SOURCE: Parrinder, Patrick. “Superhistory.” London Review of Books 12, no. 23 (6 December 1990): 26.

In the following excerpt, Parrinder comments on the recurring themes in Ballard's fiction, citing as examples the stories in War Fever.

J. G. Ballard's fiction maps a very different historical frontier. His last collection of short stories was Myths of the Near Future (1982), and in several pieces in this new collection [War Fever] he again takes up his favourite stance as a historian of the late 1990s and the early years of the 21st century. Ballard's reports from the future include a picture of Europe on the point of being overrun by totalitarian sun-worshippers (the French bare their massed nipples, and the British their ‘fearsome buttocks’, in confrontations with the riot police), and a “Secret History of World War Three” in which we learn that the war ran for four minutes on 27 January 1995, but nobody really noticed. The...