BALLARD, J.G. The Thousand Dreams of Stellavista [in Amazing Fact and Science Fiction Stories No. 36, March issue, 1962]. Chicago Ziff-Davis Publishing Company. 1962 Signed

8vo.; original coloured pictorial wrappers by Lloyd Birmingham, with illustration in black and white by Virgil W. Finlay to lower cover; pp. 145, printed in double-column, with atmospheric illustrations in line; an excellent copy with very light wear, internally equally fresh, crisp and unmarked.

Containing the first appearance of a 21-page, illustrated, short story by J.G. Ballard (pp. 48-68). Signed in ink by J.G. Ballard to second page of the issue. Also including the 38-page illustrated novelette “Mindfield!” by Frank Herbert (author of the cult 1965 sci-fi novel Dune) and another of 23-pages, “Tyrant’s Territory”, by Brian Aldiss.

“The Thousand Dreams of Stellavista” is probably the best-known of Ballard’s Vermillion Sands stories, set in the eponymous futuristic resort. The story is narrated by Howard Talbot, a lawyer, who moves there with his wife Fay, into a psychotropic domain in which their residence, made of bioplastics, shifts form according to the inhabitants’ moods. However the building’s former glamorous residents, a movie star who murdered her husband while he slept, have left their aura on the house. And Talbot was the lawyer at the wife’s trial.