# 6 Terminal Beach - A collection of short stories by J.G. Ballard.

This slim book from the author of Crash and Empire of the Sun features twelve excellent sci-fi shorts. Like much of the great genre writing of the '60s, the tales are smart, cynical and have an existential bent. The Drowned Giant elegantly details the dismantling of a oversized human corpse that washes ashore, slyly critiquing mankind's tendancy to debase the fantastic. In Deep End, mankind abandons a used up Earth for space, while a die-hard local mourns the senseless death of the planets last fish. In the lushly painted story The Illuminated Man, something goes wrong with time causing light to crystalize on everything it touches. Many of the characters in Terminal Beach face oblivion, outwardly wrestling end-times the way we do only in our subconscious. The edition I read may be out of print, but the aforementioned stories are available in the newly published Complete Short Stories of J.G. Ballard.