The Venus Hunters was originally published as The Overloaded Man by Panther in paperback in 1967. In 1980 they left out two stories (including the title story) and an article on surrealism, added three stories from the late seventies and published it under the present title. Gollancz have now published the collection for the first time in hardback, as they have done with Ballard's other British sixties paperback originals. I'm glad to have it.

The Venus Hunters is an off-beat Ballard - not exactly the style of The Drowned World, Crash or "The Voices of Time". Several of the stories are black comedies - "Passport to Eternity" especially is one where the invention never falters, and "Now: Zero" and "Track 12", about different ways of murdering people, are grand guignol brought up to date.

The other work falls into two groups: the remaining stories from the first collection and the added three. The two long stories from the original group, "The Time Tombs" and "The Venus Hunters" are related in atmosphere and narrative style to "The Voices of Time" but they are not the same kind of work exactly. They are unusual because both deal with extraterrestrials, but they also seem thinner of invention than "Voices of Time". Even so, "The Venus Hunters" is memorable, unusual also among Ballard's work in that the main characters find what they are looking for, but in that success find their disaster.

Of the three stories added in 1980, "One Afternoon at Utah Beach" and "The Sixty Minute Zoom" are both about unattractive bourgeois psychotics and both lack depth. But the masterwork of this volume is "The Killing Ground", a story published twice in New Worlds, describing the future war between the British resistance and the American army of occupation. Take any critical term I have used in this review and apply it to "The Killing Ground" - in each area the story succeeds. From the first sentence, where in a typically Ballardian fashion, one word implies and supplies a massive sequence of events prior to the story's start, to the protagonist's death in the last, Ballard combines a powerful narrative, pays close detail to characterisation and writes a brilliant analysis. In interviews Ballard has never discussed this work among his political stories but what can one make of things like this: "the war had turned the entire population of Europe into an armed peasantry, the first intelligent agrarian community since the eighteenth century.That peasantry had produced the Industrial Revolution. This one literally burrowing like some advanced species of termite into the sub-soil of the twentieth century, might in turn produce something greater" written ten years before the revival CND or the writings of E.P. Thompson or Duncan Campbell? Other people have said it before but it deserves repeating - Ballard was there first. He's still there.