In his quest for a wider audience, Ballard turns to the mystery and scores a moderate success. Yet Cocaine Nights has something in it to disappoint nearly everyone. It's sexual content is quite tame by current standards. It makes the lives of the rich and famous seem as monotonous as ours. As a mystery, it looses no real surprises; and it fails to deliver a penultimate punch. The social theory it explores, while interesting, is not likely to excite anyone. And his prose, the area in which Ballard is in a class all his own, is oddly muted. Still, I enjoyed this book greatly. I found the characters convincing, even sympathetic. Ballard's stylistic flashes, those strangely beautiful perspectives that charge his work, are strewn unexpectedly in the path of the reader. The book moves along at a steady clip. Finishing one of Ballard's novels is something akin to waking up from a dream. And for me at least, Cocaine Nights was an invigorating dream.

i have always been intrigued with the themes and topics ballards works have been dealing with. nevertheless, most of his novels could not satisfy me completely. COCAINE NIGHTS changed that. ballards' amazingly beautiful and poetic descriptive way of writing, a story about tomorrow's society set in our present, the dark side that lurks in each one of us. all of the above come together in this novel, and make COCAINE NIGHTS wahat i would consider ballards flagship work. reminiscent of FIGHT CLUB. great stuff.

And this is a brilliant novel of what lies under the thin veneer of civilisation that we all wear, an edgy exploration of the the violence that lies within us all. His usual sparkling, deceptively simple prose is here, together with a thrilling murder story, off-beat characters and a threatening air of menace lurking by the pools and apartments of the up-market retirement village. Ballard is tragically under-read, and I urge you to read Cocaine Nights, one of the best books of the 90s, and then move on to his other novels, particularly The Drought and High Rise, and then devour his short stories, which are nearly all perfectly crafted gems.

I regret that I cannot recommend "Hello America." In fact, it got so silly at times that it was embarrassing. J.G. Ballard is a British writer whose perception of America is, to say the least, a little too broad. The book's premise (the whole population of the United States flees to Europe in the 2030s, then the whole continent is turned to desert when the Bering Strait is dammed) and characters (nutcases all) were totally implausible. The attempted humor falls flat because the author is taking his premise so seriously, but the premise falls flat because the characters and their adventures are so ridiculous.

Wonderful premise! Awful execution! It's a tough experience to be 50 pages when one realizes that a book does not live up to expectations....at page 75 realize it shall not get better...at page 100 see that one is so bored there is too much temptation to give up. Listen to that temptation. It is unfathomable how a well-regard novelist wrote such a poor book and that no editor saved or stopped the book before it consumed several hours of my time with no gain to me.

The start of the book is good, besides it is hardly beliefable that things are still working after 100 years in the hardest conditions. The psychology of the characters is not very deep but the ultimate adventure that awaits for them made me read further after the first 50 pages. However when Ch. Manson appears in the story everything turns to the bad, worse, worst direction. The whole adventure becomes "forced" like the author had to make an end to the story (time pressure ?). The storyline becomes idiotic and completely boring. Actually it is a book you only read by "accident". I can not imagine that one is actually looking for it (unless she/he is forced to).

This is one of Ballard's earliest novels, and it shows. The plot and characters are flat: the world is swept by an unexplainable storm of winds increasing up to 550 miles an hour, leading to global devastation. Survival hinges on underground refuges. A thoughtfully ill-assorted group of characters, united by chance, find themselves dealing with a peculiar industrialist and his wind-resistant stronghold...or is it? Unlike many of Ballard's later novels with their hallucinogenically lovely or compelling landscapes, The Wind From Nowhere is universally dirty and claustrophobic, almost all of the action cramped in submarines, overcrowded warehouses, or the London underground. Many of the characters are two-dimensional standards of the concluding era of 1950's sci-fi--the lovely reporter, the military men, the university professor. At the same time, there are hints of the Ballard to come; moments of tense sexuality, of down-to-earth brutality, of striking images. Perhaps Ballard was destroying the standard 1950's sci-fi universe to make way for his Triassic jungles, surrealist beauties, sliding deserts and time-wracked astronauts? Anyway, if I was just starting with Ballard, I'd proceed straight to The Drowned World and his other short stories.

It is very popular to give analysis to an incredibly disparate number of subjects (literature, art, film, history, behavior, anthropology, etc.) through the murky lens of Jungian psychology. This is exactly what Stephenson is attempting to do with Ballard. Such an effort is vastly short-sighted. Stephenson wants to use all the currently stylish thinkers in pop psychology, the New Age movement, and Western inner-self dogma to give analysis to Ballard. He wants to use Joseph Campbell's methods, Jungian methods, Elliade's ideas, and he wants to use romantic and inaccurate ideas of the utopian nature of primitive cultures, and he also uses banal words like "transcendence," "fertility rituals," "infinite," "sublime," "psychic forces," "ego," and on and on. Clearly in books like Concrete Island and Crash, such silly commonplace analysis is just more of what we've all heard before a thousand times from every stylish, transient postmod thinker. In 50 years the next stylish thinker will come out and supplant Jung and Elliade. Then the hordes will compare that method to art, literature, film, and Ballard.

Ballard is a thinker that is beyond rigid systems of all the numerous 20th century thinkers that Stephenson wants to fit Ballard in to. Ballard needs to be looked at from the lens of the underworld, as Hillman might say, rather than from the tiring lens of the dayworld. Then perhaps we can get an analysis of Ballard that is more than just the cud of Freud, Jung, and Elliade.