writers of the 20th century. Sheckley, regarded by many of one of the great SF darkly absurdist writers of his time , is basically out of print. (A new collection, edited by Jonathan Lethem, is due out in April 2012.)
Life, and writing, aren't fair, as if we needed any reminders. Why Ballard? Why not Sheckley?
Revisiting 60s-era Ballard's stories -- some vaguely remembered, others forgotten -- has been alternately frustrating, puzzling, but only fitfully rewarding.
What I do seem to have remembered more or less accurately is Ballard's special blend of desolation and post-apocalyptic menace, often embodied in his bleak landscapes of abandoned buildings, ruined suburbs, empty swimming pools (a favorite), and infestations of sand, either desert or ocean. Ballard possessed a dystopian vision utterly unlike from that of any other SF writer of his time, with the possible exception of Harlan Ellison.
The opening words of a Ballard story can be as distinctive and evocative as the chords of a familiar song:
-- “Terminal Beach”: “At night, as he lay asleep on the floor of the ruined bunker, Traven heard the waves breaking along the shore of the lagoon ...”
-- “Cry Hope, Cry Fury”: “Again last night, as the dusk air moved across the desert from Vermilion Sands, I saw a faint shiver of rigging among the reefs …”
-- “Voices of Time”: Later Powers often thought of Whitby, and the strange grooves the biologist had cut, apparently at random, all over the floor of the empty swimming pool.”
-- “Cage of Sand”: “At sunset, when the vermilion glow reflected from the dunes along the horizon fitfully illuminated the white faces of the abandoned hotels …”
-- “Thousand Dreams of Stellavista”: “No one comes to Vermilion Sands now, and I suppose there are few people who have ever heard of it …”
It doesn’t get any better than that … no, I mean that literally. With a few exceptions (“Stellavista,” “Voices of Time,” “The Cloud Sculptors of Coral D”), these haunting openings are about as good as a Ballard story gets. Especially those set in the abandoned desert enclave of Vermilion Sands -- a ruined Palm Springs setting where the landscape and buildings themselves appear to be on psychedelic drugs. (Read “Stellavista”; you won’t remember the characters, but you’ll never forget the insane “psychotropic” house.)
But beyond mood and menace, most of these pieces barely function as stories. Even in his earlier, purely SF phase, Ballard appears to have little interest in character development or narrative, and even Marin Amis, in his introduction, acknowledges Ballard’s inability to write plausible dialogue.
Ballard’s literary status, however, doesn’t rest on his SF, but on his reputation as a modernist who faithfully pursued his obsessions, whether conspiracies, ecological collapse, and the “eroticism” of car crashes. Yet his work, now stripped of their shock value, lacks the genuinely imaginative leaps of great fabulists like Borges and Calvino.
The title of his piece, “The Assassination of John Kennedy Considered as an Automobile Race,” is all you need to know: the story itself is barely an appendage to the title. “The Drowned Giant” pays tribute to Barthelme, but otherwise plods.
Ballard’s ability to evoke a psychological state of isolation and alienation is unparalleled, but without the qualities of nimbleness, word play, and humor, most of these stories have not aged well.
Contrast him to Robert Sheckley, a writer even more prolific than Ballard, who wrote highly inventive, satiric, and darkly absurdist stories in a career that spanned more than 50 years. He is hardly a forgotten figure in SF fandom, but his reputation in the larger literary community is overshadowed by that of Ballard.
In one respect, this is hardly surprising. Sheckley never escaped from the confines of the SF ghetto, at a time when the walls between genre and mainstream fiction were virtually insurmountable. (The list of successful SF escapees from the 1950s-70s era is a short one: Ballard and Ray Bradbury, maybe one or two others I’ve forgotten. Isaac Asimov made his non-SF reputation through nonfiction.)
Nevertheless, the best of Sheckley’s tales, while rooted in their time, remain consistently fresh and inventive, able to delight and engage a new generation of readers in ways that Ballard no longer can. Sheckley was a creature of pulp fiction, in the best sense of that term, but his polished craftsmanship and darkly unpredictable humor endure. Ballard’s heavy obsessive prose – not so much.
I recall those eerie opening scenes in Ballard, but that’s about all. On the other hand, I can remember, in rough approximation, complete Sheckley stories such as “The Specialist” (aliens combining to form a spaceship), “The Monsters” (very complex anthropology), “Ask a Foolish Question” (the secrets of the universe), and “Pilgrimage to Earth” (forget about buying sex, what about purchasing true love?).
In the end, the Collected Stories of J.G. Ballard feel more like artifacts from an archaeological dig; they can illuminate a certain time and place, but they can no longer speak to us.
Sheckley, on the other hand, left us with stories, and as human beings, our hunger for such tales remains constant and vast in every time and age.
Can you write short stories without recognizable characters, coherent plot, or realistic dialogue?
Of course you can.
That's why God invested modernism. The list of writers who have produced such works is long and distinguished: Jorge Borges, David Barthelme, David Foster Wallace, Italo Calvino, et. al.
But what happens if you're writing in a specific genre like science fiction? Which brings us to the problem of J.G. Ballard, whose massive volume of complete stories was recently published.
I read a fair amount of SF growing up, and over the years, I've discovered the stories and images that remain most indelible come from two writers: J.G. Ballard and Robert Sheckley.
Ballard today is lionized as one of the most innovative SF and post-modern writers of the 20th century. Sheckley, regarded by many of one of the great SF darkly absurdist writers of his time , is basically out of print. (A new collection, edited by Jonathan Lethem, is due out in April 2012.)
Life, and writing, aren't fair, as if we needed any reminders. Why Ballard? Why not Sheckley?
Revisiting 60s-era Ballard's stories -- some vaguely remembered, others forgotten -- has been alternately frustrating, puzzling, but only fitfully rewarding.
What I do seem to have remembered more or less accurately is Ballard's special blend of desolation and post-apocalyptic menace, often embodied in his bleak landscapes of abandoned buildings, ruined suburbs, empty swimming pools (a favorite), and infestations of sand, either desert or ocean. Ballard possessed a dystopian vision utterly unlike from that of any other SF writer of his time, with the possible exception of Harlan Ellison.
The opening words of a Ballard story can be as distinctive and evocative as the chords of a familiar song:
-- “Terminal Beach”: “At night, as he lay asleep on the floor of the ruined bunker, Traven heard the waves breaking along the shore of the lagoon ...”
-- “Cry Hope, Cry Fury”: “Again last night, as the dusk air moved across the desert from Vermilion Sands, I saw a faint shiver of rigging among the reefs …”
-- “Voices of Time”: Later Powers often thought of Whitby, and the strange grooves the biologist had cut, apparently at random, all over the floor of the empty swimming pool.”
-- “Cage of Sand”: “At sunset, when the vermilion glow reflected from the dunes along the horizon fitfully illuminated the white faces of the abandoned hotels …”
-- “Thousand Dreams of Stellavista”: “No one comes to Vermilion Sands now, and I suppose there are few people who have ever heard of it …”
It doesn’t get any better than that … no, I mean that literally. With a few exceptions (“Stellavista,” “Voices of Time,” “The Cloud Sculptors of Coral D”), these haunting openings are about as good as a Ballard story gets. Especially those set in the abandoned desert enclave of Vermilion Sands -- a ruined Palm Springs setting where the landscape and buildings themselves appear to be on psychedelic drugs. (Read “Stellavista”; you won’t remember the characters, but you’ll never forget the insane “psychotropic” house.)
But beyond mood and menace, most of these pieces barely function as stories. Even in his earlier, purely SF phase, Ballard appears to have little interest in character development or narrative, and even Marin Amis, in his introduction, acknowledges Ballard’s inability to write plausible dialogue.
Ballard’s literary status, however, doesn’t rest on his SF, but on his reputation as a modernist who faithfully pursued his obsessions, whether conspiracies, ecological collapse, and the “eroticism” of car crashes. Yet his work, now stripped of their shock value, lacks the genuinely imaginative leaps of great fabulists like Borges and Calvino.
The title of his piece, “The Assassination of John Kennedy Considered as an Automobile Race,” is all you need to know: the story itself is barely an appendage to the title. “The Drowned Giant” pays tribute to Barthelme, but otherwise plods.
Ballard’s ability to evoke a psychological state of isolation and alienation is unparalleled, but without the qualities of nimbleness, word play, and humor, most of these stories have not aged well.
Contrast him to Robert Sheckley, a writer even more prolific than Ballard, who wrote highly inventive, satiric, and darkly absurdist stories in a career that spanned more than 50 years. He is hardly a forgotten figure in SF fandom, but his reputation in the larger literary community is overshadowed by that of Ballard.
In one respect, this is hardly surprising. Sheckley never escaped from the confines of the SF ghetto, at a time when the walls between genre and mainstream fiction were virtually insurmountable. (The list of successful SF escapees from the 1950s-70s era is a short one: Ballard and Ray Bradbury, maybe one or two others I’ve forgotten. Isaac Asimov made his non-SF reputation through nonfiction.)
Nevertheless, the best of Sheckley’s tales, while rooted in their time, remain consistently fresh and inventive, able to delight and engage a new generation of readers in ways that Ballard no longer can. Sheckley was a creature of pulp fiction, in the best sense of that term, but his polished craftsmanship and darkly unpredictable humor endure. Ballard’s heavy obsessive prose – not so much.
I recall those eerie opening scenes in Ballard, but that’s about all. On the other hand, I can remember, in rough approximation, complete Sheckley stories such as “The Specialist” (aliens combining to form a spaceship), “The Monsters” (very complex anthropology), “Ask a Foolish Question” (the secrets of the universe), and “Pilgrimage to Earth” (forget about buying sex, what about purchasing true love?).
In the end, the Collected Stories of J.G. Ballard feel more like artifacts from an archaeological dig; they can illuminate a certain time and place, but they can no longer speak to us.
Sheckley, on the other hand, left us with stories, and as human beings, our hunger for such tales remains constant and vast in every time and age.
December 8, 2011
Wow. Two wows, in fact. A small one to me, for actually reading 1,196 pages of short stories in this era of constant distraction/instant gratification (though of course it did take several months and around six library renewals split up over two years), and two, a much bigger wow, one of the biggest wows in the known universe, to J.G. Ballard. It's an understatement to say he was a fantastic writer, though of course he was. In his writing, he cut away layers of exposition, leaving only sharp, whittled points that still seem new after 40+ years of aging. He predicted videoconferencing and reality television, among other things, and came as close to being an inventor as a writer could possibly be.
That's not to say that every single one of these 98 stories is perfect. Ballard repeats himself. A lot. He reuses plots, characters, names, settings, phrases, and messages. Some of his favorites: drained swimming pools, fuselage, time-sickness, space-sickness, Ronald Reagan, the Kennedys, carparks, astronauts, television screens, birds, flying etc. All of them are about astronauts going crazy (or crazy people going astronaut), soldiers going crazy, scientists going crazy, or random people in the suburbs or cities going crazy because of the deleterious effects of televisions, war, disease, tract housing, and vehicles. If you want happy, look elsewhere. If you want rich characters, blistering love, or even some form of justice...look elsewhere. Ballard is a cynic down to his subatomic particles. He's more than a prophet of cynicism; he's a designer of cynicism, with intense visuals of crystalline insects and houses that represent the square root of negative one, and a very stylish one at that.
I've read compelling arguments about why Ballard should be required reading for all architects and planning professionals. I completely agree. In fact, I first read him in a class taught by an architecture professor (one of the few I had who actually knew how to read). She assigned "The Intensive Care Unit," an amazing story about total videoconferencing. It was like stumbling on H.P. Lovecraft in high school--in just one story, he blew me away. But "The Intensive Care Unit" isn't architectural, except, paradoxically, in its complete absence of architecture. It's about technology, which is indeed antithetical to architecture. From the very beginning technological innovation has replaced the delineated notion of "place" with an increasing number of meaningless, formless "spaces." Ballard made the conceptual leap from television to computer vision decades before it actually happened, and technologists, even more so than architects, should take heed of his warnings.
Ballard has quite a few fable-like stories told from a distant third about some odd happenings, the most famous of which is "The Drowned Giant." These are not good, except for "The Life and Death of God." Distant third is an easy, and cheap, way of expressing what would otherwise come across as brilliant ideas. I also hated "News from the Sun," "Memories of the Space Age," and "Myths of the Near Future"--a trio of very long stories toward the end that seem to tell the same awful tale three times in a row. I tend not to like stories set in jungles, forests, or war grounds (suburbanite through and through), so I generally didn't care for those either. But the good stories are so good that they made up for the ones that fell flat. Oddly, although Ballard is famous for his unusual slipstream style which is neither quite science fiction nor quite mainstream, I actually think he is at his very best in the two outlier stories--"The Voices of Time," a brilliant and perfect straight up science fiction tale, the best in this collection and one of the best stories I've ever read, regardless of length, and "End-Game," a taut mainstream (ish) thriller that, in a rare move by Ballard, penetrates the psyches of its characters--and in his experiments, particularly the curious "Notes Towards a Mental Breakdown."
Other great stories I haven't mentioned yet:
All the Vermilion Sands stories ("Prima Belladonna," "Venus Smiles," "The Thousand Dreams of Stellavista," "The Singing Statues," "The Screen Game, "Cry Hope, Cry Fury!," "The Cloud Sculptors of Coral D," and "Say Goodbye to the Wind")
"The Concentration City"
"Track 12"
"Now: Zero"
"The Sound-Sweep"
"Chronopolis"
"Billennium"
"Minus One"
"The Lost Leonardo"
"Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan"
"The Comsat Angels"
"Low-Flying Aircraft"
"The Smile"
"The Ultimate City"
"Motel Architecture"
"A Host of Furious Fancies"
"Answers to a Questionnaire"
"The Secret History of World War 3"
"Love in a Colder Climate"
"The Enormous Space"
ETC. Ballard has a universal appeal. That is, he isn't appreciated by the universe, as he should be, but people as diverse as rock stars and architects like him. As Martin Amis (who is himself stylish and interesting) says in his introduction to this massive tome, J.G. Ballard was a "one-man genre.... No one is or was remotely like him." Ballard is somehow exceedingly original and yet very clear at the same time, unlike mainstream writers, unlike science fiction writers, and unlike the postmodernists (as it is pretty obvious he wasn't intoxicated when he wrote these stories). On a slightly different note, people can't stop talking about Steve Jobs, which seems utterly unfair in light of all the other great minds who simply didn't choose to start an airtight cult before they died. RIP James Graham.
That's not to say that every single one of these 98 stories is perfect. Ballard repeats himself. A lot. He reuses plots, characters, names, settings, phrases, and messages. Some of his favorites: drained swimming pools, fuselage, time-sickness, space-sickness, Ronald Reagan, the Kennedys, carparks, astronauts, television screens, birds, flying etc. All of them are about astronauts going crazy (or crazy people going astronaut), soldiers going crazy, scientists going crazy, or random people in the suburbs or cities going crazy because of the deleterious effects of televisions, war, disease, tract housing, and vehicles. If you want happy, look elsewhere. If you want rich characters, blistering love, or even some form of justice...look elsewhere. Ballard is a cynic down to his subatomic particles. He's more than a prophet of cynicism; he's a designer of cynicism, with intense visuals of crystalline insects and houses that represent the square root of negative one, and a very stylish one at that.
I've read compelling arguments about why Ballard should be required reading for all architects and planning professionals. I completely agree. In fact, I first read him in a class taught by an architecture professor (one of the few I had who actually knew how to read). She assigned "The Intensive Care Unit," an amazing story about total videoconferencing. It was like stumbling on H.P. Lovecraft in high school--in just one story, he blew me away. But "The Intensive Care Unit" isn't architectural, except, paradoxically, in its complete absence of architecture. It's about technology, which is indeed antithetical to architecture. From the very beginning technological innovation has replaced the delineated notion of "place" with an increasing number of meaningless, formless "spaces." Ballard made the conceptual leap from television to computer vision decades before it actually happened, and technologists, even more so than architects, should take heed of his warnings.
Ballard has quite a few fable-like stories told from a distant third about some odd happenings, the most famous of which is "The Drowned Giant." These are not good, except for "The Life and Death of God." Distant third is an easy, and cheap, way of expressing what would otherwise come across as brilliant ideas. I also hated "News from the Sun," "Memories of the Space Age," and "Myths of the Near Future"--a trio of very long stories toward the end that seem to tell the same awful tale three times in a row. I tend not to like stories set in jungles, forests, or war grounds (suburbanite through and through), so I generally didn't care for those either. But the good stories are so good that they made up for the ones that fell flat. Oddly, although Ballard is famous for his unusual slipstream style which is neither quite science fiction nor quite mainstream, I actually think he is at his very best in the two outlier stories--"The Voices of Time," a brilliant and perfect straight up science fiction tale, the best in this collection and one of the best stories I've ever read, regardless of length, and "End-Game," a taut mainstream (ish) thriller that, in a rare move by Ballard, penetrates the psyches of its characters--and in his experiments, particularly the curious "Notes Towards a Mental Breakdown."
Other great stories I haven't mentioned yet:
All the Vermilion Sands stories ("Prima Belladonna," "Venus Smiles," "The Thousand Dreams of Stellavista," "The Singing Statues," "The Screen Game, "Cry Hope, Cry Fury!," "The Cloud Sculptors of Coral D," and "Say Goodbye to the Wind")
"The Concentration City"
"Track 12"
"Now: Zero"
"The Sound-Sweep"
"Chronopolis"
"Billennium"
"Minus One"
"The Lost Leonardo"
"Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan"
"The Comsat Angels"
"Low-Flying Aircraft"
"The Smile"
"The Ultimate City"
"Motel Architecture"
"A Host of Furious Fancies"
"Answers to a Questionnaire"
"The Secret History of World War 3"
"Love in a Colder Climate"
"The Enormous Space"
ETC. Ballard has a universal appeal. That is, he isn't appreciated by the universe, as he should be, but people as diverse as rock stars and architects like him. As Martin Amis (who is himself stylish and interesting) says in his introduction to this massive tome, J.G. Ballard was a "one-man genre.... No one is or was remotely like him." Ballard is somehow exceedingly original and yet very clear at the same time, unlike mainstream writers, unlike science fiction writers, and unlike the postmodernists (as it is pretty obvious he wasn't intoxicated when he wrote these stories). On a slightly different note, people can't stop talking about Steve Jobs, which seems utterly unfair in light of all the other great minds who simply didn't choose to start an airtight cult before they died. RIP James Graham.
November 2, 2010
I've finished most of this mammoth tome, but I'll probably continue dipping into it for years to come. It's a catalog of new literary values and ways of telling stories that showcase a still-startling sensibility. You know, "Ballardian." Like any collection the quality fluctuates, but the best pieces remain truly visionary. And in this context, even the weaker stories play like intriguing minor variations on major themes. Pick hits: "The Beach Murders," "Notes Toward A Mental Breakdown," "End-Game," "The Drowned Giant," "Answers to a Questionnaire," "The Terminal Beach," "The Sudden Afternoon," "The Index," plus the Vermillion Sands stories, the stray bits from The Atrocity Exhibition, oh and also the...
February 4, 2022
Ballard seems like one of those writers who is put on this earth purely to mess with your expectations. Because no matter what angle you attempt to approach him from, you're going to find yourself running into a sheer wall of question marks, asking yourself, David Byrne style "How did I get here?"
Come upon him via the most common entry point for non-SF readers, "Empire of the Sun" and think "I enjoyed that and I'd sure like to read other books where he or someone with his name is a main character!" will eventually bring to a number of strange places, not the least of which is a certain book about people who watch demolition derbies and think "This is the sexiest thing I've ever seen."
Stumble upon him via David Cronenberg's version of "Crash" and think "I want to read stuff that weird all the time!" and you'll either find yourself at the blissfully normal(ish) "Empire of the Sun"/"Kindness of Women" territory or in parts so decidedly odd that you might perhaps wonder if the book itself is hallucinating.
And enter through the door of his more typically SF works (as typical as stuff like "The Crystal World" is) and you will fairly soon embark lands where modern society has merged with technology to create some extreme sex horror hybrid where nothing turns out okay because nothing was ever okay in the first place. What's more alien . . . an offbeat planet or a giant apartment building where all civilized norms collapse and everyone goes nuts?
Needless to say, Ballard had a wide ranging career and it’s the rare person who finds all parts of it equally satisfying. Starting out as a SF author, he eventually became associated with the New Wave movement, which often straddled the line between exciting experimentation and being borderline unreadable (I like a lot of the New Wave stuff in general but let's just say its an acquired taste for some). With his plots rarely bothering with any sense of realism and going straight for mood he fit right in but it wasn't too long before he started to go beyond even that and move into more provocative territory. Thus: "The Atrocity Exhibition", which is about as extreme as anything you're going to find in SF that isn't actively trying to alienate you. Not for the faint of heart, it marked a shift into more political territory and also the premise that modern society was driving people insane, or at least drastically changing how we interacted with each other. What that means on a practical level is that that the weird experimentation of "The Atrocity Exhibition" leads directly to "Crash", which is either a book you will not finish or finish then stare at the wall for a good long while wondering what the heck you just read.
Yet Ballard wasn't there to be weird for the sake of being weird. His mid-eighties novel "Empire of the Sun" was as mainstream as you could get, depicting his childhood experiences in Shanghai during WWII, including some time in an internment camp. After that he seemed to alternate between more autobiographical material and crime novels in dystopian settings.
What this means for most people is that you can pick and choose what Ballard you want and how much of it you can take. With so many facets to his career there's no real reason to be a completest and hunt down every novel he did . . . not only is he trying to do vastly different things but I don't even know if they're intended for the same audiences. Basically, a good rule of thumb is to read the summaries and figure out how weird (or not-weird) you want to get. Then: have at it and go to town.
Makes sense, right? And yet, here I am with an 1100 page book called "The Complete Stories of JG Ballard". So much for taking my own advice.
The version I have was released in 2009 (I think it’s the first US edition) but it had come out previously in England in 2006 as two volumes. That one was also termed "Complete" but mine has two new stories despite his last short story having been published in 1996 but I'll let the scholars puzzle that one out. Why it took so long for the collection to reach US shores may have something to do with the public's typical morbid fascination with recently dead authors, as he had died in April of that year (and my edition notes he had passed away, so its not like it was a coincidence) and maybe they thought the news of his death might have sold a few more copies of this doorstop. I mean, I bought one but I have a strange fetish for things labeled "Complete". Not everyone should feel compelled to go to these lengths.
But yes, its massive. Ninety plus stories from the mid-fifties to the end of his career (with most of them concentrated in the 1960s) and its one of those books that you're either going to feel a need to plow all the way through to get it done as swiftly as possible or take a story or two piecemeal, when the mood strikes. But whatever approach one takes, it still begs the question: do you need a complete Ballard tome in your life? Or is "almost kind of complete" just good enough?
I think what's worth noting first is that rarely are his short stories as good as his novels. Its kind of counter-intuitive in a way because I think at Ballard's best he has this hazy, dreamlike quality that isn't always the kind of thing you can sustain over the course of several hundred pages. But I think it’s a mood that requires some degree of conjuring to make it stick and ten or twenty pages just isn't going to cut it, you need to be immersed in it for a bit. Which means the stories that are coasting on that vibe can be a bit obtusely odd, like something untethered from anything but the faintest wisps of internal logic. If you're into the mood you'll probably find some of those stories are bite-sized nuggets but I do think the full meal can sometimes be better. But "The Crystal World" still kind of haunts me and I read that I believe in college, or not long afterwards (it also helps that most of his best novels are fairly short, implying he had some kind of sweet spot when it came to page length).
If you're looking for consistent enjoyment, Ballard-style, you're probably going to find most of that stuff front-loaded in the collection as that's where most of his SF oriented work tends to lurk. There's some growing pains to get past, as some of it feels like SF just trying to be a little bit stranger than whatever else was going on around it . . . but its strange in a kind of calmly disquieting way, like, "Oh, well, that's odd." Stuff like "Escapement" (where a couple gets stuck in time loops, but separately) or "Concentration City" (where some guy tries to travel to the end of an apparently infinite city) are rooted in a sort of dream logic, not so much science as a place where science is just a broad set of suggestions. It never feels utterly disturbing (compare this to Cordwainer's Smith immensely, viscerally bizarre "A Planet Named Shayol" . . . and that was in 1961!) but more like a strange setup then a sort of twist ending that works with the foundations of what we've seen already.
But those tales are quick and at least center around easily digestible concepts . . . even if the presentation is off-kilter most people are able to grasp murder by slow sound ("Track 12"), death by writing ("Now: Zero"), unexpected duplicates ("Zone of Terror"), vacuuming sound ("Sound-Sweep") and alien prophecies ("The Waiting Grounds").
But then all of a sudden things start to get a bit more intense. Whatever file drawer he must have had marked "dystopian ideas" was at some point overflowing because stories start flowing out of him where the world isn't just messed up but wrong in some fundamentally bizarre way that no one in the story can capably explain that makes any kind of logical sense. Beyond the dystopian themes he starts to revisit other themes over the years . . . there's a couple stories that center around people forgoing sleep entirely or the everyone falling into a coma, there's at least two that resolve around dead astronauts orbiting the earth. Technology's influence on warping the world starts to become more prominent ("Studio 5, the Stars" a world where all poetry is written by machines so no one knows how to write verse anymore) and the dystopian themes start to get taken up a notch ("Deep End", where the earth is basically gone except for one fish, or "Billennium", where the world is so overpopulated that we all live in cubicles, or even "The Thousand Dreams of Stellavista", featuring an insane house, like a darker version of that Tati film "Mon Oncle").
In the mix are more standard fare, a kill-your-parents time travel story ("The Gentle Assassin"), a "Truman Show" type tale ("Thirteen to Centaurus"), one about regular travel in the future ("Passport to Eternity") . . . you've got a run where the stories have their moments but nothing has really crystalized into Ballard's style just yet, other than repeated use of the word "vermilion" (in his defense, a whole series of stories are set at Vermilion Sands). You have creepy scenarios, like silent towers everywhere in "The Watch-Towers" or the elaborate murder in "The Man on the 99th Floor", or the mass suicide in "The Reptile Enclosure" or the advertising saturated "The Subliminal Man" . . . they're all interesting one-offs but they don't quite stick in the mind afterwards the way his novels do.
We start to get there with "The Time Tombs" and "Now Wakes the Sea" but there's still something still a little too grounded, still a bit tethered to the conventional. Stories like "End-Game" (a man tries to talk himself out of being executed) or "The Venus Hunters" (a man befriends another man who appears to have encountered a UFO and sadly discovers he was right) are fine . . . closer is "Minus One" where a psychologist basically eliminates man through logic.
There's also at least two stories where people age backwards, the second of which ("Time of Passage") feels at times actively unsettling. All good, all nice.
Then you hit "The Terminal Beach" and everything starts to come together.
It’s the first story that feels like the Ballard we all know and love . . . the scenario skitteringly oblique, the presentation unconventional (its separate into sections that at times hardly seem connected to each other, all sporting titles that vaguely describe the contents) and the whole thing existing in some floating sliver of space, solitary and constantly changing shape. Its not quite a dream but you also sense you won't be able to touch it if you reach out.
From there we get the "Crystal World" dry run "The Illuminated Man" (still potent even in truncated, concentrated form) and its off to the races, for better or for worse. We start to ease out of SF and a more modern but still hallucinatory setting, where things are hazy and everyone seems to be on the verge of going insane, where the shape of the world itself exerts its own dangerous pressure. He also starts to mess with narrative to an extent that he's almost daring you to read the stories . . . "The Beach Murders" is basically told in alphabetical order, "The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race" is the most accurate title in literature, "The Index" is a story told via, you guessed it, an index, the infamous "Why I Want to F--k Ronald Reagan" is both what you expect and yet, not . . . none of these are strictly stories but more exercises in seeing how far he can take things and how entertaining you're going to find it depends on your appetite for going along with his experimental tendencies. Later on, "Notes Towards a Mental Breakdown" is told entirely in footnotes, like some kind of weird lovechild of "Infinite Jest" and "The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire".
Fortunately he still spends the 60s and 70s writing actual stories, alternating between SF ("The Cloud-Sculptors of Coral D") and stories grounded in what he interpreted as more real world concerns ("The Comsat Angels" and yes, the 80s band named themselves after this story) . . . gradually the more realistic stories start to take prominence even as the actual concepts become more elusive and they start to operate more as mood pieces, hitting certain notes and riding them all the way to the end. The stories may be about The Future but it’s a kind of near future, the type that a lot of his readers might have expected to see . . . only filtered through Ballard's vision its probably not a future any of them really wanted to live in.
It leads to some odd trends . . . including a stretch in the mid-seventies where he wrote several stories revolving in a row around aircraft in some way ("The Air Disaster is probably the most macabre, but not for the reasons you're imagining). The thing is, and this may be the biggest stumbling block for people who aren't into Ballard's style from the get-go, as the years go on his stories get a bit more clinical in presentation. A lot of this probably has to do with Ballard's fascination with science and chemistry (he started medical school before realizing he liked writing better and became an English Lit major) but it gives his stories a very detached veneer at times, like its being relayed to you via very detailed charts. And again, I think this approach works better in longer stories (the sections of "The Atrocity Exhibition" that presage "Crash" don't have nearly the impact the longer work does, for better or for worse) because you have more time to acclimate and the style gets more time to massage its way into your brain. But I don't think anyone is going to shed a tear over a Ballard story, and that's probably not the intent . . . when he touches on his stuff he experienced, like the WWII story "The Dead Time" you get a sense of what made "Empire of the Sun" work so well, this sense of a completely normal world that at some unknowable point deviated from being normal and from then on just feels wrong, like you've entered a different place that is always worse and can't ever get back (understandably, a lot of the war oriented stuff feels that way, see also "One Afternoon at Utah Beach").
Eventually you can definitely identify a Ballard story, a certain rumbling tone, a antiseptic seaminess, the people who aren't quite like real people but are exactly like the people that would inhabit a Ballard story . . . not mentally ill but slightly insane through no fault of their own, like those people who go mad from wandering around Lovecraftian architecture the very structure of the world is this invisible echo chamber that wears out what's left of your mind (the end of "New From the Sun" captures this vibe pretty well). When it hits right, it feels a half step removed from the real world and somewhere we're very close to entering, and not because we're fortunate. It’s a stride he hits in the eighties, just as "Empire of the Sun" is about to hit and make him, if not a household name, at least associated with something not as weird as the sexy car wreck book. What we have by this point are dreams, but not the kind you wake up from, almost like the kind you wake into and then feel burrow deeper into you. And like those dreams sometimes you shake them off after a bit and sometimes they stick . . . flipping through these I find the final paragraphs often the most memorable parts of the story, he's good at articulating just the right urgency for a slow motion collapse, so that the story often hovers at some sort of weird event horizon, about to plunge into oblivion but cutting itself off just before the fall.
Eventually, though, you run out of stories. But after almost twelve hundred pages and ninety plus tales, maybe its more than enough. One thing that became clear as I read through this is that Ballard never wrote a definitive standout short story . . . there's no "Scanners Live in Vain" or "Slow Sculpture" or "Love is the Plan the Plan is Death" . . . "Terminal Beach" might come to the closest but its probably saying something that the story that affected me the most was a smaller version of a novel that I already count as one of my favorites.
Which is fine. His true impact probably lies elsewhere and he left behind enough interesting stories to make them worth remembering. Everything all together like this is probably an exhausting experience and unless you count yourself among the truly devoted (in which case you probably already have this) a decent "Best Of" collection is probably more than sufficient to cover your needs, then dive into the novels if none of this scares you off. But there's still gems here for the people who want to do a deep dive and even if you don't want to argue that Ballard was the greatest SF writer of his era, I think you can definitely make a case that he may be the most consistently distinctive. Once he locks in he doesn't sound like anything less than himself and there was no one else who sounded remotely like him. Maybe they were prettier prose stylists, maybe some had sharper ideas but no one could quite replicate the feeling of living inside something that is unraveling at the seams and the sensation of suddenly looking down and realizing you have a knitting needle in your hands, unable to tell if you're trying to sew it all back together or are engaged in making it worse.
Come upon him via the most common entry point for non-SF readers, "Empire of the Sun" and think "I enjoyed that and I'd sure like to read other books where he or someone with his name is a main character!" will eventually bring to a number of strange places, not the least of which is a certain book about people who watch demolition derbies and think "This is the sexiest thing I've ever seen."
Stumble upon him via David Cronenberg's version of "Crash" and think "I want to read stuff that weird all the time!" and you'll either find yourself at the blissfully normal(ish) "Empire of the Sun"/"Kindness of Women" territory or in parts so decidedly odd that you might perhaps wonder if the book itself is hallucinating.
And enter through the door of his more typically SF works (as typical as stuff like "The Crystal World" is) and you will fairly soon embark lands where modern society has merged with technology to create some extreme sex horror hybrid where nothing turns out okay because nothing was ever okay in the first place. What's more alien . . . an offbeat planet or a giant apartment building where all civilized norms collapse and everyone goes nuts?
Needless to say, Ballard had a wide ranging career and it’s the rare person who finds all parts of it equally satisfying. Starting out as a SF author, he eventually became associated with the New Wave movement, which often straddled the line between exciting experimentation and being borderline unreadable (I like a lot of the New Wave stuff in general but let's just say its an acquired taste for some). With his plots rarely bothering with any sense of realism and going straight for mood he fit right in but it wasn't too long before he started to go beyond even that and move into more provocative territory. Thus: "The Atrocity Exhibition", which is about as extreme as anything you're going to find in SF that isn't actively trying to alienate you. Not for the faint of heart, it marked a shift into more political territory and also the premise that modern society was driving people insane, or at least drastically changing how we interacted with each other. What that means on a practical level is that that the weird experimentation of "The Atrocity Exhibition" leads directly to "Crash", which is either a book you will not finish or finish then stare at the wall for a good long while wondering what the heck you just read.
Yet Ballard wasn't there to be weird for the sake of being weird. His mid-eighties novel "Empire of the Sun" was as mainstream as you could get, depicting his childhood experiences in Shanghai during WWII, including some time in an internment camp. After that he seemed to alternate between more autobiographical material and crime novels in dystopian settings.
What this means for most people is that you can pick and choose what Ballard you want and how much of it you can take. With so many facets to his career there's no real reason to be a completest and hunt down every novel he did . . . not only is he trying to do vastly different things but I don't even know if they're intended for the same audiences. Basically, a good rule of thumb is to read the summaries and figure out how weird (or not-weird) you want to get. Then: have at it and go to town.
Makes sense, right? And yet, here I am with an 1100 page book called "The Complete Stories of JG Ballard". So much for taking my own advice.
The version I have was released in 2009 (I think it’s the first US edition) but it had come out previously in England in 2006 as two volumes. That one was also termed "Complete" but mine has two new stories despite his last short story having been published in 1996 but I'll let the scholars puzzle that one out. Why it took so long for the collection to reach US shores may have something to do with the public's typical morbid fascination with recently dead authors, as he had died in April of that year (and my edition notes he had passed away, so its not like it was a coincidence) and maybe they thought the news of his death might have sold a few more copies of this doorstop. I mean, I bought one but I have a strange fetish for things labeled "Complete". Not everyone should feel compelled to go to these lengths.
But yes, its massive. Ninety plus stories from the mid-fifties to the end of his career (with most of them concentrated in the 1960s) and its one of those books that you're either going to feel a need to plow all the way through to get it done as swiftly as possible or take a story or two piecemeal, when the mood strikes. But whatever approach one takes, it still begs the question: do you need a complete Ballard tome in your life? Or is "almost kind of complete" just good enough?
I think what's worth noting first is that rarely are his short stories as good as his novels. Its kind of counter-intuitive in a way because I think at Ballard's best he has this hazy, dreamlike quality that isn't always the kind of thing you can sustain over the course of several hundred pages. But I think it’s a mood that requires some degree of conjuring to make it stick and ten or twenty pages just isn't going to cut it, you need to be immersed in it for a bit. Which means the stories that are coasting on that vibe can be a bit obtusely odd, like something untethered from anything but the faintest wisps of internal logic. If you're into the mood you'll probably find some of those stories are bite-sized nuggets but I do think the full meal can sometimes be better. But "The Crystal World" still kind of haunts me and I read that I believe in college, or not long afterwards (it also helps that most of his best novels are fairly short, implying he had some kind of sweet spot when it came to page length).
If you're looking for consistent enjoyment, Ballard-style, you're probably going to find most of that stuff front-loaded in the collection as that's where most of his SF oriented work tends to lurk. There's some growing pains to get past, as some of it feels like SF just trying to be a little bit stranger than whatever else was going on around it . . . but its strange in a kind of calmly disquieting way, like, "Oh, well, that's odd." Stuff like "Escapement" (where a couple gets stuck in time loops, but separately) or "Concentration City" (where some guy tries to travel to the end of an apparently infinite city) are rooted in a sort of dream logic, not so much science as a place where science is just a broad set of suggestions. It never feels utterly disturbing (compare this to Cordwainer's Smith immensely, viscerally bizarre "A Planet Named Shayol" . . . and that was in 1961!) but more like a strange setup then a sort of twist ending that works with the foundations of what we've seen already.
But those tales are quick and at least center around easily digestible concepts . . . even if the presentation is off-kilter most people are able to grasp murder by slow sound ("Track 12"), death by writing ("Now: Zero"), unexpected duplicates ("Zone of Terror"), vacuuming sound ("Sound-Sweep") and alien prophecies ("The Waiting Grounds").
But then all of a sudden things start to get a bit more intense. Whatever file drawer he must have had marked "dystopian ideas" was at some point overflowing because stories start flowing out of him where the world isn't just messed up but wrong in some fundamentally bizarre way that no one in the story can capably explain that makes any kind of logical sense. Beyond the dystopian themes he starts to revisit other themes over the years . . . there's a couple stories that center around people forgoing sleep entirely or the everyone falling into a coma, there's at least two that resolve around dead astronauts orbiting the earth. Technology's influence on warping the world starts to become more prominent ("Studio 5, the Stars" a world where all poetry is written by machines so no one knows how to write verse anymore) and the dystopian themes start to get taken up a notch ("Deep End", where the earth is basically gone except for one fish, or "Billennium", where the world is so overpopulated that we all live in cubicles, or even "The Thousand Dreams of Stellavista", featuring an insane house, like a darker version of that Tati film "Mon Oncle").
In the mix are more standard fare, a kill-your-parents time travel story ("The Gentle Assassin"), a "Truman Show" type tale ("Thirteen to Centaurus"), one about regular travel in the future ("Passport to Eternity") . . . you've got a run where the stories have their moments but nothing has really crystalized into Ballard's style just yet, other than repeated use of the word "vermilion" (in his defense, a whole series of stories are set at Vermilion Sands). You have creepy scenarios, like silent towers everywhere in "The Watch-Towers" or the elaborate murder in "The Man on the 99th Floor", or the mass suicide in "The Reptile Enclosure" or the advertising saturated "The Subliminal Man" . . . they're all interesting one-offs but they don't quite stick in the mind afterwards the way his novels do.
We start to get there with "The Time Tombs" and "Now Wakes the Sea" but there's still something still a little too grounded, still a bit tethered to the conventional. Stories like "End-Game" (a man tries to talk himself out of being executed) or "The Venus Hunters" (a man befriends another man who appears to have encountered a UFO and sadly discovers he was right) are fine . . . closer is "Minus One" where a psychologist basically eliminates man through logic.
There's also at least two stories where people age backwards, the second of which ("Time of Passage") feels at times actively unsettling. All good, all nice.
Then you hit "The Terminal Beach" and everything starts to come together.
It’s the first story that feels like the Ballard we all know and love . . . the scenario skitteringly oblique, the presentation unconventional (its separate into sections that at times hardly seem connected to each other, all sporting titles that vaguely describe the contents) and the whole thing existing in some floating sliver of space, solitary and constantly changing shape. Its not quite a dream but you also sense you won't be able to touch it if you reach out.
From there we get the "Crystal World" dry run "The Illuminated Man" (still potent even in truncated, concentrated form) and its off to the races, for better or for worse. We start to ease out of SF and a more modern but still hallucinatory setting, where things are hazy and everyone seems to be on the verge of going insane, where the shape of the world itself exerts its own dangerous pressure. He also starts to mess with narrative to an extent that he's almost daring you to read the stories . . . "The Beach Murders" is basically told in alphabetical order, "The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race" is the most accurate title in literature, "The Index" is a story told via, you guessed it, an index, the infamous "Why I Want to F--k Ronald Reagan" is both what you expect and yet, not . . . none of these are strictly stories but more exercises in seeing how far he can take things and how entertaining you're going to find it depends on your appetite for going along with his experimental tendencies. Later on, "Notes Towards a Mental Breakdown" is told entirely in footnotes, like some kind of weird lovechild of "Infinite Jest" and "The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire".
Fortunately he still spends the 60s and 70s writing actual stories, alternating between SF ("The Cloud-Sculptors of Coral D") and stories grounded in what he interpreted as more real world concerns ("The Comsat Angels" and yes, the 80s band named themselves after this story) . . . gradually the more realistic stories start to take prominence even as the actual concepts become more elusive and they start to operate more as mood pieces, hitting certain notes and riding them all the way to the end. The stories may be about The Future but it’s a kind of near future, the type that a lot of his readers might have expected to see . . . only filtered through Ballard's vision its probably not a future any of them really wanted to live in.
It leads to some odd trends . . . including a stretch in the mid-seventies where he wrote several stories revolving in a row around aircraft in some way ("The Air Disaster is probably the most macabre, but not for the reasons you're imagining). The thing is, and this may be the biggest stumbling block for people who aren't into Ballard's style from the get-go, as the years go on his stories get a bit more clinical in presentation. A lot of this probably has to do with Ballard's fascination with science and chemistry (he started medical school before realizing he liked writing better and became an English Lit major) but it gives his stories a very detached veneer at times, like its being relayed to you via very detailed charts. And again, I think this approach works better in longer stories (the sections of "The Atrocity Exhibition" that presage "Crash" don't have nearly the impact the longer work does, for better or for worse) because you have more time to acclimate and the style gets more time to massage its way into your brain. But I don't think anyone is going to shed a tear over a Ballard story, and that's probably not the intent . . . when he touches on his stuff he experienced, like the WWII story "The Dead Time" you get a sense of what made "Empire of the Sun" work so well, this sense of a completely normal world that at some unknowable point deviated from being normal and from then on just feels wrong, like you've entered a different place that is always worse and can't ever get back (understandably, a lot of the war oriented stuff feels that way, see also "One Afternoon at Utah Beach").
Eventually you can definitely identify a Ballard story, a certain rumbling tone, a antiseptic seaminess, the people who aren't quite like real people but are exactly like the people that would inhabit a Ballard story . . . not mentally ill but slightly insane through no fault of their own, like those people who go mad from wandering around Lovecraftian architecture the very structure of the world is this invisible echo chamber that wears out what's left of your mind (the end of "New From the Sun" captures this vibe pretty well). When it hits right, it feels a half step removed from the real world and somewhere we're very close to entering, and not because we're fortunate. It’s a stride he hits in the eighties, just as "Empire of the Sun" is about to hit and make him, if not a household name, at least associated with something not as weird as the sexy car wreck book. What we have by this point are dreams, but not the kind you wake up from, almost like the kind you wake into and then feel burrow deeper into you. And like those dreams sometimes you shake them off after a bit and sometimes they stick . . . flipping through these I find the final paragraphs often the most memorable parts of the story, he's good at articulating just the right urgency for a slow motion collapse, so that the story often hovers at some sort of weird event horizon, about to plunge into oblivion but cutting itself off just before the fall.
Eventually, though, you run out of stories. But after almost twelve hundred pages and ninety plus tales, maybe its more than enough. One thing that became clear as I read through this is that Ballard never wrote a definitive standout short story . . . there's no "Scanners Live in Vain" or "Slow Sculpture" or "Love is the Plan the Plan is Death" . . . "Terminal Beach" might come to the closest but its probably saying something that the story that affected me the most was a smaller version of a novel that I already count as one of my favorites.
Which is fine. His true impact probably lies elsewhere and he left behind enough interesting stories to make them worth remembering. Everything all together like this is probably an exhausting experience and unless you count yourself among the truly devoted (in which case you probably already have this) a decent "Best Of" collection is probably more than sufficient to cover your needs, then dive into the novels if none of this scares you off. But there's still gems here for the people who want to do a deep dive and even if you don't want to argue that Ballard was the greatest SF writer of his era, I think you can definitely make a case that he may be the most consistently distinctive. Once he locks in he doesn't sound like anything less than himself and there was no one else who sounded remotely like him. Maybe they were prettier prose stylists, maybe some had sharper ideas but no one could quite replicate the feeling of living inside something that is unraveling at the seams and the sensation of suddenly looking down and realizing you have a knitting needle in your hands, unable to tell if you're trying to sew it all back together or are engaged in making it worse.
August 10, 2022
J.G. Ballard was one of the most distinctive penetrating voices of 20th century fiction. This book, the complete stories is a monument. And in true Ballardian fashion, it takes the form of a grotesque Brutalist labyrinth, and endless transit from reality into a psychosis of non-space and non-time. In some sense, this review is also a review of my own failure. I began this book in October 2017, nearly five years ago, with the plan of reading one story a day, paired with a brief reaction in words and images. My expectations for the project, formed by reading
The Best Short Stories of J.G. Ballard
as well as several of his novels, was inadequate preparation for The Complete Stories. Indeed, I am uncertain if anything could have prepared me for The Complete Stories.
Ballard's major theme is the implosion of modernity. His early stories play with crowded, stimulated, commercialized societies reaching points of parodic collapse with grim irony for his protagonists. The overt science-fiction themes ebb in the mid 1960s (coincident with the death of his wife), and the stories focus on alienated individuals undergoing a destructive final psychological crisis, often a collapse of time perception with fugues and blackouts, or perhaps a novel relation to space. The central image here is the beach, a sun-burnt strip of sand between the vast unchanging ocean and the detritus strewn land.
Ballard wrote some truly impressive stories. "Thirteen to Centaurus" is a first rank story in any form. "The Cage of Sand" was written at the height of the space race and imagines Cape Canaveral as a toxic desert haunted by obsessives maintaining a vigil on the orbiting capsules of dead astronauts. The deconstructed stories like "Answers to a Questionnaire" and "The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered As a Downhill Motor Race" do clever and ambitious things with form. Ballard wrote at least a dozen fascinating and provocative stories.
The problem is that there are about 100 stories in the book, and after those top dozen the quality begins to fall fast. I can't bring myself to care about the dissipated artists and aristocrats of the Vermillion Sands cycle. There are far too many meditations on how space flight was a cosmic sin which will be punished by eliminating time. The general misanthropy of these stories is a key part of the theme and tone, a cosmological realization that our present mode of life is a brief blip between an animal past and a dead future. But there's also a very particular and ugly misogyny, with story after story of unfaithful wives and the kamikaze husbands who destroy them.
Should you read Ballard? Absolutely. Should you read The Complete Stories? Only if you have a specific desire for literary exhaustion.
Ballard's major theme is the implosion of modernity. His early stories play with crowded, stimulated, commercialized societies reaching points of parodic collapse with grim irony for his protagonists. The overt science-fiction themes ebb in the mid 1960s (coincident with the death of his wife), and the stories focus on alienated individuals undergoing a destructive final psychological crisis, often a collapse of time perception with fugues and blackouts, or perhaps a novel relation to space. The central image here is the beach, a sun-burnt strip of sand between the vast unchanging ocean and the detritus strewn land.
Ballard wrote some truly impressive stories. "Thirteen to Centaurus" is a first rank story in any form. "The Cage of Sand" was written at the height of the space race and imagines Cape Canaveral as a toxic desert haunted by obsessives maintaining a vigil on the orbiting capsules of dead astronauts. The deconstructed stories like "Answers to a Questionnaire" and "The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered As a Downhill Motor Race" do clever and ambitious things with form. Ballard wrote at least a dozen fascinating and provocative stories.
The problem is that there are about 100 stories in the book, and after those top dozen the quality begins to fall fast. I can't bring myself to care about the dissipated artists and aristocrats of the Vermillion Sands cycle. There are far too many meditations on how space flight was a cosmic sin which will be punished by eliminating time. The general misanthropy of these stories is a key part of the theme and tone, a cosmological realization that our present mode of life is a brief blip between an animal past and a dead future. But there's also a very particular and ugly misogyny, with story after story of unfaithful wives and the kamikaze husbands who destroy them.
Should you read Ballard? Absolutely. Should you read The Complete Stories? Only if you have a specific desire for literary exhaustion.
July 18, 2021
Loved this collection. My favourite story has to be ‘The Intensive Care Unit’ which is a perfect presentiment to where our society could plausibly be heading and yet has that flair of comedy about it.
March 5, 2021
Prima Belladonna 4
Escape 3
Ciudad de concentración 5
Venus sonríe 5
Sumidero 69 4
Pista 12 3
La zona de espera 4
Ahora cero 3
El barrendero de sonidos 5
Zona de terror 3
Cronópolis 5
Las voces del tiempo
El último mundo del señor Goddard
Estudio 5, Las Estrellas 5
Final en las profundidades 3
El hombre sobrecargado 4
El señor F. es el señor F. 5
Bilenio 5
El asesino amable 5
Los locos 4
El jardín del tiempo 5
Los mil sueños de Stellavista 5
Trece a Centauri 4
Pasaporte a la eternidad 3
La jaula de arena 3
Las torres de observación 3
Las esculturas cantantes 5
El hombre del piso 99 5
El hombre subliminal
El recinto de los reptiles
Problema de reingreso 5
Las tumbas de tiempo 3
Ahora despierta el mar 4
Los cazadores de Venus 4
Final del juego 5
Menos uno 5
La tarde repentina 4
El juego de los biombos 4
Tiempo de paso 5
Prisionero de las profundidades de coral 4
El Leonardo perdido 5
La playa terminal 5
El hombre iluminado 3
El delta en el ocaso 2
El gigante ahogado 5
La Gioconda del mediodía crepuscular 3
Las danzas del volcán 2
Los asesinatos de la playa 3
El día eterno 4
El hombre imposible 5
Ave de tormenta, soñador de tormentas 4
Mañana es un millón de años 5
El asesinato de JFK 4
¡Clama esperanza, clama furia! 2
El reconocimiento 5
Los escultores de nubes de Coral D 3
Por qué quiero follarme a Ronald Reagan 3
El astronauta muerto 5
Los ángeles Comsat 5
Terreno letal 4
Un momento y un lugar para morir 3
Dile adiós al viento 3
El espectáculo de televisión más grande del mundo 4
Mi sueño de volar a la isla Wake 3
La catástrofe aérea 5
Avioneta en vuelo rasante 5
Vida y muerte de Dios 4
Notas hacia un colapso mental 5
El zum de sesenta minutos 3
La sonrisa 3
El tiempo muerto 5
El índice 3
La unidad de cuidados intensivos 5
Teatro de operaciones 5
Pasándolo de maravilla 5
Una tarde en Utah Beach 3
El zodiaco 2000 3
La arquitectura de los moteles 5
Un montón de fantasías descabelladas 3
Noticias desde el Sol 3
Recuerdos de la era espacial 3
Mitos del futuro próximo 5
Informe sobre una estación espacial no identificada 4
El objeto del ataque 4
Respuestas a un cuestionario 3
El hombre que caminó en la Luna 3
La historia secreta de la Tercera Guerra Mundial 5
El amor en un clima más frío 3
El espacio inmenso 4
El parque temático más grande del mundo 4
Fiebre de guerra 3
El cargamento de sueños 3
Guía para una muerte virtual 3
El mensaje de Marte 5
Informe desde un planeta oscuro 5
Escape 3
Ciudad de concentración 5
Venus sonríe 5
Sumidero 69 4
Pista 12 3
La zona de espera 4
Ahora cero 3
El barrendero de sonidos 5
Zona de terror 3
Cronópolis 5
Las voces del tiempo
El último mundo del señor Goddard
Estudio 5, Las Estrellas 5
Final en las profundidades 3
El hombre sobrecargado 4
El señor F. es el señor F. 5
Bilenio 5
El asesino amable 5
Los locos 4
El jardín del tiempo 5
Los mil sueños de Stellavista 5
Trece a Centauri 4
Pasaporte a la eternidad 3
La jaula de arena 3
Las torres de observación 3
Las esculturas cantantes 5
El hombre del piso 99 5
El hombre subliminal
El recinto de los reptiles
Problema de reingreso 5
Las tumbas de tiempo 3
Ahora despierta el mar 4
Los cazadores de Venus 4
Final del juego 5
Menos uno 5
La tarde repentina 4
El juego de los biombos 4
Tiempo de paso 5
Prisionero de las profundidades de coral 4
El Leonardo perdido 5
La playa terminal 5
El hombre iluminado 3
El delta en el ocaso 2
El gigante ahogado 5
La Gioconda del mediodía crepuscular 3
Las danzas del volcán 2
Los asesinatos de la playa 3
El día eterno 4
El hombre imposible 5
Ave de tormenta, soñador de tormentas 4
Mañana es un millón de años 5
El asesinato de JFK 4
¡Clama esperanza, clama furia! 2
El reconocimiento 5
Los escultores de nubes de Coral D 3
Por qué quiero follarme a Ronald Reagan 3
El astronauta muerto 5
Los ángeles Comsat 5
Terreno letal 4
Un momento y un lugar para morir 3
Dile adiós al viento 3
El espectáculo de televisión más grande del mundo 4
Mi sueño de volar a la isla Wake 3
La catástrofe aérea 5
Avioneta en vuelo rasante 5
Vida y muerte de Dios 4
Notas hacia un colapso mental 5
El zum de sesenta minutos 3
La sonrisa 3
El tiempo muerto 5
El índice 3
La unidad de cuidados intensivos 5
Teatro de operaciones 5
Pasándolo de maravilla 5
Una tarde en Utah Beach 3
El zodiaco 2000 3
La arquitectura de los moteles 5
Un montón de fantasías descabelladas 3
Noticias desde el Sol 3
Recuerdos de la era espacial 3
Mitos del futuro próximo 5
Informe sobre una estación espacial no identificada 4
El objeto del ataque 4
Respuestas a un cuestionario 3
El hombre que caminó en la Luna 3
La historia secreta de la Tercera Guerra Mundial 5
El amor en un clima más frío 3
El espacio inmenso 4
El parque temático más grande del mundo 4
Fiebre de guerra 3
El cargamento de sueños 3
Guía para una muerte virtual 3
El mensaje de Marte 5
Informe desde un planeta oscuro 5
Read
October 17, 2010It took a while while for Ballard to really hit his stride, and he was much better as a conceptualist than as a storyteller. But what concepts! How to write a J.G. Ballard story: Technology + sex + Levi-Straussian anthropology + the impact of behavioral psychology on modern man. Recombine in every possible way. Wheeee!!!!
Also, this volume gives you a great perspective on Ballard's evolution as a writer, from his early sci-fi pieces to his more stylistically distinct later works, as well as a bunch of odd experimental one-offs, some of which are amazing. "The Drowned Giant" is pure Borges, "A Guide to Virtual Death" is funny as hell, "The Ultimate City" is alarmingly prescient, and "Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan" makes me want to fuck Ronald Reagan.
Also, this volume gives you a great perspective on Ballard's evolution as a writer, from his early sci-fi pieces to his more stylistically distinct later works, as well as a bunch of odd experimental one-offs, some of which are amazing. "The Drowned Giant" is pure Borges, "A Guide to Virtual Death" is funny as hell, "The Ultimate City" is alarmingly prescient, and "Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan" makes me want to fuck Ronald Reagan.
Read
January 23, 2015For me J.G. Ballard epitomised what I was searching for in sci-fi (but I'd rather say, beyond the mere shell of it) and this book IMO epitomised Ballard in all his magnificence and pure power of Imagination. It's like watching slow but steady evolving of ones brilliant mind leitmotifs while they are performing constant re-entry in vast array of ingenious ideas and in the most condensed form. An Eye of The Storm, The Entire City. Yes, the book is long as hell and certainly is a daunting challenge (almost 100 short stories!), but it worth all the time in a world for every true fan of JG. Also I do hope that I shall revisit at least Vermilion Sands & Terminal Beach for time to stop in strange enchantment again.
December 25, 2023
A stunning collection by a master of the liminal, this contains every single Ballard short story. From quasi-autobiographical snippets to the rise of a sun-worshipping, leisure-seeking, fascist Europe to endlessly growing space stations, it's all here.
November 30, 2015
How many stars should you award to the best of all science fiction short story writers? Especially to a collection of all his printed stories (close to 100)?
Ballard's voice was unique and his range of imagination unequalled. As he grew older, the themes and images became more predictable – almost obsessive – but no one else has matched the quiet absorption of his examinations of time, space and mental dissolution.
He wrote few stories about space travel but many futuristic tales of an Earth in continual wind-down. They constrict the reader through their mental claustrophobia, though most are set in deserts and similar vast wastelands. They're saturated with loneliness – or more correctly, aloneness – following one or two or three characters separated from the remnants of a civilization in the last throes of expiring, its population decimated by worldwide ennui.
Time, for Ballard, is not only elastic but as malleable as silly putty; it stretches, condenses, stops, recycles, spirals inward into indescribable forms.
The isolated couple in "The Garden of Time" pluck the last of their crystalline blooms that hold an invading army at bay, reversing entropy less successfully with each snip. "Chronopolis" takes place in an abandoned city where the observance of time had been banned and all clocks stopped. In several later stories, the program which sent astronauts aloft has distorted worldwide time, leading to gaps, repetitions and a slowly congealing stasis.
Often, things just are, described in minute detail yet never explained, as in "The Watch-Towers," tall windowed structures that float above the world, peopled by alien tenants never seen. Like so many of the tales, it evolves as an emotionless, "just the facts" narrative. Yet other times ("Passport to Eternity") Ballard explodes into a Monty Python rattle of side-splitting nonsense that can outdo even Philip K. Dick.
Marriage, for Ballard, is a strained state of warring, weary emotions. His women are even more distant that his men and never central characters, yearned after in contradictory, emotionally deviant ways. This approach could leave them unreal, yet somehow Ballard makes them all too terrifyingly believable.
Several of his most fascinating, exuberant yet unsettling stories center on Vermillion Sands, a futuristic artistic colony where sculptures grow and threaten ("The Singing Statures"), houses morph and churn (shades of Ray Bradbury's "The Veldt") and poetry floats on the winds. Perhaps nowhere was he closer to predicting how the future might unfold than in these hedonistic forays into art and decrepitude both mental and physical.
Often his settings result from humanity having so completely lost the will to continue that its collective mental state has obliterated the environment. In others, the tired planet itself has almost stopped revolving, withdrawing the possibility of coherent life. Character and environment merge into a mental-physical haplessness.
Of the earliest stories (my favorites overall), two in particular have lived with me since I first read them some 50 years ago: "Sound Sweep" and "The Terminal Beach."
In the first, a sonic restorer, who removes corrupting overlays of sound with his sonovac, is hired to protect the reputation of a monomaniacal operatic singer who has lost her voice but insists on presenting what could be a ruinous performance. His adulation for her leads him to a perverse act of impacted love – a superb, deeply affecting character study.
"The Terminal Beach" takes place on Eniwetok Atoll, the staging area for the first H-bomb tests, where a mentally disintegrating researcher, alone and talking to a dead Japanese soldier, attempts to match the geometry of the structures of the mock test city to elements in his mind that he cannot identify. It goes well beyond fantasy or science fiction to become one of the finest stories in the English language.
In the '70s and '80s, Ballard combined sex, machinery and celebrity-adulation, most famously in his novel Crash. Among his short stories of that time, none does this more effectively (and uproariously) than "Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan" (written well before Reagan became president).
The later stories coalesce around several themes that hovered above and behind many of the early ones: cars, ancient aircraft, disabled machinery, Cape Kennedy as emblem of the hubris that we could become masters of eternal space – and birds: his increasing fascination with flight as presaging both salvation and termination. Here, Ballard at times seems stuck on a corroded disk of revolving concepts, unable, like his characters, to uncover his defining idea.
Taken as a whole, this collection is monumental, as uninhibited a summation of a writer and a man as you're likely to find. It's slow reading because of the detail, the unlikelihood of its juxtapositions, the darkness, the understated intensity. But it's beautiful.
Ballard's voice was unique and his range of imagination unequalled. As he grew older, the themes and images became more predictable – almost obsessive – but no one else has matched the quiet absorption of his examinations of time, space and mental dissolution.
He wrote few stories about space travel but many futuristic tales of an Earth in continual wind-down. They constrict the reader through their mental claustrophobia, though most are set in deserts and similar vast wastelands. They're saturated with loneliness – or more correctly, aloneness – following one or two or three characters separated from the remnants of a civilization in the last throes of expiring, its population decimated by worldwide ennui.
Time, for Ballard, is not only elastic but as malleable as silly putty; it stretches, condenses, stops, recycles, spirals inward into indescribable forms.
The isolated couple in "The Garden of Time" pluck the last of their crystalline blooms that hold an invading army at bay, reversing entropy less successfully with each snip. "Chronopolis" takes place in an abandoned city where the observance of time had been banned and all clocks stopped. In several later stories, the program which sent astronauts aloft has distorted worldwide time, leading to gaps, repetitions and a slowly congealing stasis.
Often, things just are, described in minute detail yet never explained, as in "The Watch-Towers," tall windowed structures that float above the world, peopled by alien tenants never seen. Like so many of the tales, it evolves as an emotionless, "just the facts" narrative. Yet other times ("Passport to Eternity") Ballard explodes into a Monty Python rattle of side-splitting nonsense that can outdo even Philip K. Dick.
Marriage, for Ballard, is a strained state of warring, weary emotions. His women are even more distant that his men and never central characters, yearned after in contradictory, emotionally deviant ways. This approach could leave them unreal, yet somehow Ballard makes them all too terrifyingly believable.
Several of his most fascinating, exuberant yet unsettling stories center on Vermillion Sands, a futuristic artistic colony where sculptures grow and threaten ("The Singing Statures"), houses morph and churn (shades of Ray Bradbury's "The Veldt") and poetry floats on the winds. Perhaps nowhere was he closer to predicting how the future might unfold than in these hedonistic forays into art and decrepitude both mental and physical.
Often his settings result from humanity having so completely lost the will to continue that its collective mental state has obliterated the environment. In others, the tired planet itself has almost stopped revolving, withdrawing the possibility of coherent life. Character and environment merge into a mental-physical haplessness.
Of the earliest stories (my favorites overall), two in particular have lived with me since I first read them some 50 years ago: "Sound Sweep" and "The Terminal Beach."
In the first, a sonic restorer, who removes corrupting overlays of sound with his sonovac, is hired to protect the reputation of a monomaniacal operatic singer who has lost her voice but insists on presenting what could be a ruinous performance. His adulation for her leads him to a perverse act of impacted love – a superb, deeply affecting character study.
"The Terminal Beach" takes place on Eniwetok Atoll, the staging area for the first H-bomb tests, where a mentally disintegrating researcher, alone and talking to a dead Japanese soldier, attempts to match the geometry of the structures of the mock test city to elements in his mind that he cannot identify. It goes well beyond fantasy or science fiction to become one of the finest stories in the English language.
In the '70s and '80s, Ballard combined sex, machinery and celebrity-adulation, most famously in his novel Crash. Among his short stories of that time, none does this more effectively (and uproariously) than "Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan" (written well before Reagan became president).
The later stories coalesce around several themes that hovered above and behind many of the early ones: cars, ancient aircraft, disabled machinery, Cape Kennedy as emblem of the hubris that we could become masters of eternal space – and birds: his increasing fascination with flight as presaging both salvation and termination. Here, Ballard at times seems stuck on a corroded disk of revolving concepts, unable, like his characters, to uncover his defining idea.
Taken as a whole, this collection is monumental, as uninhibited a summation of a writer and a man as you're likely to find. It's slow reading because of the detail, the unlikelihood of its juxtapositions, the darkness, the understated intensity. But it's beautiful.
August 20, 2021
There were some good stories here. Now: Zero made me think of Death Note, to the degree that someone should probably be paying Ballard royalties. Ballard's prose is awesome, crunchy, full, verbose. Many of Ballard's characters seem to be introspectively naval-gazing, astrally projecting, time-traveling going mad. The thinly veiled Poe and Conrad fan fiction was well received. More of his stuff should be made into movies in an updated format.
January 8, 2016
I may as well go ahead and review J.G. Ballard's complete stories because I've read dozens of them now and won't keep going straight through the 1000+ page edition I have in hand. I'll return to it from time to time; that's a better way to enjoy it.
Ballard was a writer of very pure imagination, and the stories that qualify as "science fiction," which I normally do not read, illustrate this best. He creates worlds that he describes with haunting beauty, few of which work out well for their inhabitants, but almost all of them enjoy beautiful deaths.
Ultimately his strategy is to generate landscapes, either astrophysical or psychological, that feels dangerous but at the same time are intriguing...and then to feed his characters into their maws, whether they be the maws of time, of aliens, of alienation, or renegade plant life. Even music, it turns out, has a certain voraciousness. Be careful of what you listen to; it may consume you.
The curious power of Ballard's stories is that once the story has put down roots, it does not really matter how plausible it is; the issue is how comprehensive and powerful it is.
I'm thinking of a way to snuff out weeds: throw a plastic tarp over them, leave it there for a few weeks, remove it, they'll all be dead. Ballard does this again and again
His weakest stories are too closely linked to things like spies, beautiful women, exotic conspiracies that have the scent of reality about them, but even then he writes with a scalpel, his prose is sharp, sneering, commanding.
For reasons I'll let others debate, writers who are tagged as producing science fiction (or horror or fantasy) often excluded from the higher ranks of literary writers. Then there is push-back, in which it is argued that a Ballard is equivalent to a Poe, a Kafka, or a Borges. I'll settle the question this way: it's a very fine thing to be mentioned in the company of Poe, Kafka, and Borges.
At times Ballard writes like Nabokov, at times like Graham Greene, and at times like his inimitable self, someone who has worked out all the consequences of believing in aliens or the social banishment of time.
Ballard's great sin is probably his refusal to commit to character. He's too interested in ideas to let individuality prevail. At times this makes his fictions somewhat airless, even lifeless, although they never lack eeriness and a kind of verbal grandeur.
In his introduction to this volume, Martin Amis, who knew Ballard, ventures that he was a bit lame when it came to dialogue. I get the point, but it didn't bother me. The mannered, expository kind of dialogue one finds in a writer like Ballard is inevitable.
I'd say that there is a certain kind of reader who, upon reading Ballard, feels a fever that never dies down. I wouldn't say I am exactly that kind of reader. But in due course, I'll finish the 1000+ pages. He's worth it.
Ballard was a writer of very pure imagination, and the stories that qualify as "science fiction," which I normally do not read, illustrate this best. He creates worlds that he describes with haunting beauty, few of which work out well for their inhabitants, but almost all of them enjoy beautiful deaths.
Ultimately his strategy is to generate landscapes, either astrophysical or psychological, that feels dangerous but at the same time are intriguing...and then to feed his characters into their maws, whether they be the maws of time, of aliens, of alienation, or renegade plant life. Even music, it turns out, has a certain voraciousness. Be careful of what you listen to; it may consume you.
The curious power of Ballard's stories is that once the story has put down roots, it does not really matter how plausible it is; the issue is how comprehensive and powerful it is.
I'm thinking of a way to snuff out weeds: throw a plastic tarp over them, leave it there for a few weeks, remove it, they'll all be dead. Ballard does this again and again
His weakest stories are too closely linked to things like spies, beautiful women, exotic conspiracies that have the scent of reality about them, but even then he writes with a scalpel, his prose is sharp, sneering, commanding.
For reasons I'll let others debate, writers who are tagged as producing science fiction (or horror or fantasy) often excluded from the higher ranks of literary writers. Then there is push-back, in which it is argued that a Ballard is equivalent to a Poe, a Kafka, or a Borges. I'll settle the question this way: it's a very fine thing to be mentioned in the company of Poe, Kafka, and Borges.
At times Ballard writes like Nabokov, at times like Graham Greene, and at times like his inimitable self, someone who has worked out all the consequences of believing in aliens or the social banishment of time.
Ballard's great sin is probably his refusal to commit to character. He's too interested in ideas to let individuality prevail. At times this makes his fictions somewhat airless, even lifeless, although they never lack eeriness and a kind of verbal grandeur.
In his introduction to this volume, Martin Amis, who knew Ballard, ventures that he was a bit lame when it came to dialogue. I get the point, but it didn't bother me. The mannered, expository kind of dialogue one finds in a writer like Ballard is inevitable.
I'd say that there is a certain kind of reader who, upon reading Ballard, feels a fever that never dies down. I wouldn't say I am exactly that kind of reader. But in due course, I'll finish the 1000+ pages. He's worth it.
June 27, 2019
Dear Unassuming Reader.
I am writing to you, because you haven't yet had the pleasure of Mr. Ballard. I can't imagine what you are waiting for, and truthfully I don't understand why you aren't reading this book right now. But you will, in time, or at least you should. Buy, borrow, beg if need be. But get your fingers turning these pages. I won't lie, it's a long, long, long haul. Time? Well worth it. Quality? Hmm, perhaps 94-97% pure. But show me a collection of anything, and I'll show you variation.
My two complaints:
1. I wish I could have read this when I was younger.
2. I wish there was more.
No, twelve-hundred pages didn't quiet my hunger for Mr. Ballard. Yes, my mind is awash with images from his stories. I won't be surprised if when I die, far far from now I hope, fragments of Ballard's stories will still be ambling through my aged and failing synaptic network.
I am writing to you, because you haven't yet had the pleasure of Mr. Ballard. I can't imagine what you are waiting for, and truthfully I don't understand why you aren't reading this book right now. But you will, in time, or at least you should. Buy, borrow, beg if need be. But get your fingers turning these pages. I won't lie, it's a long, long, long haul. Time? Well worth it. Quality? Hmm, perhaps 94-97% pure. But show me a collection of anything, and I'll show you variation.
My two complaints:
1. I wish I could have read this when I was younger.
2. I wish there was more.
No, twelve-hundred pages didn't quiet my hunger for Mr. Ballard. Yes, my mind is awash with images from his stories. I won't be surprised if when I die, far far from now I hope, fragments of Ballard's stories will still be ambling through my aged and failing synaptic network.
August 6, 2016
I knew this would be a great way to start the year and I was not disappointed. Hearing the evolution of his short stories from the 60's and onward was a joy. Many of the stories have become favorites I will re-read throughout my life. His view of future technological advances, seemingly from the side of those who didn't gain from them, serves as an interesting warning and thought experiment.
The two stories dealing with lives in reverse truly stood out. Like trying to read an MC Escher image. You brain can't quite work it out but does enjoy the experience.
Being a New Yorker, I can't help but feel a kinship with the story Billenium.
Take a month or a year but get this book. I couldn't put it down.
The two stories dealing with lives in reverse truly stood out. Like trying to read an MC Escher image. You brain can't quite work it out but does enjoy the experience.
Being a New Yorker, I can't help but feel a kinship with the story Billenium.
Take a month or a year but get this book. I couldn't put it down.
January 2, 2022
Ballard's writing is always a little off, but incredibly inventive and generally quite enjoyable. You aren't going to get deep characterizations here; just detached, almost clinical descriptions of impenetrable men going about their cryptic business in unreal situations.
The collection is long in the reading, but having now reached the final, almost twelve-hundredth page, I'm going to miss not having this to turn to when other reading sours the palate.
The collection is long in the reading, but having now reached the final, almost twelve-hundredth page, I'm going to miss not having this to turn to when other reading sours the palate.
February 7, 2015
The only reason I give this book 4 stars instead of 5 is because the stories in the second half are more hit-and-miss, and somewhat less intense, than those in the first half. But there are enough masterpieces in the book as a whole, including most of the first half, to make the majority of this massive tome obligatory reading for science fiction people.
January 29, 2015
Science-fiction short stories are not for me. These stories are of uneven quality. The best ones were like "Twilight Zone." I did not read all the stories. I think Bradbury and Asimov wrote better stories of this kind.
September 18, 2019
Another one of my long-term bathroom book projects, this one weighing in at 1,199 hardbound pages, filled with short stories by J.G.Ballard, a science fiction author I read in my youth. I've been at this elephant of a book for two years, nibbling away at it one story at a time.
Many of the stories collected here were published in sci-fi magazines of the 60s, 70s, and 80s, and I actually remembered one or two; others had not been published anywhere. Almost all are SF, but there are one or two autobiographical reminiscences of the young Ballard's experiences as a British civilian detainee in China during WWII, held in a Japanese POW camp (fully explored in Ballard's autobiographical novel "Empire of the Sun").
I recall reading that J.G. Ballard had a low opinion of some American SF authors, and being disappointed he felt that way. I remain disappointed after reading the stories in this collection, because IMO they are not nearly as good as those of the American SF writers I grew up reading. And they're pretty much all the same to boot.
Most of these stories are narrated by solitary men inhabiting ruined worlds. There always seems to be a beautiful and mysterious woman nearby, usually appearing on the balcony of an abandoned beachfront hotel, and a raffish villain, often a former astronaut, competing with the solitary man for the woman's attention.
Many of these stories were written in the early days of the space race, when the launch of an artificial satellite was front page news, many more were written in the heady days that followed, when astronauts and cosmonauts began go up. In the stories, Ballard sets up scenarios where the mere act of going into space somehow alters humanity and the orderly flow of time. Several of these stories are set in and around Cape Canaveral and Florida's Space Coast, now abandoned and partially covered with sand dunes. Even in the later SF stories, written after men had stood on the moon, the same strange conceit is at play, that space travel has somehow changed everything down below.
Other stories (which also involve the impact of space travel on humanity) are set on the Spanish and French Riviera, and in those the same three characters are British. Wherever the stories are set, the characters (with one exception in a rather good story about rebellious teenagers reoccupying an abandoned city and making its machinery work again) are unrelentingly white and upper middle class.
Sadly, even this limited cast of characters lacks depth and individuality. The loners are all the same. The women on their balconies are interchangable. The raffish villains, sometimes astronauts, sometimes doctors, are all of a piece. Of the literally hundreds of stories in this volume, only a few stand out and feel to me like they were written by the J.G. Ballard I remember reading in my teens.
Give me Arthur Clark and Theodore Sturgeon any day. Those guys could tell a story. J.G. Ballard, at least here, just tells the same one over and over.
Many of the stories collected here were published in sci-fi magazines of the 60s, 70s, and 80s, and I actually remembered one or two; others had not been published anywhere. Almost all are SF, but there are one or two autobiographical reminiscences of the young Ballard's experiences as a British civilian detainee in China during WWII, held in a Japanese POW camp (fully explored in Ballard's autobiographical novel "Empire of the Sun").
I recall reading that J.G. Ballard had a low opinion of some American SF authors, and being disappointed he felt that way. I remain disappointed after reading the stories in this collection, because IMO they are not nearly as good as those of the American SF writers I grew up reading. And they're pretty much all the same to boot.
Most of these stories are narrated by solitary men inhabiting ruined worlds. There always seems to be a beautiful and mysterious woman nearby, usually appearing on the balcony of an abandoned beachfront hotel, and a raffish villain, often a former astronaut, competing with the solitary man for the woman's attention.
Many of these stories were written in the early days of the space race, when the launch of an artificial satellite was front page news, many more were written in the heady days that followed, when astronauts and cosmonauts began go up. In the stories, Ballard sets up scenarios where the mere act of going into space somehow alters humanity and the orderly flow of time. Several of these stories are set in and around Cape Canaveral and Florida's Space Coast, now abandoned and partially covered with sand dunes. Even in the later SF stories, written after men had stood on the moon, the same strange conceit is at play, that space travel has somehow changed everything down below.
Other stories (which also involve the impact of space travel on humanity) are set on the Spanish and French Riviera, and in those the same three characters are British. Wherever the stories are set, the characters (with one exception in a rather good story about rebellious teenagers reoccupying an abandoned city and making its machinery work again) are unrelentingly white and upper middle class.
Sadly, even this limited cast of characters lacks depth and individuality. The loners are all the same. The women on their balconies are interchangable. The raffish villains, sometimes astronauts, sometimes doctors, are all of a piece. Of the literally hundreds of stories in this volume, only a few stand out and feel to me like they were written by the J.G. Ballard I remember reading in my teens.
Give me Arthur Clark and Theodore Sturgeon any day. Those guys could tell a story. J.G. Ballard, at least here, just tells the same one over and over.
February 7, 2022
I'm going to miss this book, having been reading it since last June. My goal was to read all of Ballard's short stories sequentially, interspersed with his novels, but I've slowed down on the novels and the short stories continued to be irresistible. Even the earliest tales here show traces of the man's brilliance in turning genre fiction into something personal and authentically literary. While even the earliest stories demonstrate the unique vision and insight that characterize all his prose, his peak in the late 60s through the early 80s is astonishing, story after story that consistently break the mold of genre and speak to issues that are still with us today, human failings and triumphs that are probably hardwired into our DNA.
Ballard's recurring themes, possibly even fixations, shine through again and again, sometimes as the focal point of a story but more often as free-floating (or flying) elements in stories that have larger meanings, like surrealist marginalia in a modern survival manual. Unfortunately common among his fixations is a kind of uncomfortable misogyny, often couched in queasy explorations of male inadequacy and violence. Obviously a deliberate element in his work but one that makes a few of the stories troubling to a 21st century reader. Still, the combined effect of the volume is dazzling and the dark, occasionally nihilistic elements only make the vase brighter.
It's purely impossible to choose a favorite story here but the one that stands out as I look through the contents is "Now Wakes the Sea," from 1963, probably because it taps my own romantic view of matters paleontological in a masterfully atmospheric fable of madness and obsession. It's only one of dozens though that define a writer who made an indelible mark on mid-century prose.
Ballard's recurring themes, possibly even fixations, shine through again and again, sometimes as the focal point of a story but more often as free-floating (or flying) elements in stories that have larger meanings, like surrealist marginalia in a modern survival manual. Unfortunately common among his fixations is a kind of uncomfortable misogyny, often couched in queasy explorations of male inadequacy and violence. Obviously a deliberate element in his work but one that makes a few of the stories troubling to a 21st century reader. Still, the combined effect of the volume is dazzling and the dark, occasionally nihilistic elements only make the vase brighter.
It's purely impossible to choose a favorite story here but the one that stands out as I look through the contents is "Now Wakes the Sea," from 1963, probably because it taps my own romantic view of matters paleontological in a masterfully atmospheric fable of madness and obsession. It's only one of dozens though that define a writer who made an indelible mark on mid-century prose.
September 16, 2019
Took me awhile to read this entirely but it was absolutely worth it.
Ballard never disappoint, even when some of the stories are put in a order that makes you think that they are just retakes of the same idea they always have something new or different to them.
I have to admit that my favorites one are from the last half of the collection, what I can suppose can be called a more "contemporary" Ballard, some that if you changed some details could easily pass from current news.
Ballard never disappoint, even when some of the stories are put in a order that makes you think that they are just retakes of the same idea they always have something new or different to them.
I have to admit that my favorites one are from the last half of the collection, what I can suppose can be called a more "contemporary" Ballard, some that if you changed some details could easily pass from current news.
December 31, 2019
Sometimes to easy to 'figure' out where the short stories aim, trying hard to not be predictable. What also marks his authorship, besides being ahead of his time (which is the purpose of sci-fi writers?), is that he often feels a bit immature, or rather precocious maybe. Smart in a child's way.
June 23, 2022
Ballard’s imagination is just as fierce in these stories as it is in his longer works. A truly visionary glimpse into the dark future of humanity.
August 24, 2024
Some excellent stories and a large number that haven't aged well or are at best average
July 15, 2023
What an amazing writer! One of the most important of the 20th century.
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