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Myths of the Near Future
A collection of ten J G Ballard short stories originally written for magazines in the late seventies and early eighties.
208 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1982
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About the author
J.G. Ballard
469 books4,093 followersJames Graham "J. G." Ballard (15 November 1930 – 19 April 2009) was an English novelist, short story writer, and essayist. Ballard came to be associated with the New Wave of science fiction early in his career with apocalyptic (or post-apocalyptic) novels such as The Drowned World (1962), The Burning World (1964), and The Crystal World (1966). In the late 1960s and early 1970s Ballard focused on an eclectic variety of short stories (or "condensed novels") such as The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), which drew closer comparison with the work of postmodernist writers such as William S. Burroughs. In 1973 the highly controversial novel Crash was published, a story about symphorophilia and car crash fetishism; the protagonist becomes sexually aroused by staging and participating in real car crashes. The story was later adapted into a film of the same name by Canadian director David Cronenberg.
While many of Ballard's stories are thematically and narratively unusual, he is perhaps best known for his relatively conventional war novel, Empire of the Sun (1984), a semi-autobiographical account of a young boy's experiences in Shanghai during the Second Sino-Japanese War as it came to be occupied by the Japanese Imperial Army. Described as "The best British novel about the Second World War" by The Guardian, the story was adapted into a 1987 film by Steven Spielberg.
The literary distinctiveness of Ballard's work has given rise to the adjective "Ballardian", defined by the Collins English Dictionary as "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." The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry describes Ballard's work as being occupied with "eros, thanatos, mass media and emergent technologies".
While many of Ballard's stories are thematically and narratively unusual, he is perhaps best known for his relatively conventional war novel, Empire of the Sun (1984), a semi-autobiographical account of a young boy's experiences in Shanghai during the Second Sino-Japanese War as it came to be occupied by the Japanese Imperial Army. Described as "The best British novel about the Second World War" by The Guardian, the story was adapted into a 1987 film by Steven Spielberg.
The literary distinctiveness of Ballard's work has given rise to the adjective "Ballardian", defined by the Collins English Dictionary as "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." The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry describes Ballard's work as being occupied with "eros, thanatos, mass media and emergent technologies".
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 41 reviews
April 9, 2025
Sometimes brilliant, sometimes maddening, always fascinating. Unusually, the best stories are grouped together towards the end. Apart from the delightful ‘Having a Wonderful Time’, the first two-thirds are a mixture of weaker pieces (‘Zodiac 2000’) and acquired taste (the two longest stories; see below). I wasn’t sold on the book until I hit ‘The Dead Time’, after which every story – ‘The Smile’, ‘Motel Architecture’, ‘The Intensive Care Unit’ – was a hit.
Together, ‘Myths of the Near Future’ and ‘News from the Sun’ clearly form the centrepiece of the book. They’re the most substantial and also, I discovered, the only two stories original to this collection; the others were all first published in magazines. The echoes between them reminded me of Anna Kavan’s Ice and some of her other novels, the way her arrangement of three character archetypes recurs across different novels in different guises. Here Ballard’s central group is of a similar makeup but slightly refracted, there’s the doubling of obsessions with voyeurism, sickness, abandoned Americana – plus the idea of space travel as an aberration that’s thrown humanity so out of joint it's resulted in mass infirmity and madness.
Ballard is a writer I always think I’ve read more than I actually have, and apart from anything else, this was incredibly useful as a snapshot of his short fiction. I can now see connections with both Ballard's peers and contemporaries, and writers I love who were clearly inspired by him (Nina Allan and Joel Lane, to name a couple). ‘The Smile’ would make a great pairing with Daphne du Maurier’s similarly macabre ‘The Doll’, and ‘The Intensive Care Unit’ reminded me so much of Izumi Suzuki’s ‘Terminal Boredom’ (has anyone done an anthology of 20th-century stories that predicted a video-centric society? If not, they should).
Together, ‘Myths of the Near Future’ and ‘News from the Sun’ clearly form the centrepiece of the book. They’re the most substantial and also, I discovered, the only two stories original to this collection; the others were all first published in magazines. The echoes between them reminded me of Anna Kavan’s Ice and some of her other novels, the way her arrangement of three character archetypes recurs across different novels in different guises. Here Ballard’s central group is of a similar makeup but slightly refracted, there’s the doubling of obsessions with voyeurism, sickness, abandoned Americana – plus the idea of space travel as an aberration that’s thrown humanity so out of joint it's resulted in mass infirmity and madness.
Ballard is a writer I always think I’ve read more than I actually have, and apart from anything else, this was incredibly useful as a snapshot of his short fiction. I can now see connections with both Ballard's peers and contemporaries, and writers I love who were clearly inspired by him (Nina Allan and Joel Lane, to name a couple). ‘The Smile’ would make a great pairing with Daphne du Maurier’s similarly macabre ‘The Doll’, and ‘The Intensive Care Unit’ reminded me so much of Izumi Suzuki’s ‘Terminal Boredom’ (has anyone done an anthology of 20th-century stories that predicted a video-centric society? If not, they should).
April 20, 2021
Irregular antología de relatos de J.G. Ballard, donde hay cuentos muy buenos y otros demasiado experimentales para mi gusto. Sin duda me quedo con el Ballard “más narrador”, el de la primera época. Destacaría los siguientes relatos: ‘Mitos del futuro próximo’ (1982) transcurre en un mundo devastado, con ese toque imaginativo e inmersivo tan característico del autor; ‘Una hueste de fantasía furibundas’ (1980), es un gran relato, donde un psiquiatra intenta ayudar a una joven adinerada que vive entre un convento y su cercana vivienda; ‘Noticias del sol’ (1981), otro buen cuento, es uno de esos relato de Ballard sobre astronautas y la extinción de la exploración espacial; ‘El tiempo de los muertos’ (1977), es un relato pseudo biográfico, que bien podría haber formado parte de su obra maestra El imperio del sol. Trata de un joven que escapa de un campo de prisioneros japonés en Shangai para buscar otro campo donde están sus padres.
June 20, 2020
Four stars overall, some five-star stories, some three-star ones.
The first story's opening paragraph packs a light aircraft, a terminal beach and a string of abandoned motels into the space of three sentences, and it's so close to Ballardian self-parody that I had to laugh. But I kept reading all the same, because I'm a sucker for Ballard; and inevitably, the story in question turned out to be superb.
The quality of the other stories varies, of course, and sometimes is hard to pin down. "Motel Architecture" unfolds like an Edogawa Rampo nightmare but then inexplicably, catastrophically, pisses itself away in the last couple of pages. "Theatre Of War" feels laboured and lumbering but becomes more than the sum of its parts. "The Smile" springs its trap beautifully, and "The Dead Time" is simply mind-blowing.
On the strength of this collection, it's clear that Ballard's true genius was for novels rather than short stories. But at their best, his shorts are still better than almost any other writer's I can think of.
The first story's opening paragraph packs a light aircraft, a terminal beach and a string of abandoned motels into the space of three sentences, and it's so close to Ballardian self-parody that I had to laugh. But I kept reading all the same, because I'm a sucker for Ballard; and inevitably, the story in question turned out to be superb.
The quality of the other stories varies, of course, and sometimes is hard to pin down. "Motel Architecture" unfolds like an Edogawa Rampo nightmare but then inexplicably, catastrophically, pisses itself away in the last couple of pages. "Theatre Of War" feels laboured and lumbering but becomes more than the sum of its parts. "The Smile" springs its trap beautifully, and "The Dead Time" is simply mind-blowing.
On the strength of this collection, it's clear that Ballard's true genius was for novels rather than short stories. But at their best, his shorts are still better than almost any other writer's I can think of.
May 19, 2019
JGB is one of my favourite authors. Crash and The Atrocity Exhibition are two of my favourite books and stand up well in the canon of English contemporary fiction. You can have the discussion of science fiction as literature ad infinitum as well as whether JGB was a science fiction writer or not. Yes he worked as an editor for a science fiction magazine at one point but his writing transcends the boundaries of what is and what isn't SF and stands as good writing. Good writing that is, when the author puts his mind to sorting out exactly what he wants to say and getting it down succinctly and interestingly and readably.
Authors like all of us have to make a crust. This edition of short stories was put out as a compendium of pieces written really for other publications. Compendium is the right word. Yes there is a binder of sorts - and that binder is JGB's obsessive exploration of time and it's boundaries and the transcendence of those boundaries. In each of the stories that theme can be seen as a strong element. Some of these hang a little in the air. Some are less Ballardian than the full blown works but still contain enough interest to get you through. However, there is a feeling that they are to an extent cobbled together and got out the door to get the next mortgage payments covered. Reading them made me wonder the quantity of psychedlics that JGB commonly refers to he got through in his time and is it better to have used and write from experience or to have not-used and blag it.
The eponymous opener feels exactly like an LSD experience combined with the yearning that comes from grief - maybe it's to do with the death of his wife, Mary in 1964. 'Having a Wonderful Time' explores the idea of being on constant holiday. 'A Host of Furious Fantasies' jives the Cinderella myth with a sharp twist of the blade at the end. Zodiac 2000 is a truly Ballardian short story with many of his archetypal themes. News From The Sun is the longest of the pieces collected here and is almost novella sized - probably the best thought out and followed of these short stories. Like the previous short this is very Ballardian, riffing through time and conscious / unconscious junctures represented by the increasing fugue-time experienced by the protagonists. Theatre of War seems a little dated but posits a new English (no.... sorry.... UK) Civil War as a European Vietnam as seen by a 'World in Action' camera and reporter team - for me, it doesn't work, hackneyed almost and certainly dated. Western culture has come to know far more about media, publicity and coups and insurgencies and takeovers to see this as ringing true. So it sits a little too smugly in it's 60's romanticism. Dead Time is a prequel for Empire of the Sun and works alone as a shorty story. The last two stories are set in a claustrophobic future where meeting others is shunned and connection happens through technology. One might replace television and video used by JGB in these two pieces with the mobile phone and instantly update to the present.
All in all, a bit of a potboiler as any compendium is bound to be; not up there with his great stuff, sort of cannon fodder for the mass market. Still, in my humble opinion, ANY JGB is worth a look and there are pieces in each of the stories that have a grabbing effect and exercise one's intellect beyond the page. There is a poetic tenor to any Ballard story like a face set in a rictus half between pleasure and pain. You know certain words will crop up and you know how he wants to play around with familiar themes but you can't predict exactly which ones will occur and in which order. He's like a Grand-master ERNIE, spinning the wheels and the dials to make an endless set of permutations for his readers all waiting for the premium bond win to drop through the door. Ballardians are all junkies. However, you know and recognise his themes when you see and hear them (JGB is a great visual thinker and writer. Whenever I read his work I see it unfolding on the inside of my dome like an IMAX cinema film). These stories are intrinsically Ballardian, their taste in the mouth, their shape oin the eye. It's just that some are more so than others.
Definetly worth a read. Reminded me of the Strugatskiy B. Strugatskiy A. brothers in Russia.
Authors like all of us have to make a crust. This edition of short stories was put out as a compendium of pieces written really for other publications. Compendium is the right word. Yes there is a binder of sorts - and that binder is JGB's obsessive exploration of time and it's boundaries and the transcendence of those boundaries. In each of the stories that theme can be seen as a strong element. Some of these hang a little in the air. Some are less Ballardian than the full blown works but still contain enough interest to get you through. However, there is a feeling that they are to an extent cobbled together and got out the door to get the next mortgage payments covered. Reading them made me wonder the quantity of psychedlics that JGB commonly refers to he got through in his time and is it better to have used and write from experience or to have not-used and blag it.
The eponymous opener feels exactly like an LSD experience combined with the yearning that comes from grief - maybe it's to do with the death of his wife, Mary in 1964. 'Having a Wonderful Time' explores the idea of being on constant holiday. 'A Host of Furious Fantasies' jives the Cinderella myth with a sharp twist of the blade at the end. Zodiac 2000 is a truly Ballardian short story with many of his archetypal themes. News From The Sun is the longest of the pieces collected here and is almost novella sized - probably the best thought out and followed of these short stories. Like the previous short this is very Ballardian, riffing through time and conscious / unconscious junctures represented by the increasing fugue-time experienced by the protagonists. Theatre of War seems a little dated but posits a new English (no.... sorry.... UK) Civil War as a European Vietnam as seen by a 'World in Action' camera and reporter team - for me, it doesn't work, hackneyed almost and certainly dated. Western culture has come to know far more about media, publicity and coups and insurgencies and takeovers to see this as ringing true. So it sits a little too smugly in it's 60's romanticism. Dead Time is a prequel for Empire of the Sun and works alone as a shorty story. The last two stories are set in a claustrophobic future where meeting others is shunned and connection happens through technology. One might replace television and video used by JGB in these two pieces with the mobile phone and instantly update to the present.
All in all, a bit of a potboiler as any compendium is bound to be; not up there with his great stuff, sort of cannon fodder for the mass market. Still, in my humble opinion, ANY JGB is worth a look and there are pieces in each of the stories that have a grabbing effect and exercise one's intellect beyond the page. There is a poetic tenor to any Ballard story like a face set in a rictus half between pleasure and pain. You know certain words will crop up and you know how he wants to play around with familiar themes but you can't predict exactly which ones will occur and in which order. He's like a Grand-master ERNIE, spinning the wheels and the dials to make an endless set of permutations for his readers all waiting for the premium bond win to drop through the door. Ballardians are all junkies. However, you know and recognise his themes when you see and hear them (JGB is a great visual thinker and writer. Whenever I read his work I see it unfolding on the inside of my dome like an IMAX cinema film). These stories are intrinsically Ballardian, their taste in the mouth, their shape oin the eye. It's just that some are more so than others.
Definetly worth a read. Reminded me of the Strugatskiy B. Strugatskiy A. brothers in Russia.
January 3, 2021
Conocí a este autor gracias a Alejandro Torres, amigo y librero de "Árbol de tinta", la que es a mi juicio la mejor librería de la ciudad. En ese entonces, Alejo me dijo: "Pana, este libro es una joya. Te va a encantar". Lo compré, al igual que otros del escritor chino, y me fui a casa. Pasaron tres años hasta que yo lo redescubriese entre una pila de libros por leer y decidiese llevármelo a Neiva.
Alejo no se equivocó: este libro es una barbaridad. De hecho, es el mejor libro que he leído de ciencia ficción con "El hombre en el castillo". Aquí, Ballard desprende su maestría para adentrarse en los conflictos del alma humana; en especial, aquellos que tienen que ver con la imposibilidad de comunicación en medio del desenfrenado desarrollo tecnológico; las nuevas enfermedades resultantes de eso que él da en llamar "piratería evolucionaria", esto es, el hecho de irrumpir en la naturaleza bajo fines meramente extractivos, atentando contra el orden de la misma; además de ese brutal testimonio ficcional inspirado en sus días en el campo de concentración chino a manos de los japoneses
A la base del pensamiento que inspira varios de estos relatos, Ballard concibe que uno de los grandes problemas del ser humano tiene que ver con su necesidad de irrumpir en el orden natural con la finalidad de modificarlo a su favor. El problema es que, bajo esta bandera cientificista, el humano pierde de vista qué es aquello que de verdad le es valioso y dignificante, perdiéndose entre la bruma de la máquina y sus vapores. Al final de estos relatos, siempre en el vértice de ese precipicio en el que subyace la vulnerabilidad como principal rasgo humano, Ballard destila su prosa para que la sangre y la carne tiña el yermo que hemos pisado. Que hemos maltratado con nuestra presencia.
Alejo no se equivocó: este libro es una barbaridad. De hecho, es el mejor libro que he leído de ciencia ficción con "El hombre en el castillo". Aquí, Ballard desprende su maestría para adentrarse en los conflictos del alma humana; en especial, aquellos que tienen que ver con la imposibilidad de comunicación en medio del desenfrenado desarrollo tecnológico; las nuevas enfermedades resultantes de eso que él da en llamar "piratería evolucionaria", esto es, el hecho de irrumpir en la naturaleza bajo fines meramente extractivos, atentando contra el orden de la misma; además de ese brutal testimonio ficcional inspirado en sus días en el campo de concentración chino a manos de los japoneses
A la base del pensamiento que inspira varios de estos relatos, Ballard concibe que uno de los grandes problemas del ser humano tiene que ver con su necesidad de irrumpir en el orden natural con la finalidad de modificarlo a su favor. El problema es que, bajo esta bandera cientificista, el humano pierde de vista qué es aquello que de verdad le es valioso y dignificante, perdiéndose entre la bruma de la máquina y sus vapores. Al final de estos relatos, siempre en el vértice de ese precipicio en el que subyace la vulnerabilidad como principal rasgo humano, Ballard destila su prosa para que la sangre y la carne tiña el yermo que hemos pisado. Que hemos maltratado con nuestra presencia.
August 1, 2016
J.G. Ballard es, en opinión de Susan Sontag, una de la voces más importantes de la ficción contemporánea. Al menos en Europa, donde se le ha comparado con genios de la talla de George Orwell. En Estados Unidos, en cambio, sus temáticas (la obsesión por el sexo y la violencia, la tecnología, la psicología, etc.) no han acabado de conectar con la opinión pública. Resulta paradójico, sobre todo si atendemos al hecho que son precisamente los Estados Unidos el escenario predilecto de sus fantasías de ficción.
La reseña completa en español en http://elbiblionauta.com/es/2016/08/0...
La ressenya completa en català a http://elbiblionauta.com/ca/2016/08/0...
La reseña completa en español en http://elbiblionauta.com/es/2016/08/0...
La ressenya completa en català a http://elbiblionauta.com/ca/2016/08/0...
April 17, 2020
Inventive, unsettling, and brilliant. Eerily relevant to our current coronavirus crisis, as recommended by Mark O'Connell in the New Statesman earlier this month.
Favourite stories:
- Having a Wonderful Time
- News from the Sun
- Theatre of War
- The Smile
Favourite stories:
- Having a Wonderful Time
- News from the Sun
- Theatre of War
- The Smile
April 18, 2020
This was my first foray into the oeuvre of J.G. Ballad, having discovered an extensive vintage set of his books on my dad's bookshelf. This particular set of short stories was published in the year of my birth! Myths Of The Near Future is a somewhat uneven collection that starts unpromisingly and gets steadily better as it goes on; I almost gave up midway through the first story as I found the writing quite old-fashioned, clunky and tortuous, but thankfully it really improved and flowed far better in other stories.
Ballard clearly has a core toybox of motifs that he returns to again and again: the nature of time, mental illness, flight and space travel, obsession, projection (in all senses of the word), the male ego and voyeurism all feature heavily, with most stories falling at the intersection of two or more of these themes. They are mostly told 3rd person but from the perspective of a (usually thoroughly unlikeable) male protagonist who is in the process of becoming detached from reality and slipping into an obsessive pattern of conspiratorial madness. Usually said protagonist has a stated goal of escaping from the conventional flow of time and/or the constraints of the earthly self. Quite often, this involves obsessive compulsive observation of the female form on film, with women's bodies reduced to a kind of abstract topography to be decoded by the protagonist. Here are a few lines which are fairly representative:
"The strange geometry presiding over the actress in her shower stall provided a key to that absolute abstraction of himself he had sought since his arrival at the solarium, the construction of a world formed entirely from the materials of his own consciousness."
The story which stayed with me the most was The Smile, in which a guy in London buys a lifelike mannequin of a woman as a kind of light-hearted curio, but becomes dangerously obsessed with it. The narrative's casual normalising of the encroaching patriarchal creepiness combined with incredibly dry humour brought to mind Browning's My Last Duchess or Nabokov's Lolita.
Generally the stories are deeply unsettling and I was mostly repulsed by the characters, though I'm sure that's entirely the point. If you like heroes you can root for and can't abide books where you see things from the bad guy's perspective, I don't think you'll enjoy this collection. I will give some of Ballard's more famous works a try next and see how they compare.
Ballard clearly has a core toybox of motifs that he returns to again and again: the nature of time, mental illness, flight and space travel, obsession, projection (in all senses of the word), the male ego and voyeurism all feature heavily, with most stories falling at the intersection of two or more of these themes. They are mostly told 3rd person but from the perspective of a (usually thoroughly unlikeable) male protagonist who is in the process of becoming detached from reality and slipping into an obsessive pattern of conspiratorial madness. Usually said protagonist has a stated goal of escaping from the conventional flow of time and/or the constraints of the earthly self. Quite often, this involves obsessive compulsive observation of the female form on film, with women's bodies reduced to a kind of abstract topography to be decoded by the protagonist. Here are a few lines which are fairly representative:
"The strange geometry presiding over the actress in her shower stall provided a key to that absolute abstraction of himself he had sought since his arrival at the solarium, the construction of a world formed entirely from the materials of his own consciousness."
The story which stayed with me the most was The Smile, in which a guy in London buys a lifelike mannequin of a woman as a kind of light-hearted curio, but becomes dangerously obsessed with it. The narrative's casual normalising of the encroaching patriarchal creepiness combined with incredibly dry humour brought to mind Browning's My Last Duchess or Nabokov's Lolita.
Generally the stories are deeply unsettling and I was mostly repulsed by the characters, though I'm sure that's entirely the point. If you like heroes you can root for and can't abide books where you see things from the bad guy's perspective, I don't think you'll enjoy this collection. I will give some of Ballard's more famous works a try next and see how they compare.
May 7, 2010
This collection of ten J G Ballard pieces date from the late 1970’s to early 1980’s. They are a mix of genres: classic science fiction, gothic, surreal. All of them are in beautiful English and most of them tease by letting the reader discover the situation behind the story rather than spelling it out; some of them are very funny; many obsess on sex; and most are dystopian. Families generally fare badly in Ballard’s stories, technology is always insidiously corruptive, and women are sly and faithless.
There are couple of pieces about space exploration affecting the human psyche and sense of time (Myths of the Near Future and News from the Sun), which sound less convincing now than perhaps they did forty years ago. Space exploration has lost its ability to thrill or frighten.
A couple of stories look at the effect of virtual environments on our ability to deal with reality (Motel Architecture and The Intensive Care Unit). They may have sounded more threatening when the internet was new. Now the idea that we will all go crazy from too much computer use sounds as comical as the idea that television would turn us into zombies or books make us stupid.
Two stories rework the old theme of Eve luring Adam to his doom (A Host of Furious Fancies and The Smile).
There are two political commentaries, neither very successful. Theatre of War moves the American occupation of Vietnam to Britain, and The Dead Time follows an English internee after the Japanese abandoned the camps at the end of WWII.
That leaves the best and worst pieces. Zodiac 2000 falls flat because it concerns out-dated technologies. Having a Wonderful Time is a very funny solution to the surplus workers for which capitalism has no use.
There are couple of pieces about space exploration affecting the human psyche and sense of time (Myths of the Near Future and News from the Sun), which sound less convincing now than perhaps they did forty years ago. Space exploration has lost its ability to thrill or frighten.
A couple of stories look at the effect of virtual environments on our ability to deal with reality (Motel Architecture and The Intensive Care Unit). They may have sounded more threatening when the internet was new. Now the idea that we will all go crazy from too much computer use sounds as comical as the idea that television would turn us into zombies or books make us stupid.
Two stories rework the old theme of Eve luring Adam to his doom (A Host of Furious Fancies and The Smile).
There are two political commentaries, neither very successful. Theatre of War moves the American occupation of Vietnam to Britain, and The Dead Time follows an English internee after the Japanese abandoned the camps at the end of WWII.
That leaves the best and worst pieces. Zodiac 2000 falls flat because it concerns out-dated technologies. Having a Wonderful Time is a very funny solution to the surplus workers for which capitalism has no use.
The spherical chamber where he seemed to have spent his entire life, asleep and awake, by now supplied all his needs, both physical and psychological. The chamber was at once a gymnasium and bedroom, library and workplace (nominally Pangborn was a television critic, virtually the only job, apart from that of the maintenance engineers, in a society where everything was done by machine.) -- Motel Architecture, J G Ballard (1978)
March 14, 2014
Contains the story "News From the Sun," one of my favorite, favorite Ballard stories...
January 14, 2025
Unbelievably prescient, original, bizarre and cutting. A master class in short story writing.
October 18, 2023
Excellent collection of some classic, mainly 70s, Ballard. It's all here: the drained swimming pools, the discarded sunglasses, the cameras and TV screens, the kind women and the femme fatales who don't realise it, the sharply skewed versions of reality, the sweaty obsessions, the American deserts, the Chinese paddy fields, the "Already..."'s, the counterpoints of sex and death.
And it's all, give or take the period paraphernalia, still so damned relevant. Ballard looked at things in ways nobody else ever could, associated and connected disparate ideas that nobody ever saw a link between before... and then explained WHY they were the same thing in such a calm, reasoned, yet insidious, manner that the reader has no choice but to accept it as truth, no matter how shocking or outlandish - because they know, deep down, that that it is what it is.
Stand-outs for me were: Myths of the Near Future (the Apollo astronauts infect humanity with their dreams, and now everybody thinks they've walked on the Moon); Having a Wonderful Time (enforced leisure time for the unemployable); News From the Sun (companion peace to Myths, in which Time stops and Past, Present, and Future merge); The Dead Time (transporting dead prisoners of war after Nagasaki through China's dream-scapes of paddy fields); The Smile (a man's jealousy for an exquisite example of human taxidermy); The Intensive Care Unit (what happens when one man decides to get his family together in the same room in a society where everything is done via camera and nobody ever physically meets).
And nothing of what's left -another four tales- is anything less than eminently enjoyable - not even Theatre of War (a kind of transposition of the Vietnam War to Britain), which I initially thought gimmicky and trite, but which -and typically of Ballard- turned out to be horribly on the nail.
One of Ballard's more accessible collections, and highly recommended.
And it's all, give or take the period paraphernalia, still so damned relevant. Ballard looked at things in ways nobody else ever could, associated and connected disparate ideas that nobody ever saw a link between before... and then explained WHY they were the same thing in such a calm, reasoned, yet insidious, manner that the reader has no choice but to accept it as truth, no matter how shocking or outlandish - because they know, deep down, that that it is what it is.
Stand-outs for me were: Myths of the Near Future (the Apollo astronauts infect humanity with their dreams, and now everybody thinks they've walked on the Moon); Having a Wonderful Time (enforced leisure time for the unemployable); News From the Sun (companion peace to Myths, in which Time stops and Past, Present, and Future merge); The Dead Time (transporting dead prisoners of war after Nagasaki through China's dream-scapes of paddy fields); The Smile (a man's jealousy for an exquisite example of human taxidermy); The Intensive Care Unit (what happens when one man decides to get his family together in the same room in a society where everything is done via camera and nobody ever physically meets).
And nothing of what's left -another four tales- is anything less than eminently enjoyable - not even Theatre of War (a kind of transposition of the Vietnam War to Britain), which I initially thought gimmicky and trite, but which -and typically of Ballard- turned out to be horribly on the nail.
One of Ballard's more accessible collections, and highly recommended.
January 29, 2024
Ballard is an acquired taste. There's something cold and clinical about his writing and a use of irony and wryness which leaves you never quite sure how far you should endorse/question/believe what's being said. At the same times however, he has H.G. Wells' gift for seeing where humanity is headed long before most of us realize it. The foreword to this collection, in which he looks at the ways in which the future changed from being something of promise to something of which we are in terror is a thought-provoking beginning to a fascinating collection of stories about people, technology, and war (among other things). The more Ballard I read, the funnier I find him, but he's always provocative and frequently disturbing (the story of the mannequin in this collection is a genuinely disquieting read). He's good to read alongside Christopher Priest and M. John Harrison, fellow contributors to Michael Moorcock's 'New Worlds' magazine during the 1960s, as the three writers have much in common. Priest messes with your mind. Harrison bewitches you with his elegance (and deflates you with his pessimistic realism). Ballard leaves you profoundly uncomfortable and anxious. I wonder what it was like to be in a taxi with this trio?
February 1, 2025
"The Intensive Care Unit:" Within the confines of THE INTENSIVE CARE UNIT, personal degredation takes ever decreasing precedence over the (dis)contiuing cohesion of previously existing and simultaneously disintegrating "family units."
"Motel Architecture:" In the confines of a vast hotel-like mosoleum type structure, a man who is vicariously at odds with himself and the self-made world he has created while monitoring his landscape outside his body through the use of high-tech surveilence video cameras, appears as a testament to both the extensions and obsessions of an ever-increasing voyeuristic world where society has become ever increasingly dependent on the all pervasive electronic devices individuals have aided and abetted themselves within the ever increasing superficial realities everyone continually creates. Such is the nightmarish vision a reader discovers in the confines of MOTEL ARCHITECTURE.
"Motel Architecture:" In the confines of a vast hotel-like mosoleum type structure, a man who is vicariously at odds with himself and the self-made world he has created while monitoring his landscape outside his body through the use of high-tech surveilence video cameras, appears as a testament to both the extensions and obsessions of an ever-increasing voyeuristic world where society has become ever increasingly dependent on the all pervasive electronic devices individuals have aided and abetted themselves within the ever increasing superficial realities everyone continually creates. Such is the nightmarish vision a reader discovers in the confines of MOTEL ARCHITECTURE.
March 30, 2022
Kurzgeschichten einmal quer durch Ballards Motive von Architektur, Sex, Verfall, Psychologie und Krieg. Die Stories sind schwankender Qualität, die ersten paar gefallen mir gar nicht (ich bin kein Freund seiner surrealen Ausflüge, die den Stories eher im Wege stehen), die letzten paar gefallen mir sehr gut und "Motelarchitektur" und "Familienglück" sind hochaktuell, erzählen von einer Zukunft der totalen Isolation bei gleichzeitiger Überwachung und elektronischer Kommunikation und deren Auswirkungen auf unsere Psyche, Stichworte Zoom-Meetings, Covid, Snapchat-Dysmorphie und Social Media.
October 29, 2025
I really enjoy how Ballard writes about compulsion. In different ways, every character in this collection is gripped by compulsive behaviours. Sometimes these are liberating, in others, they represent a capitulation. Like every compulsive, Ballard returns to the same themes and motifs over and over again, and this sometimes grates. By the third or fourth comparison between the anatomy of a woman and the geometry of a structure, I started rolling my eyes. Despite this, nobody does it like him. I really enjoyed this.
October 7, 2025
An interesting collection of short stories filled with liminal spaces, disconnection and human isolation. In some ways very familiar if you have read Ballard before. I particularly liked Having a Wonderful Time (what do you do with the surplus workforce no one needs?) and Theatre of War, which uses dialogue from the Vietnam War and shifts the American occupation to Britain.
Not everything lands, but I really liked this unsettling collection.
Not everything lands, but I really liked this unsettling collection.
January 10, 2026
"Myths of the Near Future" - 3*
"Having a Wonderful Time" - 2,5*
"A Host of Furious Fancies" - 3,5*
"Zodiac 2000" - 2*
"News from the Sun" - 3*
"Theatre of War" - 2,5*
"The Dead Time" - 3,5*
"The Smile" - 3,5*
"Motel Architecture" - 4*
"The Intensive Care Unit" - 4*
Strong finish!
"Having a Wonderful Time" - 2,5*
"A Host of Furious Fancies" - 3,5*
"Zodiac 2000" - 2*
"News from the Sun" - 3*
"Theatre of War" - 2,5*
"The Dead Time" - 3,5*
"The Smile" - 3,5*
"Motel Architecture" - 4*
"The Intensive Care Unit" - 4*
Strong finish!
August 2, 2021
While not terrible its also not Ballards strong suits. This book is FULL of way too many mentions about sex, masturbation and the human form. None of it is really all that compelling and most of the stories felt bland and incomplete. Definitely the worst of Ballards books that I’ve read. 2.5
June 14, 2024
3.5 ⭐️
I really liked some parts of the stories but there were others that (maybe just for me) felt ridiculous.
I really wasn't a fan of Zodiac2000 but Having a wonderful time was great, for example.
I can definitely see how there would be people who love and hate different stories in here though.
I really liked some parts of the stories but there were others that (maybe just for me) felt ridiculous.
I really wasn't a fan of Zodiac2000 but Having a wonderful time was great, for example.
I can definitely see how there would be people who love and hate different stories in here though.
September 27, 2025
Ballardian prophecies aplenty, imo the most interesting (although not the best story) being the last story, which with extreme accuracy predicts not only internet dating, but the dread of meeting someone in the flesh who has curated and perfected how they appear on the screen.
May 27, 2017
Think you know about time and time travel?
February 20, 2018
Ciencia ficción rara, cerebral y anticipada.
May 5, 2019
Son hikayelerde gözle görülür gelişme olsa da olayların dağınıklığı ve absürtlük derecesi pek çekmedi beni.
December 4, 2019
The cover was gorgeous. The book was OK.
January 5, 2020
J.G. Ballard never fails to intrigue and engage but this collection of short stories fell short of his greater works.
June 16, 2022
Some of these stories are beyond bleak, brilliant reading
August 3, 2022
Algunos cuentos son buenisimos, pero la mayoria son ligeramente incomprensibles y capaz demasiado experimentales. Pero valio la pena la lectura
October 16, 2022
Ballard's greatest short story collection. Full review: https://fakegeekboy.wordpress.com/202...
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