I always recommend his short story "Report On An Unidentified Space Station":

https://sseh.uchicago.edu/doc/roauss.htm

Funny - I read "Ballard" and immediated thought this was about Fabrice Bellard... been on HN for too long, I guess.

Ballard's fiction is great. I'm partial to the early novels (The Crystal World is one of my favourites) and to his short stories.

In his longer works, Ballard's ideas often wore a bit thin. In particular, his late novels (Cocaine Nights, etc.) are the longest — beautifully written, sure, but they are essentially reskinned versions of his earlier High-Rise and Running Wild, where he already perfected the motif of humans in gated communities reverting to base, animal, violent behaviour. We didn't really need those; he'd already made his point.

I do recommend getting his "The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard" (not to be confused with "The Complete Short Stories of J. G. Ballard: Volume 1" and "Volume 2", both of which it supercedes). It includes classics such as "The Concentration City", "Studio 5, The Stars", "A Question of Re-Entry", "Billenium", and "The Garden of Time".

While I've always enjoyed Ballard's coldly satirical perspective on modern life (The Atrocity Exhibition maybe being the pinnacle of this), I think he's at his best when he gets looser and a bit weird. Nature succumbing to strange mutations feature in The Drowned World, but The Crystal World is absolutely supercharged with hallucinogenic weirdness, a fever dream that turns magical-realist in the end. Later novels touch on this man/nature dichotomy, but not as strongly as his earlier work, although late short stories like "Dream Cargoes" revisit that theme.

As someone exposed to some undergraduate 'social science', this is one of the funniest things I've ever read http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/archives/003268.html

kingdom come, the last book written before his death, at once falls tremendously short of his reputation for prescience on the literal level, but exceeds with flying colours in prescience on the metaphorical level. the median-age HN reader would probably do well to start with it, as its zeitgeist will still be kicking around somewhere in your memory and so it will be in some sense maximally relatable of his bibliography. then work backwards to taste.

Ballard was definitely part of the British gentle apocalypse school. Se also Wyndham etc. He also had a lot of other science fiction and experimental work in addition to Empire of the Sun.

If you liked "empire of the sun" read his biography because what happened to Jim across his life is just as interesting.

I read quite a lot of Ballard and I found 'The kindness of women' provided some interesting context on the various themes of his work.

Ballard’s Kingdom Come, written in 2006, paints a picture that came true in 2016, with Brexit and Trump.

If we want to look ahead to 2034, who is writing the novel that defines the next decade?

Or to think of it another way, what would Ballard write about today that he would see coming in 2036?

No pictures? What are we supposed to be looking at?