The Best Short Stories of J. G. Ballard
J. G. Ballard
In a rare moment of genuine authorial candor and insight J. G. Ballard declared that all of his fiction was about isolation and coping with isolation. This is something most writers have to learn to deal with, and writers in our own time perhaps more than ever. And so while Ballard’s dystopic worlds aren’t our own, its anxieties and coping mechanisms (therapy and technology as (auto)eroticism) most definitely are. His later experiments in postmodern collage were, I think, failures, but in general his short fiction has held up as well or better than his novels. This is an old selection (first published in 1978), but it shows that as a prophet (which is not a necessary or even advisable role for an SF writer) Ballard still holds his ground.
goodreports.net 