Reports from the Deep End: Stories Inspired by J. G. Ballard

by Maxim Jakubowski (Editor), Rick McGrath (Editor), Chris Beckett (Contributor)

A fascinating and unsettling anthology of 31 science fiction short stories in tribute to the prophetic dystopias of New Wave sci-fi pioneer, and literary titan of the twentieth century, J. G. Ballard—featuring Will Self, Iain Sinclair, Christopher Fowler, Chris Beckett, Michael Moorcock and many more.

Few authors are so iconic that their name is an adjective – Ballard is one of them. Master of both literary and science fiction, his classic novels such as Empire of the Sun, Crash and Cocaine Nights show a world out of joint, a bewildering and strange place. Alongside the classic dystopias of The Drowned World and High-Rise, his legacy shaped the future of literature.

This collection gathers today’s greatest literary and science fiction authors to pay tribute to the creator of Ballardian worlds we live in today. Featuring:
• Chris Beckett
• Alexandra Benedict
• Pat Cadigan
• Adrian Cole
• Ramsey Campbell
• Paul Di Filippo
• Christopher Fowler
• Jeff Noon
• David Gordon
• James Grady
• Preston Grassmann
• Andrew Hook
• Samantha Lee Howe
• Rhys Hughes
• Maxim Jakubowski
• Hanna Jameson
• Toby Litt
• James Lovegrove
• Nick Mamatas
• Barry Malzberg
• Michael Moorcock
• Rick McGrath
• Adrian McKinty
• Geoff Nicholson
• Christine Poulson
• David Quantick
• Adam Roberts
• George Sandison
• Will Self
• Iain Sinclair
• Lavie Tidhar

A first of its kind anthology, collecting tales of humanity’s uncanny and uneasy clash with the future, and the distorted psychological spaces hidden in empires of concrete.

Genres: Short Stories, Science Fiction, Fiction

368 pages, Hardcover

First published November 7, 2023

About the author

Maxim Jakubowski is a crime, erotic, and science fiction writer and critic.

Jakubowski was born in England by Russian-British and Polish parents, but raised in France. Jakubowski has also lived in Italy and has travelled extensively. Jakubowski edited the science fiction anthology Twenty Houses of the Zodiac in 1979 for the 37th World Science Fiction Convention (Seacon '79) in Brighton. He also contributed a short story to that anthology. He has now published almost 100 books in a variety of areas.

He has worked in book publishing for many years, which he left to open the Murder One bookshop[1], the UK's first specialist crime and mystery bookstore. He contributes to a variety of newspapers and magazines, and was for eight years the crime columnist for Time Out and, presently, since 2000, the crime reviewer for The Guardian. He is also the literary director of London's Crime Scene Festival and a consultant for the International Mystery Film Festival, Noir in Fest, held annually in Courmayeur, Italy. He is one the leading editors in the crime and mystery and erotica field, in which he has published many major anthologies.

His novels include "It's You That I Want To Kiss", "Because She Thought She Loved Me", "The State Of Montana", "On Tenderness Express", "Kiss me Sadly" and "Confessions of a Romantic Pornographer". His short story collections are "Life in the World of Women", "Fools for Lust" and the collaborative "American Casanova". He is a regular broadcaster on British TV and radio and was recently voted the 4th Sexiest Writer of 2,007 on a poll on the crimespace website.

Reviews

[Paul Dembina · Rating 4 out of 5]

Considering this anthology had a wide selection of authors (31 in total) I thought the hit rate was pretty high.

I'm a confirmed Ballard fan so I'm, not sure how someone else coming to this without prior knowledge of at least some of his works would find it.

There are a few stories which don't appear to have much connection with either Ballard or his work. Just having it set in a gated community (for instance) doesn't seem sufficient to count as "inspired by Ballard' and I suspect some of these authors reached into their slush pile to pull out a piece for this collection.

However, there are many others that really grasped the nettle (so to speak). A few highlights for me were Will Self's "Operations" which channels the Atrocity Exhibition in suitable gruesome manner. Pat Cadigan's "The January 6, 2021 Washington DC Riot Considered As A Black Friday Sale" and The Astronaut Garden by Preston Grassman. Others had fun referencing Ballard or mimicking his tropes (Maxim Jakubowski for instance). Also a particular mention for The Dream-Sculptor of A.I.P by Paul Di Fillipo who posits an alternative life for Jim Ballard after the end of WWII. One where Ballard is orphaned and ends up in the US as a tyro film director trying to make his visions a reality in the California desert.

That's not even to mention other luminary contributors such as Adam Roberts, Michael Moorcock (with a new Jerry Corenlius tale), Iain Sinclair and Jeff Noon (although I found his story a rather disappointing Ballard pastiche).

On the whole rather good for Ballard fans

[Alex Sarll]

I requested this on Netgalley despite not actually being that into Ballard, which may seem perverse, but it has contributions from various other writers I like: Iain Sinclair, Will Self, Michael Moorcock are all listed on the cover. Granted, in at least two of those cases I don't like their current stuff as much as the older material, but obligingly they all go back to basics here; Will Self drops the modernist elder statesman bit for his old glee in being shocking, and this is the first time in ages that I've seen Sinclair write about Driffield. Moorcock, of course, has been doing new Jerry Cornelius vignettes for a while, but when you've already created an avatar for times of perpetual collapse, it would be the wrong kind of perverse not to set him running in what passes for the present.

And really, it's not quite that I don't like Ballard, more that he did one very particular thing extremely well, and that even at the length of a short novel, it generally got a bit much for me, although given it was something like a disaffected, clinical eye upon the world, it could sometimes translate extremely well into a camera's gaze, which is why I'd probably take the films of Crash and (apart from the stupid ending) High-Rise over any of the original texts. Curiously, the one place I've seen physical copies of this collection was in the BFI bookshop, a prominent display which seemed odd when it's not ostensibly a book with that strong a cinema connection, but which on a deeper level confirmed my suspicion. And then there's Paul di Filippo's contribution here, in which Ballard washes up in LA after the War, and after a recommendation from Roger Corman ends up making films in the same milieu, with another historical figure along for the ride (I initially thought two, but no, turns out there really was a cameraman called Fred West working there).

Reading this collection, I started to wonder if Ballard wasn't a bit like Mark E Smith. Not just in the sense of being a prolific figure with a reliable point of view, still seen as somehow countercultural despite being firmly ensconced in the canon, and thus absolute catnip to a certain sort of mostly male fan. But because I know a Fall tribute band, the Fallen Women, who perform with a different guest vocalist for each track, and the remarkable thing is that whoever that may be, whether it's my spouse or my mates or a celebrity I like or just some random drunk bloke, I like every last one of them more than the originals. And similarly, this has writers I like and writers I used to like and writers I don't know from Adam, and even when they don't quite capture that beady eye, I think I enjoyed all of their Ballards more than actual Ballard*. Sometimes more than them as themselves, too: Jeff Noon's time travel car crash story here is the first thing of his I've liked in a decade; Christopher Fowler was a writer whose good bits always drew me on through the many things that annoyed me in his work, but I don't think his contribution here, presumably some of his final writing, irked me once. I mean, yes, outside this context I'd probably have said its closest kin was Victor Pemberton's The Slide, but fuck it, it's set in a luxury resort, that's Ballard enough. Perhaps the secret is in Selflessness by David Gordon, one of the contributors I'd not encountered before, which suggests a common root for so much human malaise: "the self sort of swells up, becomes irritated and painful, just like any organ that is inflamed or infected." Treated in the story through a drug trial, but here through writing in the world of someone else for a while, and that someone as detached as Ballard. Curiously, even then some of the obvious signifiers aren't the ones people go for. Sure, there are lots of brittle gated communities, and writers pick up on some of the ways that the modern world feels more Ballard than ever - weird weather; AI as it actually is rather than the classic SF version; shortages and a sense of the precarious, even in nominally affluent countries and communities. Other opportunities, though, aren't seized - I was sure there'd be a riff on the Fyre Festival, but no, and there's a surprising extension of contemporary fiction's wider reluctance to deal with mobiles. OK, Ramsey Campbell puts one at the heart of his story, but that's more a Black Mirror approach than simply accounting for their casual ubiquity. Most shocking of all, especially given the title, is how few contributors go for the peak Ballard of an empty swimming pool - though given the exception is by one of the editors, maybe it was less that they didn't want to go the overly obvious route, more that he simply warned everyone else he'd bagsied those. But given the parameters of the assignment, I think my favourite has to be the one piece which outright takes the piss, Geoff Nicholson's Drift - a (literally) pedestrian Crash with Elizabeth Taylor's role taken by Olivia Colman.

*OK, maybe not The January 6, 2021 Washington DC Riot Considered As A Black Friday Sale, by Pat Cadigan, which would be a perfect title for a Ballardian story referenced and never seen, but which can't quite work itself out beyond occasional glimmers like the significance of 'the customer is always right', and a delightful comparison of the tangerine fraudster to Beanie Babies.

[Janelle · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was such a great read for me as JG Ballard is a favourite writer of mine. So many of the stories here capture the atmosphere and themes of many of his works as well as being fun reads. My clear favourite was “Drift” by Geoff Nicholson, it’s like Crash only walking instead of cars! Other stories I really liked were the opening story “The Astronaut Garden” by Preston Grassman; “Selflessness” by David Gordon; “Operations” by Will Self; and “The Next Time it Rains” by Adrian Cole. Just brilliant, makes me want to re-read Ballard himself!

[Annarella · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved it: disturbing, intriguing, thought provoking. A group of authors I love at their best
Highly recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher for this ARC, all opinions are mine

[Doreen · Rating 4 out of 5]

3/23/2024 V satisfying for the Ballard fan, some more so than others. Full review tk at TheFrumiousConsortium.net.

3/27/2024 subtitled Stories Inspired by J. G. Ballard.

And what stories! In fairness, it's hard to write anything nowadays about climate change, dystopias or class-stratified urbanization (and certainly not technological erotica, vehicular or otherwise) without being able to trace influences back to that same scrappy, complicated kid who was the focus of Stephen Spielberg's WWII movie Empire Of The Sun.

But subject alone is not enough to make a story feel Ballardian. Tho I'm hardly an expert on his oeuvre, when I think of what makes Ballard stand out from his peers, I think of a sort of tension between the protagonists and the often inhuman, uncaring forces outside of their control, followed not altogether gracefully by a surrender to inevitability. It's important, I feel, that the protagonists struggle till the very end, and only capitulate when there is no other choice. Change is rarely welcomed, only accepted.

In this, all of the stories in this brilliant anthology succeed. Some of the stories, like the excellent opener Chronocrash by Jeff Noon, and Adrian Cole's The Next Time It Rains wouldn't be out of place in any collection of sci-fi shorts. The indelible weirdness of tales like James Lovegrove's Paradise Marina and Chris Beckett's Art App are hard to forget. And, of course, there are some entries that are disturbingly sexy, including Preston Glassman's The Astronaut's Garden and David Gordon's Selflessness. That last gives us these excellent lines:

Something was unfolding in his head, a narrow path that found its way through the buildings. The streets turned like sentences, clause inside clause, the object held in abeyance, until cornered by the mark of a question.

Some of the other stories are less universal, to differing success. Of the standouts, Pat Cadigan's The January 6, 2021 Washington DC Riot Considered As A Black Friday Sale is an incredibly sharp sociopolitical analysis of contemporary American events that very much deserves to be widely read, whether by sci-fi fans or otherwise. Will Self's Observations is the type of body horror that 100% inspires David Cronenberg. Maxim Jakubowski's own The Hardoon Labyrinth By J. G. Ballard is a witty piece of fiction that made me exclaim with pleasure at the end, despite the tale being solidly entrenched in Ballardian trivia that I hadn't been aware of pre-reading. The genius of that last story was in the way Mr Jakubowski included readers in on the joke -- not always a trait shared by some of the more Ballard-biography specific pieces in the rest of the collection.

Hardcore Ballard fans, however, will find so much to love within this pages, not only for the overall top notch quality of the writing and atmosphere, but also for the many asides and homages. Novices may well be bemused by some of the tales, but hopefully this anthology will introduce more readers to Mr Ballard's dazzling and prescient oeuvre. I recommend The Drowned World to start (as I did in college!) but there is a wealth of reading to be had that is only hinted at in this outstanding collection of stories inspired by the great man himself.

Reports From The Deep End edited by Maxim Jakubowski & Rick McGrath was published March 5 2024 by Titan Books and is available from all good booksellers, including Bookshop!

[M. K. French · Rating 4 out of 5]

This short story collection is influenced by and inspired by J. G. Ballard. Though Ballard died in 2009, his work was known for dystopias, bleak manmade landscapes, and the psychological effects of technology. It's a facet often explored in science fiction, and one Ballard embraced with his career.

We open with "Chronocrash" by Jeff Noon. Time travel is an ordinary part of life, affecting work, commutes, and society at large. They can go fifty-three years backward and a few days forward, making it useful for field trips. Some people feel they owe the future to create catastrophes that can be visited, and others will try to do whatever they can to push further forward. As will the Ballard way of approaching tech, people are a means to an end. From here are other stories where people try to forge new connections despite technology or because of it, or peoples' attempts at connections fail badly.

"A Free Lunch" clearly questions how capitalism leads to the destruction of perfectly viable goods and foods, but also makes you wonder what it is they're eating. "That's Handy" has the multiple functions of a phone slowly taking on more and more of an older woman's activities. We have stories that take us into the past, yet still have a sense of alienation and separation from other people that Ballard writes about. Ballard himself shows up as a character, whether making a film or TV show, or his words are directly referenced. Hollywood and politics certainly make it difficult to exert kindness to fellow humans, and the current American political landscape shows up for all that the stories are generally very British.

"They Do Things Differently There" was especially chilling, with a "V for Vendetta" vibe crossed with "1984," as the government is literally everywhere and has outlawed past tense speech and owning anything older than a year. I found that story more horrifying than "The Next Time It Rains" where the rain doesn't stop and transforms people, or the VR and AI-fueled finale "The Next Five Minutes." People need connections to others, a sense of belonging, and a sense of history. Once disconnected from that, the true dystopia begins. These stories show that in so many different ways, there will be plenty to think about and hopefully learn from.

[Angus McKeogh · Rating 3 out of 5]

Definitely had the feel of stories written by Ballard, both thematically and regarding content. However, as with many collections, about a third of the stories were excellent, another third were average, and the last third were not great. Thus three stars.

[Simon Burdus · Rating 4 out of 5]

A really interesting and thought provoking anthology. With over 30 contributors the success hit rate is surprisingly high with a lot more great stories than poor ones.