4 ms·
That collection has a bunch of great stories. Some I particularly like: * "Report on an Unidentified Space Station" — shades of Lem, Borges, and Harlan Ellison
by atombender 3y ago
That collection has a bunch of great stories. Some I particularly like:
* "Report on an Unidentified Space Station" — shades of Lem, Borges, and Harlan Ellison as a crew explores an apparently infinite construct.
* "A Question of Re-Entry" — post-colonialism á la Heart of Darkness by way of science fiction allegory; a beautiful companion to his apocalypse series (of which the best is The Crystal World; there's another story here, "The Illuminated Man", that Ballard used as the basis for that book).
* "The Drowned Giant" — an odd fable about giant found washed up on a beach and how a cottage industry of scavenging grows around it. (There's a decent animated version of this story in Netflix's "Love, Death & Robots.")
* "Dream Cargoes" — I guess I like Ballard the most when he's off in some tropical environment where nature is doing weird things, and this is one of them, and also because it's implied to be set on Vieques, an island that I love very much.
There are a few duds, but what's interesting is the wide span of Ballard's focus. He doesn't do one type of story, but many. (Unfortunately his later career could have done with more of this type of imaginative variance; he spent his last couple of decades writing at least three (four, if you count Running Wild) about rich gated communities hiding dark psychological secrets, and they were not very good.)