New in Print

The Complete Short Stories of J.G. Ballard

Oswald was the starter.

From his window above the track he opened the race by firing the starting gun. It is believed that the first shot was not properly heard by all the drivers. In the following confusion Oswald fired the gun two more times, but the race was already underway.

Kennedy got off to a bad start.

Those are the opening lines of J.G. Ballard’s short story “The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race.” It’s just one of a mind-scouring 92 tales compiled in this mammoth compendium, but it’s the one the makes me smile the most, and laugh, and – Ballard died April 19 – shudder-sob a little, sometimes. The ABC Wide World of Sports historical prism stylistics owe, as noted in the author’s introduction, a singular debt to Alfred Jarry’s equally sardonic, blasphemous “The Crucifixion Considered as an Uphill Bicycle Race.” But Ballard, a pensive, perpetually pacing literary lion too casually pegged to sci-fi when a far more appropriate pigeonholing would’ve been, oh, “life-fi” or “humanity: WTF?-fi,” remains with his time-straddling, history-engulfing, and intensely intimate novels – the autobiographical The Empire of the Sun, the autoerotic monsterpiece Crash – on equal footing with Bradbury, Burgess, and, yes, Greene.

Ballard’s short work, including two new stories for the Yank edition (“The Secret Autobiography of J.G.B.” and “The Dying Fall”), is shockingly, dryly prescient, almost formally concise, often matter-of-fact, as his characters spiral their inky lives out into the bleak, black, all-engulfing madness of the state, technology, and one another. (Often it seemed that, for Ballard, hope was not only the thing without feathers but that which lacked wings as well.) His influence on modern culture remains readily apparent, from the music of Joy Division (“The Atrocity Exhibition”) to Mute Records’ very first release, “Warm Leatherette,” by the Normal. Of course, he’s also rightly recalled as the godfather of the cyberpunk genre of sci-fiction-futurism (Bruce Sterling said as much in Mirrorshades).

Is the measure of an author’s import on a given society the true valuation of his worth? And what would Ballard make of Amazon’s Kindle? I suspect he would have propped it up on a stone fence in his back yard and had at it with a 6.5 x 52 mm Carcano M91/38 bolt-action rifle. Certainly, “without doubt Oswald badly misfired. But one question still remains unanswered: who loaded the starting gun?” Why, Ballard, of course.

This article appears in September 25 • 2009.