There was a time, some ten or fifteen years ago, when the notion of "inner space," usually associated with the writings of J. G. Ballard, threatened to change the direction of science fiction. The mind, it was suggested, was the genre's true subject. Down here in the human head, away from the galaxies, was virgin land, Freud's new frontier….

Science fiction soon settled back into its old tracks and took to the stars again, but fantasy and dream, long outlawed by the more earnest practitioners, had found their way back into the form—at least in some of their more clinical aspects. The word terminal, for example, echoes mournfully through Ballard's stories and novels. Visions of endings are everywhere: a world winding down, its inhabitants dropping off one by one into a collective final sleep; an all but abandoned earth, its oceans bleached dry, its surface a desert of sand and salt; a group of dead astronauts circling the planet like satellites, doomed to orbit for decades until their capsules cave in; Eniwetok, a cluster of disused concrete bunkers and runways and weapons ranges, littered with broken B-29s and Superfortresses, natural home of a missed apocalypse, "an ontological Garden of Eden," as one of Ballard's characters ironically says.

It is difficult, in these scenes, to separate the private terror from the public possibility, the personal nightmare from the nightmares of history. In all the stories the stress clearly falls on the mental conditions being shown, the inner spaces of psychosis and the approaches to psychosis. The historical places and imaginable historical disasters are figures; they are shapes and traces the psyche has found for the making of its own portrait….

Ballard is a master of conventional science fiction, and [in The Best Short Stories of J. G. Ballard] shares its cherished worries about crowded city life, the domination of time, the encroachments of technology, and the ravening consumer society….

But in spite of the skill and the invention that go into these pieces, Ballard's heart, or his head, is elsewhere. He is not primarily interested in the narrative line of his stories, or in the people caught up in the situations he has devised for them. He is interested mainly in images of the kind I have mentioned, an abandoned Eniwetok, an earth without oceans, a universe of sand or coral or salt or concrete. He hints, in two stories, at the horrors of life without sleep—operations are performed to allow men to stay awake all the time. He has characters collect, again in two different stories, what he calls "terminal documents": Beethoven's final quartets, a transcript of the Nuremberg Trials, the fusing sequences for the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs….

[This] is writing which is often obsessive, and frequently in energetic bad taste. It evokes a mind, or a series of minds, haunted by dreams of emptiness and annihilation. We may not share these dreams at all—I don't—but the best of Ballard's remarkable stories—"The Voices of Time," "The Cage of Sand," "The Terminal Beach," "The Atrocity Exhibition"—confront us with landscapes we can neither disown nor forget. Even the most cheerful and least speculative of us will remember moments when this burned and ending world might have been ours. (p. 28)