Reviews for Times Book of Saints

The average rating for Times Book of Saints based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-12-20 00:00:00 Jeffrey Craig JG Ballard's stuff divides fairly neatly into three phases: 1) 1956-64 - At first he was writing actual science fiction, and he was really cranking it out. There are some beautiful ones in this early part, probably my favourites - "The Sound Sweep", "The Concentration City", "Billenium", "The Voices of Time". It became gradually clear - to JG and to the reader - that he wasn't really able to do the hard-sf thing (extrapolation with a lot of wires and diagrams), but instead, he was developing, slowly, a genuine voice, a way of seeing the present in the guise of the future, and a unique form of poetry. He also wrote a trio of potboiling disaster novels, which are fun for people who like contemplating the destruction of humanity, which I know is a popular form of entertainment. 2) 1965-83 - Something happened. He became noticably strange in 1965, at the exact time when the 60s counterculture was becoming self-conscious. You may be thinking that he would have turned out like the Michael Caine character in Children of Men, all long hair and the best hashish, the poshest, most mature and most well-read hippy, but no, he kept his suit on and his hair was cut every three weeks. Intellectually, he was hurtling towards the outer edge, and then when he found it, he built a further edge on top of it. Falling in with a bunch of other new crazed experimentalists (like Michael Moorcock) he became part of the take-over of the formerly staid British sf mag New Worlds. This mag then became a major platform for cultural madness and outrage in Britain in print for the next five years. (And was duly prosecuted for obscenity.) There was an assumed sf sensibility behind the madness published by New Worlds but often it was hard to see because it wasn't there. This was when sf became "speculative fabulation". I wish I had a collection of New Worlds 1965-1970. Man alive! I would look over them and be amazed – so prescient, and so gone. So anyway, in this period JG invented "the compressed novel", i.e. the very refined, hyperintellectualised mashup of Hollywood Babylon, the National Enquirer, the facelifts of the rich and famous, the autopsies of the rich and famous, the study of autoerotic fatalities, the architecture of Los Angeles with especial reference to its swimming pools, inner space as alien landscape, the topography of hospitals and beaches, aeronautical engineering manuals, the soundless autogeddon of the near future, the frigid poetry of motorways, decayed technologies, abandoned futures – all rendered into distilled prose in which the more lurid the event being described, the more crystalline became the prose. JG became infatuated by public events like the assassination of Kennedy and the death of Marilyn Monroe. This was not space opera. There were no aliens. Earth is the only alien planet, said JG Ballard, and he meant it. The apotheosis of this most ballardian phase of Ballard was, of course, Crash. Typical short story titles from this period: The Terminal Beach The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race The Atrocity Exhibition The Intensive Care Unit Memories of the Space Age Myths of the Near Future 3) 1984 – 2009 – With the publication of the non-sf, non-weird The Empire of the Sun, JG suddenly got himself a massive hit, and his long time fans were amazed to see him atop the bestseller lists and being filmed by Spielberg. Couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy but it was like seeing Captain Beefheart at No 1 in the pop charts. Huh? God help anyone who bought Crash after reading Empire of the Sun – “Oh look, dear, this is by the same author as that one you liked” “Oh okay, let’s see – whoah! Engine oil! Semen! Internal organs! Surgery! Deliberate car crashes! Aaaargh!”. So anyway, in his final phase JGB abandoned the short story form (only 80 pages of this 1186-page collection are from this period) and instead cranked out seven dystopian novels of varying qualities, which I confess have never tempted me. Maybe one day. No, what I like is JGB at his most elegiac, which is to say, at his most lethal. It's all in these short stories. Every home should have one. Random quote generator - from page 817 : Already other memories were massing around him, fragments that he was certain belonged to another man’s life, details from the case-history of an imaginary patient whose role he had been tricked into playing. As he worked on the Fortress high among the dunes, brushing the sand away from the cylinder vanes of the radial engines, he remembered other aircraft he had been involved with , vehicles without wings. Some first lines of stories: In the evening, as Franklin rested on the roof of the abandoned clinic,he would often remember Trippett, and the last drive he had taken into the desert with the dying astronaut and his daughter. All day this strange pilot had flown his antique aeroplane over the abandoned space centre, a frantic machine lost in the silence of Florida. At dusk Sheppard was still sitting in the cockpit of the stranded aircraft, unconcerned by the evening tide that advanced towards him across the beach. Later Powers often thought of Whitby and the strange grooves the biologist had cut, apparently at random, all over the floor of the empty swimming pool. At sunset, when the vermilion glow reflected from the dunes along the horizon fitfully illuminated the white faces of the abandoned hotels… These stories are sad, wistful, clinical, upsetting meditations on the future we thought we were going to have and the future we turned out to be having all the while, which were two very different things.

Review # 2 was written on 2013-06-23 00:00:00 Amy K Rider Perfection! & indispensable--I must own it when I have enough cashola. A "summer project" that took an eternity to "rip" through, "The Complete Stories of J.G. Ballard" is an often-recommended collection of 96 little capsules of SF, horror & fantasy. If you want to become a writer (one who usually starts off writing superb short stories), then Ballard is your main man. I thought of the cover page (of the American Edition) while trying to formulate a cohesive review (which I probably failed at already)--a monolith of a man staring straight at you and little dots floating around him, like atoms or molecules. No, I think they represent bubbles, as in EVERY SHORT STORY IS A BUBBLE THAT DEVIATES FROM THE FOUNTAIN-BRAIN-- some closely resemble reality, like mirrors, and some stray so far off that they seem galaxies away... but they all have an auteur's signature. Ballard, in each tale, immerses you into foreign (but not altogether alien) atmospheres where everything is authentic. All plots seem to be going on RIGHT NOW, somewhere else. His themes, well-tackled and fascinating, range from supremely male symbols: brand-name cars, airplanes, buildings, landscapes, motorcycles, mysterious femme fatales, overpopulation, rarely-sex and libido (strange for the man who wrote "Crash"!!!) to other themes: deserts, beaches, dunes, sand. Ballard at times is a kid playing with a train set, though his settings are enormous in scale-- Gotham cities. He plays with LEXICOGRAPHY in tales like "Notes Toward a Mental Breakdown", "The Terminal Beach" & "The Index"... which is always refreshing. There are killer enormous birds, dead astronauts, watches, jewels, hotel rooms, American cities of tourism...Las Vegas, Florida. Some of the bubbles seem to pop unexpectedly & almost prematurely, while others rove in the brain, persistent and glossy. What Ballard's short stories are about: zero. Trying to lasso the emptiness of everything is a majestic feat. Since you asked here are the TOP 13 (therefore, essential) Short Stories of J.G. Ballard (I did the work for you, but they are not in particular order): 1)Chronopolis 2)Billenium 3)Studio 5, The Stars 4)Minus One 5)Time of Passage 6)The Air Disaster 7)The Life and Death of God 8)The Dead Time 9)The Intensive Care Unit 10)Love in a Colder Climate 11)The Secret History of World War III 12)The Enormous Space 13)The Largest Amusement Park in the World