SOURCE: Latham, Rob. “Confusion of Origins.” American Book Review 14, no. 2 (June-July 1992): 8, 19.

In the following essay, Latham considers the significance of War Fever in Ballard's short fiction oeuvre.

War Fever is J. G. Ballard's ninth collection of stories, his first since the superlative Myths of the Near Future in 1982. I think a good case can be made for Ballard as the finest British writer of short fiction in the postwar period; in any case, he is certainly one of the most thematically sophisticated and stylistically diverse. The tales in this new volume range from hilarious satires to chilling parables, gritty science fictions to lyrical fantasies, with a few unclassifiable oddments tossed in War Fever represents Ballard's modest story output for the entire 1980s, a period during which he essentially forsook the form to write novels; if it weren't for the fact that these longer efforts include masterworks like Empire...