1955 / Audiobook / 222 pages / UK
***
I liked the short story a lot when I read all of those. This extended version must have added a lot by definition, but it didn't add anything to the experience. By taking so much longer to cover the same ground, it's easily the weaker version. Come on, you could fit loads of stories into that binding.
1961 / Ebook / 160 pages / UK
***
The odd one out in Ballard's ecogeddon tetralogy, it feels as if he needed to get the Hollywood disaster movie out of his system, complete with screenplay-ready beats and stock characters, before he could start getting weird and constructing pyramids to inaugurate Hodgson's Night Land.
1962 / Audiobook / 158 pages / UK
****
We skip well past the thrilling disaster movie this time to follow some jaded explorers seeking meaning in London's tropical lagoon, when they're not killing each other or fighting crocodiles. Discussions of evolutionary pseudobiology and ancestral memory in this setting seemingly wasn't trippy enough for the author, he had to write The Crystal World to remedy that.
1964 / Audiobook / 160 pages / UK
***
Reading Ballard's increasingly sadistic apocalypse porn back to back made the abruptly parched Earth even more affecting. His characters grow more believable with each one, which makes it even harder to disconnect. There's always a glimmer of hope at the end, at least. He's not a monster.
2015 / Ebook / 133 pages / UK
**
Less a manifesto than an excuse for a joke book of one liners and a chance to vent about overrated authors. Speaking of which, it's all been downhill from Lint.
