Domestic shock therapy
Before The Twilight Zone, there was J.G. Ballard. The speculative fiction writer—who died earlier this year—wrote the novels that became Steven Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun and David Cronenberg’s 1996 horror flick Crash, about the relationship between sex and car crashes. And The Complete Short Stories of J.G. Ballard is another wild ride.
In “Studio 5, The Stars,” the literary artists of the future all depend on poetry writing machines. In “Chronopolis,” house clocks are outlawed until a brainy, renegade teenager stirs a revolution. Even the houses of the future have become potentially perilous—“psychotropic” homes that shape-shift in response to a homeowner’s every mood and anxiety flood the real-estate market in “The Thousand Dreams of Stellavista.”
Ballard’s perverse mind focuses on an unexamined aspect of the domestic world, then twists it, creating fictions that are two parts social commentary and another part camp. The Complete Short Stories is a fine primer on a social scientist gone mad