So Bosch and Renee's POVs still work well together. I think the two cases that are going on are giving me a bit of whiplash though. Definitely happy to see Mickey Haller again. The constant put down of defense attorney's makes me roll my eyes though. It's like these people don't live in a world where the Central Park 6 was a thing.

After renewing this book twice at my library I decided it was time to finally start it. Enjoying it so far, it seems to be a good study of mass hysteria and the psychology of literally living one on top of the other.

I once (somewhere on Goodreads) observed that a lot of what is usually labelled Science Fiction is really Engineering Fiction. There are rare examples of Mathematics Fiction (e.g. Flatland, Abbott or Eon, Greg Bear). There's a lot of Physics Fiction and Biology Fiction. Le Guin wrote Anthropolgy Fiction. Imagine my surprise when recently in Ballard's autobiography he said that he favoured Psychology Fiction. This struck me as the perfect pithy description of what Ballard was doing most of the time in his short stories.

This collection has many interesting and surprising stories and the odd few that are actually predictable if you know his work fairly well. Many of the most memorable have the common setting of Vermillion Sands, a fading, no longer fashionable beach resort for the rich and famous that exists - somewhere. It's not quite our Earth, but not apparently an alien world, despite the flying rays that seem like they replace the gulls of most seashores. In fact it's the embodiment of a mood - a mood so effectively evoked that after reading several stories, I was able to guess we were back there from just the first paragraph of one story, confirmed in the next. This impressed upon me the level of writing skill on display.

Well, there's still a similarly brick-sized second volume to look forward to!

Insects wearing jewellry?!

An eminently readable autobiography from a man who's fiction can sometimes be enigmatic, sometimes deliberately intended to shock, showing numerous repeated themes and tropes. Where did those themes come from? Since the publication of Empire of the Sun it has been clear that the strongest and most overt of them relate to his childhood experiences of Shanghai during WWII. This book demonstrates that most of the others date back to the same period of his life - and most of the remainder to no later than when he left formal education behind.

Despite a frank description of the important events in his life, Ballard remains himself an enigma to me after reading this. I don't know or understand the character of the man a lot better than before I started. I usually find letters reveal character more readily than biography and it turns out this is no exception. Nevertheless, this is an interesting work for its childhood eyewitness account of 1930s Shanghai and wartime internment as well as the impressions of post-war Britain through the eyes of an ex-pat child going to the old country for the first time.