The Complete Short Stories: Volume 2
The second in a two volume collection of acclaimed short stories by the author of Empire of the Sun, Crash, Cocaine Nights and Super-Cannes.JG Ballard is firmly established as one of Britain’s most highly regarded and influential novelists. However, during his long career he was also a prolific writer of short stories, many of which show the germination of ideas he used in his longer fiction.This, the second book in a two-volume collection, offers a platform from which to view Ballard’s other works. Almost all of his novels had their seeds in short stories and this collection provides an extraordinary opportunity to trace the development of one of Britain’s most visionary writers.
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Fourth Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
77–85 Fulham Palace Road
London W6 8JB
This edition published by Fourth Estate in 2014
First published in Great Britain by Flamingo in 2001
This collection copyright © J. G. Ballard 2001
Most of the stories in this book previously appeared in the following collections:
The Terminal Beach © J. G. Ballard 1964; The Disaster Area © J. G. Ballard 1967; The Day of Forever © J. G. Ballard 1967; The Atrocity Exhibition © J. G. Ballard 1969; Vermilion Sands © J. G. Ballard 1971; Low-Flying Aircraft © J. G. Ballard 1976; The Venus Hunters © J. G. Ballard 1980; Myths of the Near Future © J. G. Ballard 1982; War Fever © J. G. Ballard 1990
The following stories have not previously appeared in a collection of J. G. Ballard’s stories:
‘The Recognition’ © J. G. Ballard 1967; ‘A Guide to Virtual Death’ © J. G. Ballard 1992; ‘The Message from Mars’ © J. G. Ballard 1992; ‘Report from an Obscure Planet’ © J. G. Ballard 1992
The right of J. G. Ballard to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988.
Introduction © Adam Thirlwell 2014
Interview © Travis Elborough 2004
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Cover by Stanley Donwood
Ebook Edition © APRIL 2014 ISBN: 9780007513611
Version: 2014-08-28
Contents
Introduction by Adam Thirlwell
The Gioconda of the Twilight Noon
The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race
The Cloud-Sculptors of Coral D
Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan
The Greatest Television Show on Earth
My Dream of Flying to Wake Island
Notes Towards a Mental Breakdown
Report on an Unidentified Space Station
The Man Who Walked on the Moon
The Secret History of World War 3
Short stories are the loose change in the treasury of fiction, easily ignored beside the wealth of novels available, an over-valued currency that often turns out to be counterfeit. At its best, in 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.
Short stories have always been important to me. I like their snapshot quality, their ability to focus intensely on a single subject. They’re also a useful way of trying out the ideas later developed at novel length. Almost all my novels were first hinted at in short stories, and readers of The Crystal World, Crash and Empire of the Sun will find their seeds germinating somewhere in this collection.
When I started writing, fifty years ago, short stories were immensely popular with readers, and some newspapers printed a new short story every day. Sadly, I think that people at present have lost the knack of reading short stories, a response perhaps to the baggy and long-winded narratives of television serials. Young writers, myself included, have always seen their first novels as a kind of virility test, but so many novels published today would have been better if they had been recast as short stories. Curiously, there are many perfect short stories, but no perfect novels.
The short story still survives, especially in science fiction, which makes the most of its closeness to the folk tale and the parable. Many of the stories in this collection were first published in science fiction magazines, though readers at the time loudly complained that they weren’t science fiction at all.
