Synopsis
A war-ravaged Beirut is the setting for the title story of this visionary collection, a tale in which a young street fighter inadvertently discovers how to bring an to the bloodshed only to find that his solution is all too effective as far as some supposedly neutral observers are concerned. Other stories feature an assassination plot against an American astronaut, the leader of an authoritarian religious movement; a man who is destroyed by a car crash and resolves never to leave his apartment again; and the survivor of a toxic-waste ship wrecked on a deserted Caribbean island.
Publishers Weekly
Ballard, the surrealistic poet of contemporary life, looks into the near future in this collection of unsettling short stories. They all revolve around a world in which current tendencies are carried to alarming extremes: Ronald Reagan's presidency is revived, and a nation obsessed with his health barely notices a fleeting world war; a cargo vessel carrying toxic wastes creates a brief, hallucinatory paradise on a Caribbean island; AIDS anxiety calls forth a strange new society in which casual sex is compulsory, in order to raise the birth rate; astronauts figure in two stories, one a vision of Cape Canaveral as a shrine of ancient aviation history where time has literally stood still, the other an account of a self-described moon-walker living off his past in Rio. There are also three brilliant literary satires, which take the forms, respectively, of a questionnaire to which only the answers are given; a series of footnotes without a text; and an index to a book that may never have been written, about a man who could have been a key figure in 20th-century history. Ballard's is a playful and versatile imagination, and this collection will gratify his admirers. (Apr . )