[In the following review of War Fever, Diski finds Ballard's stories “stiff” and unimaginative in light of more extraordinary events precipitating the end of the Cold War.]

Last December, I was on a plane to New York. Halfway through the flight, the man sitting next to me explained that he had been on a geographical survey in the Hindu Kush for the previous three months without access to news, and wanted to know if anything had happened recently. Well, yes, it had, as a matter of fact; the Berlin Wall had become nothing more than a slab of soon-to-be demolished concrete, and in the 12 weeks he had been analysing minerals up his mountain, the central political reality of the second half of the twentieth century had been blown away.

The geologist stared at me for a moment and decided to go to sleep. I suppose he thought that if all that could happen in three months, maybe everything would be back to normal by the time we touched down at Kennedy. Which is to say that if science fiction is to hijack our imaginations, it's got to do something more than play with predictions or offer weird scenarios of what might be. The present, thank you very much, is quite strange enough already.

In this collection of stories [War Fever], J G Ballard is more concerned with inner space and internal realities, though there are a few Orwellian exercises in social prediction. “Love in a Colder Climate” is a tale of sexual conscription in a post-Aids world where people have chosen to abstain from sex entirely, so that the birth rate has fallen to a dangerously low level. Two conscripts meet, fall in love, and refuse to contaminate their relationship with cold copulation. Celibate love rears its head, but the government has a surgical solution for draft-dodgers.

Another story along these lines, “The Largest Theme Park in the World,” turns the entire population of a federal Europe into beach bums. A new nation emerges for a while, inhabiting a shoreline “country” 3,000 miles long and 300 metres wide. Naturally, it's not long before these hyper-fit, ultra-tanned hordes divide into national groups according to their preferred beach resorts and reinvent frontiers and fiscal barriers.

The more intriguing interior stories deal with damaged minds and distorted visions of reality. Ballard has several variations on a theme of madness, where bounded spaces—rooms in a house, a deserted satellite station—enlarge to encompass the infinite. His characters live in a solipsistic nightmare, but find a terrible kind of peace as they become irretrievably withdrawn.

These stories get close to drawing you into the terror of isolation. Yet there is something stiff about them, as if the requirements of the genre keep you at arm's length. It is a little like reading accounts of acid trips you haven't taken, or hearing the story of a movie that will never get made. You ought to feel pity for the protagonist, but you never get closer than feeling creepy.

In some ways, the most effective stories are those that are not narrated at all. A hundred answers, to a questionnaire we don't see, create a ghost far more palpable than the first-person narratives, as does the story which consists only of an 18-word title and annotations on each of those words.

This collection fails to satisfy, not just because the events of the last year have been more extraordinary than any writer might have imagined, but because even the best of the bunch smack of sociology and psychology, rather than enticing us into their words through individuals whose heartbeat we can feel.