War Fever is J. G. Ballard's ninth collection of stories, his first since the superlative Myths of the Near Future in 1982. I think a good case can be made for Ballard as the finest British writer of short fiction in the postwar period; in any case, he is certainly one of the most thematically sophisticated and stylistically diverse. The tales in this new volume range from hilarious satires to chilling parables, gritty science fictions to lyrical fantasies, with a few unclassifiable oddments tossed in War Fever represents Ballard's modest story output for the entire 1980s, a period during which he essentially forsook the form to write novels; if it weren't for the fact that these longer efforts include masterworks like Empire of the Sun and The Day of Creation, one might almost regret his decision, especially given the manifold pleasures this volume affords.

The experimental oddments are the shortest and, actually, the least memorable pieces in the book. “Notes Towards a Mental Breakdown” consists of a series of footnotes keyed to the only surviving sentence of a murderer's confession, teasing out the contradictions and ambiguities impacted into this seemingly simple fragment. “Answers to a Questionnaire” and “The Index” are each precisely that: the former a battery of responses to questions that are never given, slowly drawing out the story of a man who assassinated a scientific genius who had apparently discovered the secret of immortality; and the latter an index to the lost autobiography of a forgotten giant of the twentieth century who, among other accomplishments, declined a marriage proposal from Isak Dinesen, heard Einstein's deathbed confession, and attempted to restore the antipapacy in Avignon. These three literary torsos are quite engaging, but considered alongside Ballard's truly experimental works in the shorter form (for example, the hallucinatory “impacted novels” gathered in The Atrocity Exhibition), they are thin and forgettable.

The other tales in the book more than make up for this, however. Generally, these break down into tales of obsessional pathology on the one hand and science-fictional twists on existing realities on the other. Among the best of the former group is “The Enormous Space,” in which a divorced executive abruptly decides to isolate himself in his house, “a reductive Crusoe paring away exactly those elements of bourgeois life which the original Robinson [had] so dutifully reconstituted,” fending off all interlopers and gradually discovering, as he passes into a haze of hunger and madness, previously unseen vistas hidden beneath the bland domestic surfaces. Other stories of visionary psychopathology include “The Man Who Walked on the Moon” a haunting tale of a down-at-heel gentleman who makes a modest living off tourists at a beachside resort by relating his experiences as an astronaut, the lonely moonwalks that now dominate his mind but that he appears only to have imagined. And in “Dream Cargoes,” the survivor of a toxic waste ship wrecked on a deserted Caribbean island undergoes a psychic metamorphosis amid a rapidly mutating landscape, “a botanical mad-house” in which time itself seems to be crystallizing. These stories display Ballard's conviction—a conviction that has animated much of his work—that irrational states of consciousness bordering on insanity are productive of almost mystical insight.

The science fiction tales are even more effective, especially “The Secret History of Word War 3,” an amazing document in which the health of a reelected President Reagan, monitored constantly on American TV screens, becomes a national obsession, obscuring, in its blips and burps, an international episode that almost ignites global apocalypse. “The Largest Theme Park in the World” evokes a reunited Europe divided between North and South, the former a dwindling bastion of dour capitalism, the latter a swelling hedonistic paradise of beaches and nightclubs; the story culminates with the healthy New Age barbarians of the South plotting to invade the exhausted, flabby North and extend the hegemony of “the first totalitarian system based on leisure.” More disturbing extrapolations are “Love in a Cold Climate,” in which AIDS-conscious citizens have grown so reluctant to engage in intercourse that governments must establish mandatory sex among strangers to forestall a plummeting birth rate, and the eponymous “War Fever,” in which war-torn Beirut, sealed off from the rest of the world, has become a United Nations laboratory to study the effects of rampant internecine violence.

Taken altogether, War Fever is a dazzling if brief display of Ballardian pyrotechnics, richly inventive in its fantasy, deftly surgical in its social criticism. Less thematically consistent than earlier collections such as Vermilion Sands and Myths of the Near Future, its diverse assemblage makes the book ideal for new readers of the author, since it allows them to sample him in all his moods, both light and dark.

The Kindness of Women is Ballard's fourteenth novel, the second installment in his fictional autobiography, following 1984's hugely successful Empire of the Sun. Like that earlier book, it eschews explicitly science-fictional or fantastic modes, instead focusing meticulously on the everyday world of familial and social relationships. An affecting and often powerful chronicle of an unusual life, the book details Ballard's early years as a British P.O.W. in Japanese-occupied Shanghai (a slightly different take on material exhaustively related in the earlier volume); his abortive careers as a medical student at Cambridge and an RAF trainee pilot in Canada in the fifties; his marriage to a bright, lively woman who bore him three children before her shocking accidental death; his experiments with drugs, conceptual art, and morbid eroticism in the sixties; and his quiet, contemplative, and mostly contented life since. The novel is suffused with Ballard's characteristic mordant intelligence, lively sense of irony, and stylistic sharpness, yet fans of his earlier novels of lyrical fantasy (e.g., The Unlimited Dream Company) or savage satire (e.g., High Rise, will perhaps be a bit put off by the gentle social realism and unstinting embrace of domesticity this volume affects. The book's closing chapters all but assert that the Ballard of the sixties and early seventies—the author of such brilliantly disturbing experiments as The Atrocity Exhibition and Crash—has quietly retired.

It would probably be wrong to accept this conclusion fully, however, as the clever framing device for this novel suggests. The opening chapters in Shanghai establish a complex dialectic of reality and illusion, less pointed than in his more explicitly fantastic works, but still insistent and provocative. The scenes of brutality and horror the young Ballard experiences in war-ravaged China are related with a vivid surrealism, focused in this description of the bombing of an amusement park: “Everywhere hands and feet lay among the debris … fragments of joss sticks and playing cards, gramophone records and dragon masks, part of the head of a stuffed whale, all blanched by the dust.” The sudden eruption of violence into the boy's sheltered, affluent life makes the world appear unreal, insubstantial: “the confused images in my head had merged with the newsreels”; a battlefield seems “the stage set of an uncompleted war film.” The filmic quality of experience is an obsessive theme throughout the book, culminating in the closing chapter, in which a portly fiftyish Ballard becomes an extra on the set of Steven Spielberg's film version of Empire of the Sun: “A genie had sprung up from the pages of my novel and was busily conjuring the past into life. … Memory had been superseded by a new technology of historical recovery.” Though his narrative approach is doggedly realistic, this subtext of the pervasion of reality by instrumentalities of illusion lends an air of alienated fantasy to even the most mundane scenes, suggesting that Ballard always sees the world slightly distanced and askew whether his material is overtly fantastic or not.

Throughout the novel, Ballard suggests that it is only through “the kindness of women” that he is able to keep any grip on reality at all; without the strong, anchoring presences of several important females in his life—from his morose Russian governess in pre-war Shanghai to a prim teenage girl in the Japanese prison camp to his vivacious wife to several British friends and lovers—he might forever drift in visionary reverie, endlessly shuffling and reshuffling his painful memories. It would be easy for this theme to dip into unintentional sexism, with women depicted as stolidly maternal beings whose sole purpose is to comfort and succor men, but Ballard avoids this pitfall through his deft portraiture. All the women in the book are rendered with a keen, unsentimental intelligence; they are individuals, not stereotypes. Ballard is clearly aware of his own desperate need to mythologize them, and so are they, and this mutual perception makes for another structuring tension in the book between realism and fantasy.

Despite its comprehensive coverage of his life, the novel has one glaring omission: there is almost nothing on Ballard's literary career—his early association with the so-called “New Wave” movement in British science fiction, his developing iconoclastic experimentalism (represented in only one scene, where he reads his story “My Plan for the Assassination of Jacqueline Kennedy” at a sixties happening), and his later phase of magical realism (The Unlimited Dream Company, The Day of Creation). Yet seasoned readers of Ballard will pick up all his major themes, which are shown to be tied to crucial episodes in his life. His obsession with entropic dissolution, remarked especially in his early trilogy of disaster novels (The Drowned World, The Drought, and The Crystal World), is linked to a traumatic event on a deserted railway platform shortly after his escape from the prison camp, in which he witnesses Japanese soldiers torture and kill a Chinese civilian. His fascination with abortive attempts at transcendence, focused in the wrecks of aircrafts and spaceships that litter his stories, connects with his spotting of the crashed plane of a fellow RAF trainee while on lonely reconnaissance in Canada, as well as with a bad LSD trip. Most disturbingly, his fixation on the motif of the car crash as a bleak postmodernist emblem of the fusion of sex, death, and technology, articulated in his most harrowing novel, Crash, relates to his involvement with a pair of nihilistic thrill-seekers (one a mentally unbalanced friend from his Shanghai days), who stalk one another by car throughout London in a morbid pas de deux; Ballard, drawn into their twisted world, is almost killed in a crack-up of his own.

The plotting of this episode differs slightly from earlier versions Ballard has given in the press of his traffic accident and the way it informed his work. Readers who have followed Ballard's occasional public statements about his life will notice other small changes and inconsistencies. It is perhaps significant that, as in Empire of the Sun, Ballard never identifies his protagonist (in this case the narrator) beyond his first name, Jim; nor does he ever explicitly mention the titles of any of his literary works (though they are sometimes neatly sewn into the text as metaphoric allusions). One can only assume that the events recorded in the book are historically accurate; there is always the possibility that, rather than sketching the links between his fictional themes and the substance of his life, Ballard has instead restaged his life through the prism of his fantasies. Given the endemic blurring of reality and illusion that marks all Ballard's work, this confusion of origins in the putative autobiography of such an incomparable fantasist is perhaps only appropriate, In any event, The Kindness of Women is a worthwhile addition to an extraordinary oeuvre.