J.G. Ballard was one of the most distinctive penetrating voices of 20th century fiction. This book, the complete stories is a monument. And in true Ballardian fashion, it takes the form of a grotesque Brutalist labyrinth, and endless transit from reality into a psychosis of non-space and non-time. In some sense, this review is also a review of my own failure. I began this book in October 2017, nearly five years ago, with the plan of reading one story a day, paired with a brief reaction in words and images. My expectations for the project, formed by reading The Best Short Stories of J.G. Ballard as well as several of his novels, was inadequate preparation for The Complete Stories. Indeed, I am uncertain if anything could have prepared me for The Complete Stories.

Ballard's major theme is the implosion of modernity. His early stories play with crowded, stimulated, commercialized societies reaching points of parodic collapse with grim irony for his protagonists. The overt science-fiction themes ebb in the mid 1960s (coincident with the death of his wife), and the stories focus on alienated individuals undergoing a destructive final psychological crisis, often a collapse of time perception with fugues and blackouts, or perhaps a novel relation to space. The central image here is the beach, a sun-burnt strip of sand between the vast unchanging ocean and the detritus strewn land.

Ballard wrote some truly impressive stories. "Thirteen to Centaurus" is a first rank story in any form. "The Cage of Sand" was written at the height of the space race and imagines Cape Canaveral as a toxic desert haunted by obsessives maintaining a vigil on the orbiting capsules of dead astronauts. The deconstructed stories like "Answers to a Questionnaire" and "The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered As a Downhill Motor Race" do clever and ambitious things with form. Ballard wrote at least a dozen fascinating and provocative stories.

The problem is that there are about 100 stories in the book, and after those top dozen the quality begins to fall fast. I can't bring myself to care about the dissipated artists and aristocrats of the Vermillion Sands cycle. There are far too many meditations on how space flight was a cosmic sin which will be punished by eliminating time. The general misanthropy of these stories is a key part of the theme and tone, a cosmological realization that our present mode of life is a brief blip between an animal past and a dead future. But there's also a very particular and ugly misogyny, with story after story of unfaithful wives and the kamikaze husbands who destroy them.

Should you read Ballard? Absolutely. Should you read The Complete Stories? Only if you have a specific desire for literary exhaustion.