War Fever
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 end 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.
Contents:
- War Fever
- The Secret History of World War 3
- Dream Cargoes
- The Object of the Attack
- Love in a Colder Climate
- The Largest Theme Park in the World
- Answers to a Questionnaire
- The Air Disaster
- Report on an Unidentified Space Station
- The Man Who Walked on the Moon
- The Enormous Space
- Memories of the Space Age
- Notes Toward a Mental Breakdown
- The Index
J. G. Ballard
James Graham Ballard (1930–2009) was a British novelist and short story writer who was a prominent part of the New Wave in science fiction in the mid- to late-1960s and whose work frequently focused on dystopian themes.
J. G. Ballard's best known books are the controversial novel Crash, an exploration of sexual fetishism connected to automobile accidents, and the semi-autobiographical novel Empire of the Sun, about his childhood internment by the Japanese during World War II after the invasion and conquest of Shanghai, where Ballard was born in the International Settlement. Both books were adapted into films, by David Cronenberg and Stephen Spielberg respectively.