FICTION

WAR FEVER by J.G. Ballard (Farrar , Straus & Giroux: $18.95; 176 pp.) . Outer space and inner space: In these 14 stories by J. G. Ballard, they seem almost the same. Ballard, an Englishman, is best known in this country for “Empire of the Sun,” an autobiographical World War II prison-camp novel that became a Steven Spielberg movie. But he also writes science fiction and fantasy, and in this collection most of his main characters, in one sense or another, are astronauts.

Some explore an infinitely expanding space station. Some, feeling alienated from society, only imagine that they have walked on the moon. Some succumb to attacks of timelessness--a malady spreading from abandoned launch pads in Florida. One is affected strangely by toxic chemicals leaking from a freighter. Another shuts himself up in his house and gets lost in its unexpected immensity. It’s all much the same journey--into a twilight zone between the euphoric and the sinister, the mystical and the mad.

Several of the stories highlight Ballard’s wit. They take the forms of psychiatrists’ reports, a questionnaire, even the index of a suppressed biography of a major, unknown world figure (an intimate of Einstein, Gandhi and Churchill whose ex-wives marry Mickey Rooney). In one, a nostalgic America drafts Ronald Reagan to serve a third term; the public is so absorbed by bulletins about the doddering President’s physical condition that when World War III happens, nobody notices.

Other stories are fairly realistic--just pushed to an imaginative extreme. In the title story, for example, the civil war in Beirut has gone on for generations; when a militia fighter finally comes up with an effective idea for peace, he discovers that the outside world has reasons to quash it.

Ideas are Ballard’s strength in this collection, not characterization or style (though his style is often deft). These stories benefit from being brought together. Read alone, they would seem top-heavy with meaning, but because their ideas play off one another, “War Fever” is more than the sum of its parts.