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!