The Terminal Beach

Thirteen stories make up this 1964 collection, ranging from the title story's account of a man unable to leave a former nuclear test island after losing his wife and son, to the corpse of a giant washed ashore and slowly stripped by scavengers, to a death-row prisoner playing out a final chess game with his own executioner. Ballard's recurring subject, people responding to catastrophe, decay and empty landscapes with something closer to fascination than horror, runs through even the collection's stranger detours. One of the defining early collections of Ballard's inner-space fiction.