The Complete Stories of J.G. Ballard, in One Volume

At 1196 pages, The Complete Stories of J.G. Ballard has to be the longest short story collection I have ever read. It contains 94 stories, and comes at a time of renewed interest in the short story. I am going to review this book for the Sacramento or San Francisco Book Review, but for now, here are some details from W.W. Norton & Company, the publisher.

Ballard passed away in April after a long battle with cancer, so this book comes as a perfect way to commemorate his fiction career. The stories span from 1956 to around 1996. Admired by authors like kingsley Amis, Martin Amis, Graham Greene, Anthony Burgess, Susan Sontag, Ballard is credited with having invented cyberpunk and his novels and short fiction have influenced speculative fiction, but there is a literary quality to his "earnest, thoughtful, and elegant" (Norton) use of the genre.

He was obsessed with human life in the face of rapid change, the concept of the near future reigning in all his works, which tend to be apocalyptic, but his gaze was on man-made brutalities like war and other forces like fame, technology, and power.
His works are dystopian, yet are quite anchored in this concrete world of ours.

Born in Shangha in 1930, Ballard was imprisoned in an internment camp in 1943 after Japan invaded China in 1937. He was later to base his famous novel, Empire of the Sun, on his experiences. He died in England in April 2009, and his compendium of short fiction was published on September 21. I received the book last week, together with Orhan Pamuk's Museum of Innocence.

My browsing of Ballard's book shows me I will enjoy some of the innovations in his writing, and I may finally develop an interest in speculative fiction. The book was contains an introduction by Martin Amis, which is a concise study of Ballard's short fiction career. In his 2001 introduction, Ballard said these things about the short story:

1. They are the loose change in the treasury of fiction, easily ignored in preference for the "wealth of novels available"

2. Handled by a master ( he mentions Borges, Ray Bradbury, and Edgar Allan Poe), "the short story is coined from precious metal, a glint of gold that will glow for ever in the deep purse of your imagination."

3. Short stories have a "snapshort quality, their ability to focus on a single subject".