The Complete Short Stories

The Complete Short Stories of JG Ballard are required reading for all connoisseurs of Ballard's writing. This compilation brings together 96 short stories drawn from previous collections of Ballard's short stories, including The Voices of Time and War Fever, as well as four previously uncollected stories. The result is an exhilarating overview of Ballard's development as a short-story writer, from the singing orchids of Vermilion Sands in Prima Belladonna, completed in 1956, to the millennial anxieties of Report from an Obscure Planet, written in 1992.

The Complete Short Stories confirm Ballard's stature as a craftsman of the short story, which often suits his surreal brilliance above and beyond later novels such as Cocaine Nights and Super-Cannes. In his Introduction, Ballard reflects, "the short story is coined from precious metal, a glint of gold that will glow for ever in the deep purse of your imagination." Time and again, whether exploring the furthest reaches of science fiction, or the banal surrealism of English suburban life, Ballard's perverse insight lodges itself in your imagination, as he explores and often punctures what he refers to as "that over-worked hologram called reality". This collection will delight devotees, but it will also allow readers new to Ballard to experience a short-story writer of the stature of Borges, Bradbury or Edgar Allan Poe. --Jerry Brotton

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The Complete Short Stories - Rated
Every story a joy to read: fantastic ideas executed to perfection.

Having read a small selection of his short stories and thoroughly enjoyed 'Crash', 'Super-cannes' and 'Empire of the Sun' i had high expectations, i am pleased to say were not misplaced.

When he's good he's very, very good. But... - Rated
OK, this must be the definitive collection of JG Ballards work, spanning his writings for the best part of half a century. Therefore, if you like his stuff, this is a good buy. However, for those with an interest in him as a literary eccentric (a kind of shrewd William Burroughs)this a bit hit and miss. There are some stories which are excellent, some so good and written in such an innovative style that it almost makes the purchase worthwhile. But these are from his post-Atrocity Exhibition era and some of the earlier stuff is just generic sci-fi that has been emulated so much over the intervening years that it has lost its freshness. Apart from that, this is a good buy for sci-fi fans, readers of esoterica and those who fancy a change from the usual brain-drain of modern fiction.

Enthralling - Rated
I'll keep this brief; this collection of short stories is enthralling. Ballard writes with such skill that he's able to tell a big story and paint a colourful picture in sometimes just a few pages. And his ideas are often from a different planet.

I'm not a great, or quick, reader, and have found this 1000 page collection to keep me happy for almost 12 months! I tend to read one story every other night, and each one is completely different to the last. They're often thought-provoking, often amusing, often surreal, and always entertaining.

Breathtaking - Rated
Nobody could write a book of this size without repeating themselves at least a few times - Ballard, over the forty year period this book covers, actually repeats himself a great deal, but one gets the impression this is no accident. Ballard's recurring themes develop like a plot does in a good novel, his ideas gradually overlapping and coalescing to create a unique vision of the world that is at once bleak and optimistic.

Ballard is fantastic at placing characters into particular spaces and watching them interact and develop within these strict geographical parameters. Space stations, abandoned hotels, beach resorts for the apathetic rich - one gets the feeling that these are all illustrations, surreal microcosms, of our own everyday existence.

By the way, to place these stories in context, read Ballard's Empire of the Sun and The Kindness of Women - one can really see the significance of aircraft wrecks that litter his stories or the manipulative sirens that inhabit Vermilion Sands.

Plese read this book, and gaze through the weird and wonderful fiction to a clutch of simple truths.

Definitive collection of key writer of 20th century. - Rated
This collection is the ideal introduction to Ballard, the place where themes have been worked out that would recur in novels such as Crash and Empire of the Sun. As he states in his all too brief introduction, Ballard sees the short story as something that is still important in literature- particularly in the realm of science-fiction to which he belongs/doesn't belong (the joy of the new wave).

These stories come from several collections: The Voices of Time, The Terminal Beach, The Disaster Area, The Day of Forever, The Atrocity Exhibition, Vermilion Sands, Low-Flying Aircraft, The Venus Hunters, Myths of the Near Future and War Fever. Included also are The Recongnition (from 1967/disaster era) and three stories from the 1990's: A Guide to Virtual Death, The Message from Mars & Report from an Obscure Planet. This collection is great value- as the volumes purchased seperately would be a lot more expensive and not in this impressive single volume.

Loads of great stories, from which you can identify his distinctive style concerning death, sex, the future and so much more in a developing polaroid of the present tense. The Garden of Time is one of my favourites, sort of fusion of The Unlimited Dream Company and Last Year at Marienbad. Billennium is a great early work, where overpopulation becomes a factor and a black comic punchline is added (as with works like The Drowned World, the hero embraces the malady- a frequent element in Ballard's oeuvre).

The infamous Why I Want to F*** Ronald Reagan surfaces along with The Assassination of JFK Considered as a Downhill Motor Race from the great Atrocity Exhibition. A familiar character to that work is Traven- who features in the classic The Terminal Beach- where the style of Atrocity Exhibtion is found and features like the death of a wife, the car crash and a tropical geophysicality occur (and recur). It's perfect, as a short story can be (and as the novel can never be, as Ballard correctly states in the intro).

Too many stories to detail, ones that I've liked include The Comsat Angels, Notes Towards a Mental Breakdown, Having a Wonderful Time, Report on an Unidentifed Space Station, The Man who Walked on the Moon and Chronopolis.

This collection, along with such longer works as Empire of the Sun/The Kindness of Women; the urban disaster trilogy of Crash, Concrete Island & High Rise; The Atrocity Exhibtion; Super Cannes; Cocaine Nights; Vermillion Sands; The Drowned World & The Crystal World provide a mass of evidence that Ballard is one of the greatest voices of the 20th century. His style may be his own fusion of Conrad and Burroughs, but there has frequently be a writer more interesting in 20th century fiction. My only quibble is I would have liked notes on each story, like in the annotated edition of The Atrocity Exhibition; a minor gripe regarding a great selection of brilliant short stories.