All those things that he lists can be found in the other stories in this collection as well. But what Ballard has always done is bring things home - it is not space that is fascinating, it is here; it is not the future that is interesting, it is now. He once said that the only truly alien planet is Earth, and I suppose that could be extended to say that the only true stranger is oneself. The unseen powers are close at home - so Faulker the "Overloaded Man" in the third story wants to switch off everything, while Abel, a sixteen year old boy, on a prison like spaceship in "Thirteen To Centaurus", accepts his imprisonment, and in "The Watch-Towers" Renthall alone maintains his rejection but also his ability to see the towers. What Abel sees from his secret porthole on the spaceship is passed over in a paragraph, and the story ends with a psychologist realizing that his subject was studying him.

We know now where Ballard saw the drained swimming pools and abandoned airfields, but until they were re-cast in his SF they were not complex codes. Now they are. In the Ballardian world everything tends to entropy except the minds which revel in it - their patterns grow more bizarre, their justifications more stretched, but equally they confirm their existence in the here and now. A lot of SF dates quickly; this collection I feel sure has not.

I am typing this on J G Ballard's sixty second birthday. This collection has been printed and re-printed ever since its first publication. Its effect in another thirty years, when Ballard is the grand old man of English letters, will still be as strong, I feel sure.