Customer Reviews

The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard

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We shall not see the like of J.G. Ballard again -- and is that not the highest praise any writer can receive? Ballard adroitly used calm, almost transparent prose to create surreal story-scapes and characters who intellectually realize they are headed into trouble, but are emotionally and viscerally incapable of resisting Chaos's pull.

Now we have "The Complete Short Stories of J.G. Ballard," tracing this major author's development during a career that spanned from the mid-1950s into the early years of 21st Century.

In 2001, Ballard said, "Short stories are the loose change in the treasury of fiction" -- this book is a tall stack of change indeed. The values of each piece vary (as must be the case, by definition, for any "Complete" retrospective), but each one will repay the investment of your reading time.

Highly, highly recommended.

I first learned about the work of British science fiction writer J.G. Ballard as a junior-high-school student, when I bought (for 50 cents!) a brand-new 1962 Berkeley Medallion paperback edition of his prescient end-of-the-world novel "The Drowned World" (I still have it). His surreal, evocative story of a dysfunctional group of people exploring the steaming, verdant lagoons of flooded cities on an Earth transformed into "the forgotten paradises of the reborn Sun" blew me away at the time. I eagerly bought Ballard's novels and short-story collections as they appeared for years afterwards, until I drifted away from science fiction. Now, with my interest in sci-fi rekindled and with "The Complete Stories of J.G. Ballard," I again have at my fingertips, in one convenient volume, all of his stories that made such a strong impression on me as a youth.

If you're reading this review, you probably already know about the late Mr. Ballard's unique, dystopian, psychologically themed, often controversial sci-fi work. So I won't try to sell you on him as an author. If you like his work, you're probably already at least mildly interested in "The Complete Stories of J.G. Ballard." If you don't know or like his work--and it most definitely is not for everyone--then you'll have no interest in the book. So, assuming you're in the former category, is this a book you should consider buying?

My answer is an enthusiastic "Yes!" This collection is a fantastic volume, a fantastic value and a "must-have" for any real Ballard fan. When this massive, heavy tome arrived at my front door, I eagerly opened it, in the proper way for a new book, and then flipped through it, savoring the sheer wealth of creativity captured in small print on its 1,199 crisp pages. Then I checked the Table of Contents. The 98 stories included were published between 1956 and 1992. All of my favorites were there--long-remembered classics such as "The Voices of Time," "The Cloud Sculptors of Coral D," "A Question of Re-Entry" and "The Cage of Sand." Looking further, I came to a sudden realization. I had never read about half of the stories--almost the entire second half of the book. So now I face the pleasant prospect of not only re-reading stories that I've already enjoyed, but also of discovering new ones for the first time. There's not much in the way of "extras" (in DVD parlance)--just a 3-1/2-page Introduction by Martin Amis and a one-page Author's Introduction written in 2001. But the stories here speak for themselves, and the book really needs nothing more. Most highly recommended.

This is a terrific collection of J.G. Ballard stories, and other reviews have covered my thoughts about his writing pretty well. I am posting this essentially as a notice that, in spite of the title of this collection, it is not "complete". Among the missing are (at least that I have noticed) "Plan for the Assassination of Jacqueline Kennedy" and "The Atrocity Exhibition" (I'm not sure how this last one went missing, considering an entire separate collection was named after it).

So it's a great collection, but I'm docking one star in my review for what I consider to be misleading title/description.

I've always enjoyed J. G. Ballard's writing. It used to be that you had to find his stories in British editions, which, pre-Internet, were rare in the US. I've read most of these stories before, in different collections, but having them all in one book is a real treasure.

Ballard is more like Borges or Cortazar, or Kafka, than he is like Bradbury or Heinlein. If you are expecting "Sci-Fi" stories, you might be disappointed, even though a lot of the stories involve the future and astronauts.

It might not be good for your mental health to read all of these stories in one run. I'm about 600 pages into this collection, and the accumulating weight of Ballard's obsessions is starting to make me want to take a break. It's an understatement to say that Ballard had a traumatic childhood, and I don't think it's armchair psychology to say that his writing is on one level a way of dealing with trauma. How else can you explain the endless repetition of specific images and situations? Let's see - coral reefs, abandoned swimming pools, sand, plane crashes and crashed airplanes, concrete, empty cities, astronauts, time. If anyone want to add to the list, please do - I know I'm missing a few.

Time, specifically, is an obsession. Ballard seems to see the space age as a confrontation between humanity and the mystery of time. "If the sea was a symbol of the unconscious, was space perhaps an image of unfettered time, and the inability to penetrate it a tragic exile to one of the limbos of eternity, a symbolic death in life?" I'd say that about a third of the stories in this collection deal with this kind of question. Like Kafka, Ballard used his stories to examine philosophical questions from all angles.

In Ballard's world, other people are usually a source of betrayal and cruelty. One's own self is also untrustworthy, and possibly an illusion altogether. Exerting free will is possible, but the individual always ends up being crushed by inhuman forces - society, or time, or the universe. Marriages are almost always cold and suffocating. Women are either temptresses or soulless housewives. It's not a view of life that I share, and, like I said before, it's a view that begins to oppress after long exposure. There are no "characters" in these stories that you will remember - just stock humans, placed in Ballard's inventions to explore a particular question about human nature or reality.

Some of Ballard's stories have the power of Orwell's "1984" - they predict a future that has already arrived, and they point to dangers that are very real. Other stories, like "The Garden of Time" and "The Watch-Towers", are like fairy tales, with images that will haunt you.

One thing is for sure - no one else ever wrote like this. Read Ballard for a visit to a brilliant mind, one that looked with a clear eye on horror and beauty alike.

A must for all Ballard fans. Expansive and amazing short stories. Now his other books need to be distributed state side!

This massive book is a steal for its price. I've now read all 1196 pages. Tons of clever sci fi merging with paranoid urban horror. Ballard uses many recurring themes in many of these stories. There are lots of solitary people that occupy empty hotels. Often surrounded by sand dunes that evoke memories of the space race and the surface of the moon. He puts his characters in the loneliest environments possible but his characters often seem very at ease with their situations and are there by choice. Ballard creates wide open spaces that still feel claustrophobic because they are so desolate. But it never feels hopeless or depressing. He also includes a lot of futuristic art in his stories, especially in his Vermillion Sands stories. Very clever ideas about living houses and growing sculptures and sound experiments. There are tons of great ideas in these stories.

This is a great bedroom night stand book. Most of the almost 100 stories are in the 10-20 page range and can be read in one sitting. The stories are short and to the point with great ideas that don't suffer from the author trying to fill a novel. The quality over the span of the stories is a lot better than most other authors could produce. There were only a handful of stories in the collection that kind of bored me. A few of the stories will be some of my all time favorite short stories. I'm going to leave this book by my bed and put away my copy of Kafka's complete stories.

I donated my pile of Ballard short story collections to the local Public Library the day I found out about this volume. What a lovely tome. Even the Martin Amis intro is wonderful. If you are already a Ballard fan, I can't imagine how you could do without this book.

If you are not a Ballard reader yet, but enjoy experimental SF that bends the boundaries of the genre and really digs deeply into IDEAS, you will likely enjoy this. I wish more filmmakers would be brave enough to do Ballard adaptations, his short stories would be ideal fodder for such efforts (hint to screenwriters: buy this immediately and let these stories expand your minds).

The joyful, twisty (and sometimes twisted) imagination on display in these stories is a wonder to follow. I especially love the way Ballard invents wild stuff and just presents it with little or no "explanation". He basically forces the reader to come into his worlds without any hand-holding guidance and honestly this style goes a long way toward making the things he creates feel real in spite of their being so far out. If you are looking to be transported to places that are just a bizarre shade off-kilter from the world you and I live in, Ballard may be right for you.

This is a great collection from one of the most interesting writers of fiction ever. J. G. Ballard routinely expressed more original ideas in ten pages than most current popular authors stretch out to a thousand. However, this is the heaviest and most unwieldy book I have ever experienced. Apart, of course, from reference books that one doesn't read for entertainment. The Kindle doesn't work for me.

I love short fiction from the '50s and '60s. I have collected many editions of short stories such as the beautifully bound collections from the New England Science Fiction Association. I also work out regularly and have no problem with massive bricks of books, having waded my way through some of Neal Stephenson's recent output. This edition is seriously heavy. I was unable to hold it in position to read it for any length of time. Carrying it on trains and planes was out of the question. It wouldn't prop open on a table. The pages are flimsy, blow about and crease easily. the binding is too weak for the weight of the book and started failing almost immediately. This is not a high quality edition.

I eventually committed the ultimate sacrilege and cut it into four manageable volumes. I am now able to enjoy the stories, a few of which I read in my youth. Yesterday I was on flights and in airports for over 30 hours. I could not have carried the original hideous brick but two of the smaller volumes were easy to carry.

Most of the stories in this collection are masterful. And no other story I've read matches the skin-tingling beauty of The Drowned Giant.

I've read several of J.G. Ballard's writings and they are some of my most cherished books. Ballard is very easy to read with a limited set of characters, little complication, and great visuals of strange worlds. It's easy to relax with his writing while letting your imagination flow. I've read about 1/4 of this book so far and am thoroughly enjoying it.

The only thing I can say negative is that the title is somewhat misleading. To me, "complete stories" means all of his stories. However, the editor includes only "short stories" and distinguishes them from "novels" such as "Crystal World" and "Drowning World," which are NOT included. This was quite disappointing because now I have to buy additional books to complete my set.