FICTION
Released: April 1, 1991
"A notably uneven collection, ranging from mordant commentary and febrile near-brilliance to murky or trite experiments and subterfuges."
FICTION
Released: Dec. 30, 1988
"Worthwhile, certainly, but more variety would have served this fine writer more justly."
Eight stories, 1962-85, exploring what Ballard views as a grandiose and mesmerizing yet ill-judged and ultimately doomed enterprise: the manned exploration of space.
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FICTION
Released: April 1, 1988
"Still, if rather murky in overall thrust, chapter by chapter this is rich, strange work from a distinctive storyteller: elegantly phrased, vividly imagined, and rescued from portentousness by a deeply ironic tilt."
With unabashed echoes of all the great "river novels," from Huckleberry Finn to Heart of Darkness to The African Queen, Ballard (The Crystal World, Crash, Empire of the Sun) offers here a poetic, stately, oddly half-involving tale—part escape/chase adventure, part symbolic soul-journey.
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FICTION
Released: Nov. 1, 1979
"An audacious book, then, adhering to its chosen purposes with magisterial economy — but strangely dissatisfying and ungrounded."
Ballard has rapidly moved from his early "science fiction" into a label-defying realm where repeated enactments of sex and death appallingly calibrate the dial-faces of our instrument-centered awareness.
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FICTION
Released: Nov. 1, 1974
"Ballard handles this kind of reductive moral fable with incomparable finesse, investing the narrative with savage horror that eats away at banal appearance and reveals the skeleton beneath the skin."
Ballard's newest nightmare fantasy of contemporary society finds hero Robert Maitland marooned on a seemingly deserted traffic island just outside London watching the unconcerned motorists stream by.
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