The best science fiction stories by the author of High-Rise that reveal the variety of his projections of twentieth-century technology in post-atomic worlds.

"Ballard is among our finest writers of fiction."—Anthony Burgess

"A visionary in both style and substance. . . . The literary equivalent of Salvador Dali or Max Ernst."—The Washington Post Book World

First published in 1978, this collection of nineteen of J. G. Ballard's best short stories is as timely and informed as ever. This collection includes "The Garden of Time," the inspiration for the 2024 Met Gala—fashion's biggest night.

His tales of the human psyche and its relationship to nature and technology, as viewed through a strong microscope, were eerily prescient and now provide greater perspective on our computer-dominated culture.

Ballard's voice and vision have long served as a font of inspiration for today's cyber-punks, the authors and futurists who brought the information age into the mainstream.

Praise for J. G. Ballard

"A writer of enormous inventive powers. Ballard has, like Calvino, a remarkable gift for filling the empty, deprived spaces of modern life with the invisible cities and the wonder worlds of the imagination."—Malcolm Bradbury, The New York Times Book Review

"Complex, obsessive, frequently poetic, and always disquieting chronicles of nature rebelling against humans, of the survival of barbarism in a world of mechanical efficiency, of entropy, anomie, breakdown, ruin. . . . The blasted landscapes that his characters inhabit are both external settings and states of mind."—Luc Sante