The Best Science Fiction of J. G. Ballard

An excellent collection of 17 stories by the Shepperton sage running from his early purely S.F. output to the stories that would mutate into the clinical, psychologically intense novels like "Crash" and "The Atrocity Exhibition" of the 1970s. The best story here is "The Voices of Time" which I've re-read several times this week; the weakest is the "The Sound Sweep" which inelegantly mixes S.F. elements with magic realism. This collection is interesting as it throws some light on the way Ballard moved away from stories he didn't particularly like writing in the S.F. magazines to the New Worlds experimental, inner space fiction represented by "The Terminal Beach", the penultimate story here. Themes change too as Ballard moves away from stories about time and space towards more psychologically geared stories such as "The Insane Ones", though the mind was of interest in the early days, as in the unfortunately titled "Manhole 69." Apart from "Voices" I also liked "The Overloaded Man" - an example of the Ballardian middle-class rebel- who effaces his wife, his belongings, and ultimately himself from the universe. And right in the middle of this volume can be found a beautiful example of magic realism, "The Garden of Time" which was fulsomely praised by Anthony Burgess. It wouldn't look out of place in a Borges collection.