SOURCE: “Stranger than Fiction,” in New Statesman & Society, November 9, 1990, p. 38.

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...