My favourite short story of Ballard's is "Report on an Unidentified Space Station" (1982) [1]. It manages to be superb sci-fi while also showing several of Ballard's favourite topics — in particular, architecture and religion.

Another favourite is "A Question of Re-Entry" (1963), set in the Amazonian rainforest, and a kind of postcolonialist retelling of Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness".

In googling a source for that story, I found that it was turned into a radio play [2] in 1988 by the Canadian CBC, along with several other stories [3].

[1] https://sseh.uchicago.edu/doc/roauss.htm

[2] https://www.jgballard.ca/vanishing_point/cbc_drama/re-entry....

[3] https://www.jgballard.ca/vanishing_point/jgb_vanishingpoint....

High Rise has one of the greatest opening paragraph I have ever read…

“Later, as he sat on his balcony eating the dog, Dr Robert Laing reflected on the unusual events that had taken place within this huge apartment building during the previous three months. Now that everything had returned to normal, he was surprised that there had been no obvious beginning, no point beyond which their lives had moved into a clearly more sinister dimension. With its forty floors and thousand apartments, its supermarket and swimming-pools, bank and junior school-all in effect abandoned in the sky-the high-rise offered more than enough opportunities for violence and confrontation. Certainly his own studio apartment on the 25th floor was the last place Laing would have chosen as an early skirmish-ground. This over-priced cell, slotted almost at random into the cliff face of the apartment building, he had bought after his divorce specifically for its peace, quiet and anonymity. Curiously enough, despite all Laing's efforts to detach himself from his two thousand neighbours and the regime of trivial disputes and irritations that provided their only corporate life, it was here if anywhere that the first significant event had taken place-on this balcony where he now squatted beside a fire of telephone directories, eating the roast hind-quarter of the alsatian before setting off to his lecture at the medical school.”

The movie made from "High-Rise" is completely off the hook. So bizarre. I liked it. Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKPghZ5cc_E

Looks intriguing! Thanks for sharing the trailer

Almost want to rewatch it. As it is still, in my memories, the most bizarre film ever.

One contender, from waaaaay back (1982): 'Liquid Sky'

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_Sky

trailer: https://youtu.be/S9-n9gpFVpk?si=aPafm_J0G49elMup

tip: read the trailer's YouTube comments

I like his 1960s disaster novels -- The Drowned World, The Burning World. The Crystal World, about civilization ending and bands of survivors trying to get by. They definitely had an influence on later works, such as George Romero's "Living Dead" films.

Absolutely love this trilogy too. The Drowned World was my first proper introduction to Ballard.

I'd always liked the movie Empire of the Sun since I was a kid, but could never quite put my finger on why. One day in 2020 I read the films wikipedia page, started reading more about him as an author and got hooked.

To quote John Gray [1],

>Unlike many others, it wasn't his dystopian vision that gripped my imagination. For me his work was lyrical – an evocation of the beauty that can be gleaned from landscapes of desolation.

1. https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2018/12/john-gray-on-jg...

His book 'The kindness of women' helps to fill in a lot of the biographical context behind 'Empire of the Sun' and many of his other works.

My first read was Kingdom Come (released 2006). It felt like such a great crazy tale that might have taken place in our times (even though it was absurd & fantastic); mall culture & hooliganism & factionalism. It felt like such a a snapshot of Bush II era to me. (Little did I expect what was to happen next in the world! How much we would fall!)

Drowned World was the next thing I picked up, and wow what a damned book! Nueronic time and these people slipping backwards towards it; it's such a wild psychological trip. That speaks so viscerally to the many compacted confused layers inside us, earlier forms baked deep into civilization.

Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle wrote some great global disaster novels as well. Footfall and Lucifer's Hammer.

I wish Niven had been able to keep writing books on his own. I loved the Known Space books but something happened to him after 1970 that was worse than what happened to Heinlein around then. I don't think the books he wrote w/ Pournelle where anywhere near as good as Neutron Star, World of Ptavvs, etc. His great disaster short story Inconstant Moon dates from that period.

Yeah but Niven's best stories were mostly shorter. (Even Inconstant Moon is a novella.) IMO, Niven and Pournelle were really great complements. Niven wasn't really a great novel writer and Pournelle ended up doing militarist fiction--some of which was OK but not as good as their joint work.

My favorites from this writer

Love The Crystal World.

The film version of Vandermeer's Annihilation owes much to Crystal World, down to using names of several of the characters (Ventress is one I recall).

My evil twin checked out a lot of Ballard books from the library, some of which I read and some of which I still have. I really like

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Rise_(novel)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concrete_Island

I find it hard to believe that

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hello_America

didn't have some impact on Fallout New Vegas.

I literally started reading his short stories yesterday. Can you recommend some favorites? So far, I’ve read Terminal Beach and The Drowned Giant.

I put a few of my favorites in a comment a couple of months ago,

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38237862

Since then I've also really enjoyed "The Ultimate City", which is Solarpunk before it was called Solarpunk.

'The Drowned Giant' is beautiful and sad.

When I wrote something on recommended short stories a while back, I picked Chronopolis and also wrote "Other Ballard shorts that aren't too experimental include "The Drowned Giant," "The Overloaded Man," and perhaps the most conventionally SF "Thirteen for Centaurus.""

Of his later stories, "War Fever" has stayed with me; it has clear conceptual connections with Will Self's "Quantity Theory of Insanity". Running Wild is also extremely taut & affecting.

A huge collection of them have been released as an audiobook. Highly recommended!

I'm a huge fan of the Vermillion Sands anthology. A group of stories set in a future resort town populated mainly by bored celebrities, rich people, artists and other oddballs... The stories center around the dystopia that emerges when technology gives these neurotic/narcissistic humans too much power and too much free time. The games bored rich people play, the traps we fall into, etc. The day to day "leisure" aspect of the stories makes the world they live in almost mundane, while at the same time its terrifyingly familiar.

Although in many ways the "future tech" in the stories is dated, the humans in the stories haven't changed a bit. Always felt these stories are relevant to the technology enabled problems we're facing today. Humans are the problem. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

The Vermilion Sands stories are definitely an acquired taste and I think Ballard did have a genuine and perverse attraction to high society (admittedly one of his own creation).

I find them difficult to love.