The Crystal World - Rated 
Following a mysterious message a doctor heads into the Cameroon jungle on the trail of his ex-lover, only to find that pockets of time are being leached out of the area leading to strange crystal transfomations of the flora and fauna. In many ways 'The Crystal World' is a familiar reworking of Ballard's earlier novels, with the onset of a geological disaster (previously an excess and lack of water in 'The Drowned World' and 'The Drought')being used to mirror the psychological states of the cast, while the lead character gradually comes to actively embrace the new state of the world. However despite it's familiarity the bizarre SF concept at the heart of this novel makes for some startling and haunting imagery, and 'The Crystal World' stands as the most lyrical and strange of Ballards early novels. Excellent stuff.
Brutal, beautiful planet - Rated 
Is there any artist who can lay claim to such a consistently dazzling and diverse range of writing? In this formative (and in my view most accomplished)period of his career, Ballard deconstructs our modern superficialities and demonstrates the primitive instincts and impulses that reside within us all. The imagery is at times breathtakingly beautiful, an arabesque landscape saturated with "Kori Nors".
However, it is the position of the individual amidst unrelenting adversity that dominates the book, with Ballard's evocative prose hypnotising the reader like a jewel-studded basilisk. His imagination is apparently boundless, his prose exquisitely rendered, and impossible scenarios are made to seem all too plausible. And best of all he's still writing well into his 70s, with the indefatigable need to confront our, and his demons still as intense as ever. Psychological extremity in a tangential world. All kneel and worship!!!
Surrealist realism - Rated
The science-fictional premise of The Crystal World (that the ‘supersaturation of time’ is causing the world, its plants, animals and people, to crystalise) is far less important than the imagery it produces. Ballard’s prose style is like the jewelled forests he describes so well: precise, scintillating, beautiful, but slightly cold. It’s his imagery that lingers in the mind, not his story or characters — the protagonist running through the weirdly transformed forest, whirling his arm to stop it crystallising, sending off sparks of prismatic colour; a snake whose eyes ‘had been transferred into enormous jewels that rose from its forehead like crowns’; a helicopter sliding backwards through the air as the weight of crystals forming on its rotor blades causes it to crash. Ballard has often paid homage to the Surrealists, and many of his novels resemble Surrealist paintings (with the added dimension of time!), none more so than this, one of his finest. In a sense, the idea of the ‘supersaturation of time’ is his attempt to remove that dimension from his work, turning this book into an attempt at a still image in prose: an image of the world as a single, multifaceted crystal, at one with eternity.
In the Mirrors of Beautiful Apocalypse - Rated
"The Crystal World" is the final part of Ballard's loose quartet of sixties 'disaster' novels although here the floods, droughts and raging hurriances of the earlier "Drowned World", "The Drought" and "The Wind from Nowhere" are replaced by a strangely esoteric harbinger of doom described as the "suprannuration of time itself". Ballard has denied claims that the novel was written under the influence of mind-altering drugs but the hypertrophied florescence and luridly colourful scenes of a West African jungle that form the novel's setting remind one of Aldous Huxley's encounter with Peyotl (a drug derived from cactus plants in Mexico) in "The Doors of Perception". Dr. Sanders, the laconic Ballardian hero takes a river journey that reminds the reader of Marlowe's passage into Conrad's "Heart of Darkness". The doctor intends to deploy his medical skills in the service of altruism at a leper colony - but these 'motives' are soon made questionable by the ambiguous criteria that so often govern the psychology of an alienated Ballardian hero. In the jungles the withdrawing military are helpless in the face of an encroaching forest canopy that literally doubles in space, mass and "time". Will the hero escape or more interestingly, will he stay to embrace destruction in the fabege mirror box of perpetual replication? A must read for all fans of a sophisticated and 'mythological' science fiction.
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