Ballard's writing is always a little off, but incredibly inventive and generally quite enjoyable. You aren't going to get deep characterizations here; just detached, almost clinical descriptions of impenetrable men going about their cryptic business in unreal situations.

The collection is long in the reading, but having now reached the final, almost twelve-hundredth page, I'm going to miss not having this to turn to when other reading sours the palate. ( )

How can you not rate this five stars? It contains every story by a master storyteller. Many of the pieces are working outs of themes that receive fuller elaboration in his novels and many of the stories seem to cover the same ground in slightly different ways. Ballard reuses themes, names, and even settings. His obsession with time and the escape from it is what struck me most. It infuses his stories from even the earliest ones and receives it's fullest treatment in the later stories.

Ballard's short story writing slowed down considerably after 1980 and there are very few after 1985. Ballard's world view is mostly dim so these are better taken in smaller doses. The book is massive and long and the pages are large so it isn't easy to read in bed for instance. ( )

There were some good stories here. Now: Zero made me think of Death Note, to the degree that someone should probably be paying Ballard royalties. Ballard's prose is awesome, crunchy, full, verbose. Many of Ballard's characters seem to be introspectively naval-gazing, astrally projecting, time-traveling going mad. The thinly veiled Poe and Conrad fan fiction was well received. More of his stuff should be made into movies in an updated format. ( )

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Title: The Complete Stories of J.G. Ballard
Series: ----------
Author: Jerry Ballard
Rating: 2 of 5 Stars
Genre: SF
Pages: 1199/DNF@55%
Format: Digital Edition

Synopsis:

A massive collection of short stories by the author Jerry Ballard. Mainly from the 60's and 70's, Ballard's stories one and all revolved around broken characters; broken mentally, broken physically, broken emotionally, broken psychologically, broken in any way you can imagine. The world is dystopian, hope has been removed and the inexorable pessimistic fate for humanity cannot be thwarted.

My Thoughts:

Ballard was a qualified writer, ie, he knew his craft and did it well. However, his style and subject matter destroyed any positives for me in that aspect. In the over 600 pages I read I would have expected SOME variety in the stories but nope, uniform brokenness was what Ballard thought and what he wrote. By the time I'd decided to DNF this, I wasn't even depressed, I was simply bored. I imagine I felt like what an art connoisseur would have felt like if Edvard Munch had only painted Scream style paintings.

At the 25% mark I was raging inside. The brokenness of the characters really had gotten to me and I was sick that Ballard could write such people over and over and over. Every man was a coward in one way or another, every woman a harpy or drone. Then like I said earlier, I just got bored. You can only read the same type of character and story so many times before it stops having an impact.

Originally, this book was published in 2 separate volumes and honestly, I think that was the correct choice. This 1 volume was just too big. Maybe if you wanted to slowly read a story here and there every day or week and you could set this down whenever you wanted, you'd not get bored. I still would have gotten bored though and there was no way I was going to spend a prolonged time period with this author's outlook. One week of reading it every day, approximately 100 pages a day (anywhere from 4-10 stories), was enough.

Ballard also hasn't aged well. The wonders of psychology would solve all the problems, but of course with Ballard that was misused so it would create all the problems. In one story psychologists had been outlawed by a right-wing world order and the main character had gone to jail for trying to help someone in an underground psychology session. I don't see Ballard becoming an enduring author. To the dustbins of history with him I say!

Finally, I couldn't help but compare this massive collection to the volumes of short stories by Asimov that I read back in '16. That was also a 2 volume collection, Volume One and Volume Two and together they about equaled the same number of pages as this. Their tone however, was much more positive and upbeat, which allowed the more negative stories in that collection to be more of a savory contrast, like sweet and sour chicken. Ballard was just sour chicken. That is only yummy if you're a sick, sick individual.

★★☆☆☆ ( )

This is a huge collection of short stories; clocking in at over 1,100 pages. Most of them were written in the 1960's & 70's; and unfortunately it shows; there is a dated feel to many of them, fascinating as some of the dystopian visions are.
High points included rediscovering Chronopolis, a story read years ago about a world where clocks do not exist (I use world advisedly - many of the stories take place in city-worlds, abandoned city-worlds, liminal zones); also the Vermillion Beach stories.

I've not really got into the habit of picking a book up and putting it down without having read the whole of it; and this is certainly too big and too concentrated a collection to read that way. Interesting, good in parts, in others a little same-y. ( )