A User's Guide to the Millennium: Essays and Reviews - Softcover

Ballard, J. G.

3.85

439 ratings by Goodreads

9780312156831: A User's Guide to the Millennium: Essays and Reviews

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0312156839 ISBN 13: 9780312156831

Publisher: Picador, 1997

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Over the course of his career, J.G. Ballard has revealed hidden truths about the modern world. The essays, reviews, and ruminations gathered here—spanning the breadth of this long career—approach reality with the same sharp prose and sharper vision that distinguish his fiction. Ballard's fascination for and fixation upon this century take him from Mickey Mouse to Salvador Dali, from Los Angeles to Shanghai, from William Burroughs to Winnie the Pooh, from the future to today.

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About the Author:

J. G. Ballard is the author of numerous books, including Empire of the Sun, the underground classic Crash, Concrete Island and The Kindness of Women. He is revered as one of the most important writers of fiction to address the consequences of twentieth-century technology. He passed away in 2009.

From Kirkus Reviews:

Like a brain with a severed corpus callosum, this is a wide-spectrum collection of Ballard's heady essays from the '60s that address the future with visionary irony and recent newspaper reviews that concern a pathological, if mundane, present. On such topics as the automobile and the Space Age, or the personalities of Ralph Nader and Salvador Dali, Ballard (Rushing to Paradise, 1995, etc.) views the 20th century from a singular, removed perspective that is sometimes martianlike. Still, there is a world of difference between, say, his oracular overview of Surrealism for the ``New Wave'' science-fiction magazine New Worlds in 1966 and his prosaic review of a Dali biography in the Guardian in 1986. Ballard the socio-media decoder also proves able to temper his sensibilities when writing for the more banal channels of glossy magazines and Sunday papers. Biographies of Elvis, Howard Hughes, and Einstein, or histories of Hollywood writers, modern China, and comic books are alike easy work, his rarified intellect only subliminally present. He can respectfully, mischievously review Kitty Kelly's ``chain-saw'' biography of Nancy Reagan, but he did a far more creative hatchet job in his satirical ``Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan'' in 1970 (not included here). The most notable pieces here tend to be from New Worlds, such as ``Which Way to Inner Space,'' his call to recalibrate science fiction's ``vocabulary of ideas'' and focus less on technology and more on psychology: ``The only truly alien planet is Earth,'' he writes. Yet at century's close, he can still mordantly praise suburban Shepperton's numbing environs and call for a London of Shanghai-esque decadence. Ironically, the closer Ballard approaches to the millennium, the more he blends futurism with ephemera and the more frequently he dwells on his past. -- Copyright �1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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