The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard by J. G. Ballard, Martin Amis (Introduction)

The Barnes & Noble Review

In J. G. Ballard's stories, the world is always ending. No surprise, given that the late author (who died in April 2009 at the age of 78) spent several years as a boy in a Japanese prison camp outside Shanghai. The casual slaughters, hardening of souls, and not-so-faraway mushroom clouds Ballard lived through -- recalled in his most popular novel, the autobiographical Empire of the Sun -- inform nearly every piece collected in this long-needed volume. Arranged chronologically, The Complete Stories presents a breathtaking vantage point on the development of Ballard's apocalyptic and mythopoeic voice. His early work in the 1950s and '60s was dominated by languorous pieces about decadent resort zones ("Prima Belladona") or crystallizing landscapes (a unique end-world scenario in "The Illuminated Man"). He transitioned during the Vietnam War to a harsher, more plot-driven, and adventurously fractured style, as in the sardonic Reagan satire "The Secret History of World War 3." A consummate reader and prolific critic, Ballard's influences were always right on the sleeve (Dalí, Conrad). But this hat-tipping never kept him from breaking new ground, which he regularly did as a charter member of Britain's New Wave, embedding classic science fiction tropes into Kafkaesque scenarios. Themes of flight and escape were recurrent obsessions, threaded into Ballard's distrust of science's utopian promises and his prescient early take on the sex- and death-drenched celebrity mediascape that blooms in many stories like a malevolent growth. What is most remarkable about the cold, sparkling dream fictions in this treasure box of a book is not, however, the myriad methods by which Ballard fantasized the world's end, but how often he presaged the arrival of something terrifyingly and beautifully new. --Chris Barsanti

From the Publisher

The American publication of The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard is a landmark event. Increasingly recognized as one of the greatest and most prophetic novelists, J. G. Ballard was a "writer of enormous inventive powers," who, in the words of Malcolm Bradbury, possessed, "like Calvino, a remarkable gift for filling the empty deprived spaces of modern life with the invisible cities and the wonder worlds of imagination."



Best known for his novels, such as Empire of the Sun and Crash, Ballard rose to fame as the "ideal chronicler of disturbed modernity" (The Observer). Perhaps less known, though equally brilliant, were his devastatingly original short stories, which span nearly fifty years and reveal an unparalleled prescience so unique that a new word-Ballardian-had to be invented. Ballard, who wrote that "short stories are the loose change in the treasury of fiction, easily ignored beside the wealth of novels available," regretted the fact that the public had increasingly lost its ability to appreciate them.



With 98 pulse-quickening stories, this volume helps restore the very art form that Ballard feared was comatose. Ballard's inimitable style was already present in his early stories, most of them published in science fiction magazines. These stories are surreal, richly atmospheric and splendidly elliptical, featuring an assortment of psychotropic houses, time-traveling assassins, and cities without clocks. Over the next fifty years, his fierce imaginative energy propelled him to explore new topics, including the dehumanization of technology, the brutality of the corporation, and nuclear Armageddon. Depicting the human soulas "being enervated and corrupted by the modern world" (New York Times), Ballard began to examine themes like overpopulation, as in "Billenium," a claustrophobic imagining of a world of 20 billion people crammed into four-square-meter rooms, or the false realities of modern media, as in the classic "Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan," a faux-psychological study of the sexual and violent reactions elicited by viewing Reagan's face on television, in which Ballard predicted the unholy fusion of pop culture and sound-bite politics thirteen years before Reagan became president. Given Ballard's heightened powers of perception, it is astonishing that the dehumanized world that he apprehended so acutely neither diminished his own febrile imagination nor his engagement with mankind, evident in every story, including two new ones for this American edition.



So eerily prophetic is his vision, so commanding are his literary gifts, the import and insight of J. G. Ballard's deeply humanistic and transcendent works can only grow in years to come.

The Washington Post - Michael Dirda

Ballard believes strongly in plot, and, with a few exceptions, his stories are intensely gripping without ever being upbeat or reassuring. In style, his work combines an almost medical precision with an astonishing power for evocative description by the simplest means…Ballard's most influential stories were written mainly in the early 1960s…But this hefty volume permits a reappraisal of his excellent, if somewhat neglected, short fiction of the 1970s and '80s…In The Complete Short Stories of J.G. Ballard devastated worlds are matched with even more devastated psyches. But these aren't simply "myths of the near future," they are probes sent down into the desolate heart of the here and now. As Ballard knew, reality has become just a subgenre of science fiction.

Library Journal

The author of well-regarded novels like Crash and Empire of the Sun, which were made into films, British author Ballard was (he died earlier this year) a master of dystopian sf. The 1,216 pages in this collection are an astonishing record of a vibrant and vital mind at work. This volume includes 92 stories, most of which are set in some kind of nightmarish future world or alternate "visionary present," to use Ballard's phrase from his introduction to the book. The variety of stories here is impressive, even dizzying: "Manhole 69," for example, is about a scientific experiment to free human beings from sleep. "Prima Belladonna" is a disturbing story about a relationship between a singing orchid (with a 24-four octave range) and a beautiful, mysterious mutant woman. "Zodiac 2000" updates the Zodiac signs to include "The Sign of the Clones" and "The Sign of the Cruise Missile." Ballard is every bit the equal of Vonnegut, Orwell, and Huxley. VERDICT A revelation; essential reading. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 5/15/09.]—Patrick Sullivan, Manchester Community Coll., CT

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