The Complete Short Stories

For the first time in one volume, the complete collected short stories by the author of Empire of the Sun and Super-Cannes – regarded by many as Britain’s No 1 living fiction writer.

With sixteen novels over four decades – from The Drowned World in 1962 to the controversial Crash in 1973, the award-winning, semi-autobiographical Empire of the Sun in 1984 and his recent Sunday Times bestseller Super-Cannes – J.G. Ballard is firmly established as one of Britain’s most highly regarded and most influential novelists.

Throughout his remarkable career, he has won equal praise for his ground-breaking short stories, which he first started writing during his days as a medical student at Cambridge. In fact, it was winning a short-story competition that gave him the impetus to become a full-time writer.

His first published works, ‘Prima Belladonna’ and ‘Escapement’, appeared in Science Fantasy and New Worlds in 1956. Ever since, he has been a prolific producer of stories, which have been published in numerous magazines and several separate collections, including The Voices of Time, The Terminal Beach, The Disaster Area, The Day of Forever, Vermilion Sands, Low-Flying Aircraft, The Venus Hunters, Myths of the Near Future, and War Fever.

Now, for the first time, all of J.G. Ballard’s published stories – including four that have not previously appeared in a collection – have been gathered together and arranged in the order of original publication, providing an unprecedented opportunity to review the career of one of Britain’s greatest writers.