The Best Short Stories of J. G. Ballard by J. G. Ballard
"The Best Short Stories of J. G. Ballard" is a collection featuring nineteen significant works from the renowned British author, published between 1957 and 1978. The stories have appeared in various esteemed magazines and showcase Ballard's remarkable imagination and versatility in storytelling. The narratives explore themes such as space exploration, urban alienation, and psychological complexities, often set against the backdrop of future cities, desolate islands, and eerily familiar suburban environments.
Ballard delves into the internal landscapes of his characters' minds, revealing their unusual reactions to surreal challenges. For instance, in "The Overloaded Man," the protagonist's overwhelming sensory experiences lead him to perceive reality as abstract art, prompting a drastic decision to escape his circumstances. The collection emphasizes Ballard's ability to craft vivid, speculative worlds, where educated and composed characters confront bizarre and unsettling realities.
With a distinctive focus on the intersection of the human psyche and extraordinary situations, Ballard's works invite readers to reflect on the boundaries of perception and the nature of reality itself. This anthology serves as a compelling introduction to Ballard's unique literary voice and thematic preoccupations.
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The Best Short Stories of J. G. Ballard
First published: 1978
Type of work: Stories
Type of plot: Science fiction—New Wave
Time of work: Primarily the near future
Locale: Imaginary locales on Earth
The Plot
The Best Short Stories of J. G. Ballard contains nineteen impressive works published between 1957 and 1978 in such British and American magazines as New Worlds, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and Amazing Stories. Together, these stories show the extraordinary imagination and range of Ballard’s storytelling. There are tales of spaceflight, urban isolation, psychological manipulation, and the outbreak of strange, imaginary diseases. The stories take place in the overcrowded cities of the future, on abandoned South Sea islands, and within view of the quiet but suddenly terrifying lawns of suburbia.
Ballard’s stories show his preoccupation with the internal landscapes of the mind. They also contain unusual responses to the challenges his characters face. Harry Faulkner, in “The Overloaded Man,” suddenly loses touch with his suburban neighborhood. He begins to perceive the world as an abstract painting and decides to drown himself to extinguish this new sensory overload. Contrary to expectations, the short story views Faulkner’s action as a relative success.
Far from confining himself to realistic places, disasters, or injuries, Ballard invents new ones for most of his stories. He creates vivid cities of the future, such as an imaginary subtropical community, where “The Cloud-Sculptors of Coral D” reside and create their imaginary art, and the refuse-littered, abandoned launchpads of Cape Canaveral in “The Cage of Sand,” where two men and a woman have gathered to watch the nightly appearance of as many as seven dead astronauts who orbit Earth in their functionless capsules.
Ballard’s protagonists, though thrust into strange new worlds and alien landscapes, generally accept these with little questioning, as does Count Axel in “The Garden of Time.” His flowers are able to stop time outside his mansion, where barbarian hordes ready themselves for a final assault. They will succeed when his last flower has been plucked.
Like Count Axel and Louisa Woodwind, whose husband is one of the dead astronauts, Ballard’s protagonists typically are well-educated, articulate, and emotionally controlled men and women. As Harry Faulkner shows, however, beneath this tranquil façade of reason, control, and clinical detachment is a deeper layer of strange obsessions and aberrant needs.
This defiance of the normal and fictional probing of the radically new are crucial aspects of many of the stories. “The Terminal Beach” successfully experiments with style and language. It focuses on Traven’s mind-frame, which has guided him to maroon himself on the Pacific island of Eniwetok, the historical site of American nuclear tests. There, Traven tries to make his body a part of the natural landscape and to construct a complex system that integrates the living, the dead, and inanimate objects.