Superb science fiction. And the best stories were written in 1960! The Voices of Time & The Garden of Time were first published in New Worlds in 1960, a fairly staid SF magazine that at the time might well have had a conventional sword & sourcery series by a very young Michael Mooorcock, and an article by Arthur C. Clarke about rockets. But the editor wanted to stretch his readers, so he was the first publisher of Ballard. The two stories above are some of my favourite fantasy stories, one melancholy, the other downright depressing. Both deal with the perception of time and entropy in different ways. Let no-one forget that Ballard was once an extremely innovative & original fantasy writer, and this early collection proves it. ( )

Ballard's collection gets off to a tremendous start, with an exceptionally moving, melancholic first story: it just so happens that all life in the universe is a clock counting down to zero. What happens to humanity when people give up their collective will to live? The answer isn't proferred, but illustrated in the lives of some of those who struggle on.

From such an auspicious start, the work rolls downhill at great speed, with quite a mediocre science-fiction rewriting of "Sunset Boulevard" and films of its period. Too long and too uneventful, the piece upsets the rhythm of the book, which Ballard has to work had then to recover. ( )