[More and more J. G. Ballard] looks like a leading figure in a very rich and developing field. His earlier work was usually cast as science fiction, but he has long since worked loose from that pocket. Like many excellent contemporary writers, from Italo Calvino to Thomas Pynchon, he draws on science-fiction methods to create a magical modern fantasy. A writer of enormous inventive powers, an explorer of the displacements produced in modern consciousness by the blank ecology of stark architecture, bare high-rises, dead superhighways and featureless technology, he has, like Calvino, a remarkable gift for filling the empty, deprived spaces of modern life with the invisible cities and the wonder worlds of the imagination.

"The Unlimited Dream Company" is a book of this kind, a remarkable piece of invention, a flight from the world of the familiar and the real into the exotic universe of dream and...