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The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard
J. G. Ballard
1st Books Library
October 2009
On Sale: September 21, 2009
1216 pages
ISBN: 0393072622
EAN: 9780393072624
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
“More than one thousand compelling pages from one of the
most haunting, cogent, and individual imaginations in
contemporary literature.”—William Boyd 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 soul as “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. .
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