Search Worlds Without End

Sixteen of the author's own favorite science fiction stories.

Table of Contents:

• The Voices of Time - (1960)
• The Drowned Giant - (1964)
• The Terminal Beach - (1964)
• Manhole 69 - (1957)
• Storm-Bird, Storm-Dreamer - (1966)
• The Sound-Sweep - (1960)
• Billenium - (1961)
• Chronopolis - (1960)
• Build-Up - (1957)
• The Garden of Time - (1962)
• End Game - (1964)
• The Watch-Towers - (1962)
• Now Wakes the Sea - (1963)
• Zone of Terror - (1960)
• The Cage of Sand - (1962)
• Deep End - (1961)

On a day in April, just after three o'clock in the afternoon, Robert Maitland's car crashes over the concrete parapet of a high-speed highway onto the island below, where he is injured and, finally, trapped. What begins as an almost ludicrous predicament soon turns into horror as Maitland—a wickedly modern Robinson Crusoe—realizes that, despite evidence of other inhabitants, this doomed terrain has become a mirror of his own mind. Seeking the dark outer rim of the everyday, Ballard weaves private catastrophe into an intensely specular allegory.

The definitive cult, post-modern novel -- a shocking blend of violence, transgression and eroticism.

When our narrator smashes his car into another and watches a man die in front of him, his sense of sexual possibilities in the world around him becomes detached. As he begins an affair with the dead man's wife, he finds himself drawn with increasing intensity to the mangled impacts of car crashes.

Then he encounters Robert Vaughan, a former TV scientist turned nightmare angel of the expressway, who has gathered around him a collection of alienated crash victims and experiments with a series of erotic atrocities, each more sinister than the last. But Vaughan craves the ultimate crash - a head-on collision of blood, semen, engine coolant and iconic celebrity.

First published in 1973 'Crash' remains one of the most shocking novels of the second half of the twentieth century and was made into an equally controversial film by David Cronenburg.

The classic, award-winning novel, made famous by Steven Spielberg's film, tells of a young boy's struggle to survive World War II in China.

Jim is separated from his parents in a world at war. To survive, he must find a strength greater than all the events that surround him.

Shanghai, 1941 -- a city aflame from the fateful torch of Pearl Harbor. In streets full of chaos and corpses, a young British boy searches in vain for his parents. Imprisoned in a Japanese concentration camp, he is witness to the fierce white flash of Nagasaki, as the bomb bellows the end of the war...and the dawn of a blighted world.

Ballard's enduring novel of war and deprivation, internment camps and death marches, and starvation and survival is an honest coming-of-age tale set in a world thrown utterly out of joint.

A startling and at times unsettlingly prescient collection of J. G. Ballard's greatest interviews.

J.G. Ballard was a literary giant. Best known for his controversial bestseller 'Crash' and the memoir 'Empire of the Sun', he was a writer of unique talent – always surprising, frequently prescient.

Such acuity was not exclusive to his novels and, as this book reminds us, Ballard's restive intelligence sharpened itself in dialogue. He entertained many with insights into the world as he saw it, and speculated, often correctly, about its future. Some of these observations earned Ballard an oracular reputation, and continue to yield an uncannily accurate commentary today.

'Extreme Metaphors' collects the finest interviews of his career. Conversations with Will Self, Jon Savage, Iain Sinclair and John Gray, and collaborators like David Cronenberg, are a reminder of his wit and humanity, testament to Ballard's profound worldliness as much as his otherworldly imagination. This collection is an indispensable tribute to one of recent history's most original thinkers.

Edited by Simon Sellars and Dan O'Hara

Within the concealing walls of an elegant forty-storey tower block, the affluent tenants are hell-bent on an orgy of destruction. Cocktail parties degenerate into marauding attacks on 'enemy' floors and the once-luxurious amenities become an arena for technological mayhem!In this classic visionary tale, human society slips into violent reverse as the inhabitants of the high-rise, driven by primal urges, recreate a world ruled by the laws of the jungle.

A violent novel filled with insidious twists, Kingdom Come follows the exploits of Richard Pearson, a rebellious, unemployed advertising executive, whose father is gunned down by a deranged mental patient in a vast shopping mall outside Heathrow Airport. When the prime suspect is released without charge, Richard's suspicions are aroused. Investigating the mystery, Richard uncovers at the Metro-Centre mall a neo-fascist world whose charismatic spokesperson is whipping up the masses into a state of unsustainable frenzy. Riots frequently terrorize the complex, immigrant communities are attacked by hooligans, and sports events mushroom into jingoistic political rallies.

In this gripping, dystopian tour de force, J.G. Ballard holds up a mirror to suburban mind rot, revealing the darker forces at work beneath the gloss of consumerism and flag-waving patriotism.

Table of Contents:

• The Ultimate City
• Low-Flying Aircraft - (1975)
• The Dead Astronaut - (1968)
• My Dream of Flying to Wake Island - (1974)
• The Life and Death of God - (1976)
• The Greatest Television Show on Earth - (1972)
• A Place and a Time to Die - (1969)
• The Comsat Angels - (1968)
• The Beach Murders - (1966)

This collection brings together Ballard's ''Cape Canaveral stories,'' eight in all, written between 1962 and 1985, and set in a future when the space program has ceased and civilization itself seems on the wane. Images of waste, abandonment, emptiness and desolation recur toppling towers, dead astronauts circling the Earth endlessly, deserts, empty swimming pools. In ''News from the Sun,'' life itself is slowly draining away as people are increasingly subject to long fugue states, recalling Eliot's line, ''Not with a bang but a whimper.'' In the title story, the protagonist alternately wanders a deserted Canaveral and tends his dying wife. Ballard writes a clear, flawless prose, rich in deft phrase and vivid imagery. This book is not for the ray-gun and bug-eyed monster crowd.

Table of Contents:

• The Cage of Sand - (1962) - novelette
• A Question of Re-Entry - (1963) - novelette
• The Dead Astronaut - (1968) - short story
• My Dream of Flying to Wake Island - (1974) - short story
• News from the Sun - (1981) - novelette
• Memories of the Space Age - (1982) - novelette
• Myths of the Near Future - (1982) - novelette
• The Man Who Walked on the Moon - (1985) - short story

Violent rebellion comes to London's middle classes in the extraordinary new novel from the author of Cocaine Nights and Super-Cannes. When a bomb goes off at Heathrow it looks like just another random act of violence to psychologist David Markham. But then he discovers that his ex-wife Laura is among the victims. Acting on police suspicions, he starts to investigate London's fringe protest movements, falling in with a shadowy group based in the comfortable Thameside estate of Chelsea Marina. Led by a charismatic doctor, the group aims to rouse the docile middle classes to anger and violence, to free them from both the self-imposed burdens of civic responsibility and the trappings of a consumer society -- private schools, foreign nannies, health insurance and overpriced housing. Markham, seeking the truth behind Laura's death, is swept up in a campaign that spirals rapidly out of control. Every certainty in his life is questioned as the cornerstones of middle England become targets and growing panic grips the capital!

Table of Contents:

• Myths of the Near Future - (1982) - novelette
• Having a Wonderful Time - (1978) - short story
• A Host of Furious Fancies - (1980) - short story
• Zodiac 2000 - (1978) - short story
• News from the Sun - (1981) - novelette
• Theatre of War - (1977) - novelette
• The Dead Time - (1977) - novelette
• The Smile - (1976) - short story
• Motel Architecture - (1978) - short story
• The Intensive Care Unit - (1977) - short story

BSFA and Nebula Award nominated novelette. It originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, October 1982. It can also be found in the collections Myths of the Near Future (1982), Memories of the Space Age (1998) and The Complete Short Stories of J. G. Ballard (2001).

Table of Contents:

• The Man on the 99th Floor - (1962)
• Thirteen to Centaurus - (1962)
• Track 12 - (1958)
• The Watch-Towers - (1962)
• A Question of Re-Entry - (1963)
• Escapement - (1956)
• The Thousand Dreams of Stellavista - (1962)
• The Cage of Sand - (1962)
• Passport to Eternity - (1962)

Eden-Olympia is more than just a multinational business park, it is a virtual city-state in itself, with the latest in services and facilities for the most elite high-tech industries. Isolated and secure, overlooking the luxurious French Riviera, the residents lack nothing. Yet one day Dr. Greenwood from Eden-Olympia's clinic goes on a suicidal shooting spree. Dr. Jane Sinclair is hired as his replacement, and she and her husband, Paul, are given Dr. Greenwood's house as a residence.

Unable to work while recovering from an accident, Paul spends his days taking a close look at the house where Dr. Greenwood shot himself and three hostages. He discovers clues in the house lead him to question Eden-Olympia's official account of the killings. Drawn into investigating the activities of the park's leading citizens, while Jane is lured deeper into Eden-Olympia's inner workings, Paul uncovers the dangerous psychological vents that maintain Eden-Olympia's smoothly running surface. An experiment is underway at Eden-Olympia, an experiment in power and brutality. Soon Paul finds himself in race to save himself and his wife before they are crushed by forces that may be beyond anyone's control.

The irrational, all-pervading violence of the modern world is the subject of this extraordinary tour de force.

The central character's dreams are haunted by images of John F. Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe, dead astronauts and car-crash victims as he traverses the screaming wastes of nervous breakdown. Seeking his sanity, he casts himself in a number of roles: H-bomber pilot, presidential assassin, crash victim, psychopath. Finally, through the black, perverse magic of violence he transcends his psychic turmoil to find the key to a bizarre new sexuality.

Table of Contents:

• You and Me and the Continuum - (1966)
• Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan - (1968)
• You: Coma: Marilyn Monroe - (1966)
• The Assassination Weapon - (1966)
• The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race - (1966)
• The Atrocity Exhibition - (1966)
• Plan for the Assassination of Jacqueline Kennedy - (1966)
• Crash! - (1969)
• Love and Napalm: Export U.S.A. - (1968)
• Tolerances of the Human Face - (1969)
• The Summer Cannibals - (1969)
• The Great American Nude - (1968)
• The University of Death - (1968)
• Notes Towards a Mental Breakdown - (1967)
• The Generations of America - (1968)

Contents:

• 7 - Introduction (The Best of J. G. Ballard) - essay
• 9 - The Concentration City - (1957) - short story (variant of Build-Up)
• 30 - Manhole 69 - (1957) - short story
• 54 - The Waiting Grounds - (1959) - novelette
• 86 - The Sound-Sweep - (1960) - novelette
• 128 - Chronopolis - (1960) - novelette
• 155 - The Voices of Time - (1960) - novelette
• 191 - The Overloaded Man - (1961) - short story
• 206 - Billennium - (1961) - short story
• 223 - The Insane Ones - (1962) - short story
• 235 - The Garden of Time - (1962) - short story
• 244 - Thirteen to Centaurus - (1962) - novelette
• 269 - The Subliminal Man - (1963) - short story
• 288 - Passport to Eternity - (1962) - short story
• 310 - The Cage of Sand - (1962) - novelette
• 336 - A Question of Re-Entry - (1963) - novelette
• 370 - The Terminal Beach - (1964) - novelette
• 393 - The Day of Forever - (1966) - short story

First published in 1978, this collection of nineteen of Ballard's best short stories is as timely and informed as ever. His tales of the human psyche and its relationship to nature and technology, as viewed through a strong microscope, were eerily prescient and now provide greater perspective on our computer-dominated culture. Ballard's voice and vision have long served as a font of inspiration for today's cyber-punks, the authors and futurist who brought the information age into the mainstream.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction - (1978) - essay by Anthony Burgess
• The Voices of Time - (1960)
• The Terminal Beach - (1964)
• Chronopolis - (1960)
• The Drowned Giant - (1964)
• The Cage of Sand - (1962)
• The Concentration City - (1957)
• Manhole 69 - (1957)
• Deep End - (1961)
• The Garden of Time - (1962)
• The Subliminal Man - (1963)
• Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan - (1968)
• The Cloud-Sculptors of Coral D - (1967)
• The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race - (1966)
• The Atrocity Exhibition - (1966)
• End-Game - (1963)
• The Overloaded Man - (1961)
• Plan for the Assassination of Jacqueline Kennedy - (1966)
• Thirteen to Centaurus - (1962)
• Billennium - (1961)

A collection of 98 enthralling and pulse-quickening stories, spanning five decades, venerates the remarkable imagination of J. G. Ballard.

With a body of work unparalleled in twentieth-century literature, J. G. Ballard is recognized as one of the greatest and most prophetic writers in the world. With the much-hailed release of The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard, readers now have a means to celebrate the unmatched range and mesmerizing cadences of a literary genius. Whether writing about musical orchids, human cannibalism, or the secret history of World War III, Ballard's Complete Stories evokes the hallucinations of Kafka and Borges in its ability to render modern paranoia and fantastical creations on the page. A Washington Post Best Book of 2009, Boston Globe Best Book, Los Angeles TimesFavorite Book, and San Francisco Chronicle Best Book.

On the arid, war-plagued terrain of central Africa, a manic doctor is consumed with visions of transforming the Sahara into a land of abundance. But Dr. Mallory's obsession quickly spirals dangerously out of control.

Nebula Award nominated short story. It orginally appeared in the collection The Terminal Beach (1964). In the US is was first published in Playboy, May 1965, under the title Souvenir. It can also be found in the anthologies Nebula Award Stories 1965 (1966), edited by Damon Knight, 11th Annual Edition: The Year's Best S-F (1966), edited by Judith Merril, Masterpieces of Fantasy and Wonder (1989), edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer, The Road to Science Fiction 5: The British Way (1998), edited by James Gunn Kafkaesque: Stories Inspired by Franz Kafka (2011), edtied by James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel. It is also included in the collections The Impossible Man and Other Stories (1966), Chronopolis and Other Stories (1971), The Best Short Stories of J. G. Ballard (1978) and The Complete Short Stories of J. G. Ballard (2001).

Contains:

• The Voices of Time
• Chronopolis
• The Cage of Sand
• Prima Belladona
• Studio 5, The Stars
• The Garden of Time
• The Sound-Sweep
• The Watch-Towers

Contains:

• Now Zero
• The Time-tombs
• Thirteen to Centaurus
• Track 12
• Passport to Eternity
• Escapement
• Time of Passage
• The Venus Hunters
• The Coming of the Unconscious
• The Overloaded Man

Contains:

• The Terminal Beach
• The Volcano Dances
• The Drowned Giant
• Deep End
• A Question of Re-entry
• The Delta at Sunset
• End-game
• The Gioconda of the Twilight Noon
• The Illuminated Man
• The Lost Leonardo
• The Reptile Enclosure
• Bilennium

One of the Burgess 99 Best Novels in English Since 1939. A young man who has never flown a plane steals a small aircraft from London Airport and crash lands it in the thames at the suburban community of Shepperton. He is taken in by the towns people as an apocalyptic figure fascination, and in the few days following his recovery he begins to assume certain supernatural powers that transform both the town and its inhabitants. Tropical flora and fauna appear;daily routine is disrupted by wild pan-sexual celebrations; and in their final climax of liberation, the towns people are taught to fly.

A war-ravaged Beirut is the setting for the title story of this visionary collection, a tale in which a young street fighter inadvertently discovers how to bring an to the bloodshed only to find that his solution is all too effective as far as some supposedly neutral observers are concerned. Other stories feature an assassination plot against an American astronaut, the leader of an authoritarian religious movement; a man who is destroyed by a car crash and resolves never to leave his apartment again; and the survivor of a toxic-waste ship wrecked on a deserted Caribbean island.

Table of Contents:

• War Fever - (1989) - novelette
• The Secret History of World War 3 - (1988) - short story
• Dream Cargoes - (1990) - short story
• The Object of the Attack - (1984) - short story
• Love in a Colder Climate - (1989) - short story
• The Largest Theme Park in the World - (1989) - short story
• Answers to a Questionnaire - (1985) - short story
• The Air Disaster - (1975) - short story
• Report on an Unidentified Space Station - (1982) - short story
• The Man Who Walked on the Moon - (1985) - short story
• The Enormous Space - (1989) - short story
• Memories of the Space Age - (1982) - novelette
• Notes Towards a Mental Breakdown - (1976) - short story
• The Index - (1977) - short story

Table of Contents:

• Prima Belladonna - (1956)
• The Thousand Dreams of Stellavista - (1962)
• Cry Hope, Cry Fury! - (1967)
• Venus Smiles - (1957)
• Studio 5, The Stars - (1961)
• The Cloud-Sculptors of Coral D - (1967)
• Say Goodbye to the Wind - (1970)
• The Screen Game - (1963)

A terrifying vision of the future from one of our most renowned writers - J G Ballard, author of 'Empire of the Sun' and 'Crash'.

Following the energy crisis of the late twentieth-century America has been abandoned. Now, a century later, a small group of European explorers returns to the deserted continent. But America is unrecognisable - the Bering Strait has been dammed and the whole continent has become a desert, populated by isolated natives and the bizarre remnants of a disintegrated culture. The expedition sets off from Manhattan on a cross-continent journey, through Holiday Inns and abandoned theme parks. They will uncover a shocking new power in the heart of Las Vegas in this unique vision of our world transformed.

There is a worldwide wind, constantly westward and strongest at the equator. The wind is gradually increasing, so that at the beginning of the story, the force of the wind is making air travel impossible; later, people are living in tunnels and basements, unable to go above ground; near the end, "The air stream carried with it enormous quantities of water vapour - in some cases the contents of entire seas, such as the Caspian and the Great Lakes, which had been drained dry, their beds plainly visible."

In the 21st century, fluctuations in solar radiation have caused the ide-caps to melt and the seas to rise. Global temperatures have climbed, and civilization has retreated to the Arctic and Antarctic circles. London is a city now inundated by a primeval swamp, to which an expedition travels to record the flora and fauna of this new Triassic Age.

This early novel by the author of CRASH and EMPIRE OF THE SUN is at once a fast paced narrative, a stunning evocation of a flooded, tropical London of the near future and a speculative foray into the workings of the unconscious mind.

Weird and mesmerizingly grotesque, The Drought tells the chilling story of the world on the brink of extinction, where a global drought, brought on by industrial waste, has left mankind in a life-or-death search for water. Violence erupts and insanity reigns as the human race struggles for survival in a worldwide desert of despair.

J. G. Ballard's fourth novel, which established his reputation as a writer of extraordinary talent and imaginative powers, tells the story of a physician specializing in the treatment of leprosy who is invited to a small outpost in the interior of Africa. Finding the roadways blocked, he takes to the river, and embarks on a frightening journey through a strange petrified forest whose area expands daily, affecting not only the physical environment but also its inhabitants.