I once (somewhere on Goodreads) observed that a lot of what is usually labelled Science Fiction is really Engineering Fiction. There are rare examples of Mathematics Fiction (e.g. Flatland, Abbott or Eon, Greg Bear). There's a lot of Physics Fiction and Biology Fiction. Le Guin wrote Anthropolgy Fiction. Imagine my surprise when recently in Ballard's autobiography he said that he favoured Psychology Fiction. This struck me as the perfect pithy description of what Ballard was doing most of the time in his short stories.

This collection has many interesting and surprising stories and the odd few that are actually predictable if you know his work fairly well. Many of the most memorable have the common setting of Vermillion Sands, a fading, no longer fashionable beach resort for the rich and famous that exists - somewhere. It's not quite our Earth, but not apparently an alien world, despite the flying rays that seem like they replace the gulls of most seashores. In fact it's the embodiment of a mood - a mood so effectively evoked that after reading several stories, I was able to guess we were back there from just the first paragraph of one story, confirmed in the next. This impressed upon me the level of writing skill on display.

Well, there's still a similarly brick-sized second volume to look forward to! ( )

I'm reading this as an exercise in curiosity, undaunted by two volumes that would cover about eight books of normal length. It's been many years since I heard of Ballard, and I originally thought he was a normal fiction author. I was therefore surprised and flabbergasted to learn that Empire of the Sun was written by a careerist speculative fiction author. I tried discovering an introduction to his work that was all science-fiction-y, but came to the unsettling conclusion that I'd have to wade through enormous tracts of short fiction if I wanted to get to the real meat of his works. I'm not a huge short-story fan, but I generally like them when I do read them.

I simply tend to go for the long rides in both scope and characterization.

I'm half-way through this enormous work, and I can't say I've changed my mind.

And yet, there are some real gems in here that I simply can't ignore.

I loved everything with the annihilation of time, including the time flowers, the preservations, or world that had lost all its clocks. I was shocked and thrilled to learn that he wrote the original concept of Death Note, and the surprise ending was quite delicious. Some of his best characterizations (even though I doubt he'll ever be known as a master of that craft,) revolved around the sonic sculptures and the societies that had been changed irrevocably by them.

There were other stories I couldn't get into. I didn't care much for the ones focused on overpopulation or biological manipulations. I've seen much better treatments, and the characters, although showing a particular Ballardian clinical approach, just didn't grab me.

Any location that included sand was fantastic, though. The Mars preservation on Earth was particularly fun, but the murder-for-poetry retreat was a close second. The cloud sculptors was pretty damn poignant.

There is only one thing that I can't quite figure out. Are his stories getting better as I climb through these books, improving with practice? Or am I merely sensitizing myself to his prose and getting more out of it as I continue. I just don't know. But with a few early exceptions, I like more and more of his later stories.

I still wish I could spend a lot more time inside each story without having to let go, but this is the nature of short tales.

On, now, to the next four novel's length of stories. ( )

The biggest weakness of the collection is the lack of detailed sources for stories. Reviews follow in year of publication order. Later stories are available here as single stories by Ballard. Billenium is a good starting place. Vermilion Sands stories can get somewhat predictable..

A woman can make a strange plant sing...

Escapement

A man gets stuck in a slice of time...

Concentration city

There is only 'the city', nothing else...

Venus smiles

A artist creats a 'work' that keeps on growing....

Manhole

Three men go without sleep for an experment ...Dark.

Track 12

A man plays a strage recording to another....

The waiting grounds

A new manager takes over what assumed to be a dead planet - very Stapeldonian....

Now : zero

A disgrunted individual thinks he can cause death on demand...

The sound-sweep A mute man cares for an over the hill opera opera singer whenall music is perfect due to 'sound sweeps....Overlong

The voices of time

Genes are mutating, people are sleeping shorter, and a new reality might might be evolving.. A classic.

The last world of Mr. Godard

A locally respected man who owns a business goes home and watches his employees via a strange 'model' of thearea in a suitcase....

Studio 5, the stars

A strange artist joins an artist colony and galvanises things...

Deep end

Most have left Earth when a crashed Russian platform causes a stir....

The overloaded man

A drpped out academic decides to retire from reality....

Mr F. is Mr F

Clever turnabout on child birth...

Billenium

Two friends find a new room in a house...

The gentle assassin

Nice idea but perhaps a little over egged...

The insane ones

Insanity must not be treated...

The garden of time

A couple face time...

The thousand dreams of Stellavista

Rich people have homes than can sense their moods but this is sometimes unwise....

Thirteen to Centaurus

What appears to be a routine spaceflight is challenged by young eyes... ( )

I usually read short story anthologies in one go, but I wisely decided not to with this gargantuan beast, which I’ve been struggling through piece by piece since I was reading The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Why I thought it was a good idea to read such an enormous volume of work from an author whom I’d never sampled before I have no idea.

J.G. Ballard was quite famous, however, and I had heard of him. He was so renowned for the tone of bleak alienation in his books that a word was coined: “Ballardian,” meaning “resembling or suggestive of the conditions described in J. G. Ballard’s novels and stories, especially dystopian modernity, bleak man-made landscapes and the psychological effects of technological, social or environmental developments.” Most of the stories in this anthology were written in the 1950s and 1960s, and there’s often a strong sense of a rigid consumerist post-war society, trapped between the stifling customs of the past (wives pour their husband a stiff drink when he gets home from work etc.) and the bleak ugliness of modern cities, architecture and ways of living.

By and large they are not only tedious, but bleak and depressing. One can’t fairly fault Ballard for writing bleak stories, if that’s his stock in trade, but it was a bit of a drag to read through thirty-nine of them. He seems particularly obsessed with abstract things like time, sound and vision, and if a story is set in his fictional desert city of Vermilion Sands, it’s an instant tip-off that it’s going to be a boring trudge through some crappy story about musical statues or audio technicians or something like that.

There are a few good stories in there; I particularly enjoyed Concentration City (about a man trying to escape a city that stretches on forever), The Watch-Towers (about life in a town dominated by mysterious observation towers) and The Venus Hunters (about an astronomer who falls in with a scientist claiming to have met Venusian explorers). On the whole, though, I regretted reading this book shortly after beginning it, and only finished it through sheer determination. Note to self: do not buy “the complete” anything of an author you haven’t read before. ( )