What do you think?
Rate this book


784 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2006
Mallory pressed on toward the Cape, the engine of the motorcycle at full throttle. The tracts of suburban housing unravelled before him, endlessly repeating themselves, the same shopping malls, bars and motels, the same stores and used-car lots that he and Anne had seen in their journey across the continent. He could almost believe he was driving through Florida again, through the hundreds of small towns that merged together, a suburban universe in which these identical liquor stories, car parks and shopping malls formed the building blocks of a strand of urban DNA generated by the nucleus of the space centre. He had driven down this road, across these silent intersections, not for minutes or hours but for years and decades. The unravelling strand covered the entire surface of the globe, and then swept out into space to pave the walls of the universe before it curved back on itself to land here at its departure point at the space centre. Again he passed the overturned truck beside its scattered television sets, again the laundry van in the liquor store window. He would forever pass them, forever cross the same intersection, see the same rusty sign above the same motel cabin…Ballard’s cultural and political satire is also razor-sharp, so deadpan as to be perfectly believable, especially reading it now when so much of what he wrote about has either already come to pass or is on the cusp of occurring. The man's prescience was stunning. It’s regrettable he hasn’t been around to usher us through the age of social media and artificial intelligence, although his treatment of television remains relevant and could just as easily apply to the Internet and social media. Likewise his infamous lampooning of Ronald Reagan unfortunately rings familiar tones at this time of Joe Biden’s notable public faltering. In ‘The Secret History of World War 3,’ Reagan is excavated from retirement for a third term following his successor’s largely unpopular and failed term. However, given the state of the world at the time and the many political challenges facing him, the narrator wonders:
Could even the Reagan presidency cope with a world so askew? Along with my fellow-physicians who had watched the President on television, I seriously doubted it. At this time, in the summer of 1994, Ronald Reagan was a man of eighty-three, showing all the signs of advancing senility. Like many old men, he enjoyed a few minutes each day of modest lucidity, during which he might utter some gnomic remark, and then lapse into a glassy twilight. His eyes were now too blurred to read the teleprompter, but his White House staff took advantage of the hearing aid he had always worn to insert a small speaker, so that he was able to recite his speeches by repeating like a child whatever he heard in his earpiece. The pauses were edited out by the TV networks, but the hazards of remote control were revealed when the President, addressing the Catholic Mothers of America, startled the massed ranks of blue-rinsed ladies by suddenly repeating a studio engineer’s aside: ‘Shift your ass, I gotta take a leak.’ Watching this robotic figure with his eerie smiles and goofy grins, a few people began to ask if the President was brain-dead, or even alive at all.What follows is a hilarious description of the solution to this dilemma concocted by the White House staff in collaboration with the media. As usual, Ballard hits so close to the mark that while you’re laughing out loud at the absurdity of it all, you’re also crying inside because of how near the quick he’s cut, and you know that what he’s dreamed up is either already happening or is about to unfold.