Customer Reviews
The Complete Short Stories - By: , 10 Oct 2004 
Every story a joy to read: fantastic ideas executed to perfection.
Having read a small selection of his short stories & thoroughly enjoyed 'Crash', 'Super-cannes' & '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... - By: , 04 Jul 2004 
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 interestin him as a literary eccentric (a kind of shrewd William Burroughs)this a bit hit & miss. There are some stories which are excellent, some so good & writtenin such an innovative style that it almost makes the purchase worthwhile. But these are from his post-Atrocity Exhibition era & 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 & those who fancy a change from the usual brain-drain of modern fiction.
Enthralling - By: Mr. Paul A. James, 14 Oct 2003 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 & paint a colourful picturein sometimes just a few pages. And his ideas are often from a different planet.
I'm not a great, or quick, reader, & have found this 1000 page collection to keep me happy for almost 12 months! I tend to read one story every other night, & each one is completely different to the last. They're often thought-provoking, often amusing, often surreal, & always entertaining.
Breathtaking - By: , 05 Jun 2003 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 doesin a good novel, his ideas gradually overlapping & coalescing to create a unique vision of the world that is at once bleak & optimistic.
Ballard is fantastic at placing characters into particular spaces & watching them interact & 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 storiesin context, read Ballard's Empire of the Sun & 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, & gaze through the weird & wonderful fiction to a clutch of simple truths.
Definitive collection of key writer of 20th century. - By: Jason Parkes, 14 Nov 2002 This collection is the ideal introduction to Ballard, the place where themes have been worked out that would recurin novels such as Crash & Empire of the Sun. As he statesin his all too brief introduction, Ballard sees the short story as something that is still importantin literature- particularlyin 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 & War Fever. Included also are The Recongnition (from 1967/disaster era) & 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 & notin this impressive single volume.
Loads of great stories, from which you can identify his distinctive style concerning death, sex, the future & so much morein a developing polaroid of the present tense. The Garden of Time is one of my favourites, sort of fusion of The Unlimited Dream Company & Last Year at Marienbad. Billennium is a great early work, where overpopulation becomes a factor & a black comic punchline is added (as with works like The Drowned World, the hero embraces the malady- a frequent elementin 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 featuresin the classic The Terminal Beach- where the style of Atrocity Exhibtion is found & features like the death of a wife, the car crash & 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 statesin 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 & 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 & Burroughs, but there has frequently be a writer more interestingin 20th century fiction. My only quibble is I would have liked notes on each story, likein the annotated edition of The Atrocity Exhibition; a minor gripe regarding a great selection of brilliant short stories.
