Millennium People

Much of the fun of Millennium People and it is one of the most amusing novels I've read in a long time comes from watching as the world finally catches up with Ballard and Ballard, wryly, reacts. Ballard, acutely fierce as ever, detonates a bomb under Middle England in his continuing attempt to shock the middle classes out of complacency and into violent struggle. Ballard's flowing prose exerts its usual hypnotic spell and there are many darkly beautiful moments.--Andrew Martin Ballard is a natural surrealist; his is a world where the unthinkable is commonplace and rationality chucked in the towel long ago.... Ballard's phrasing is as sure as ever. He writes wonderfully well about London. His characterization is as vivid as it is strange. An extremely unsettling novel. Reading it is like having all the planks that underpin your life removed one by one and being forced to confront the brutality and emptiness that lies below.--John Preston Millennium People will compete with the best of contemporary British fiction.--Ian Thomson Wonderfully warped, blackly comic! written with Ballard's customary panache, its potent mix of sex, violence and radicalism will keep his fans happy. Millennium People is at once deadly serious and slightly ridiculous and somehow all the more unsettling for it. Starred Review. Ballard is a British Philip K. Dick, heir to Conrad and H.G. Wells, in whose stories the present, taken to extremes, anticipates the future. In fact, the only complaint to be made of this bruisingly smart novel is that it has taken eight years for it to appear in the U.S. Consider Ballard's late novel Millennium People.... The events of 9/11 had not yet begun to fade into memory...but Ballard was right on time with his depiction of a police psychologist who, infiltrating a band of terrorists in the London suburbs, finds them to be well, suburbanites.... [A]s Norton embarks on a program to reissue his work...the thought of more Ballard to read is enough to make even a dystopian think a little better of the world. --Gregory McNamee