The stories collected in Low-Flying Aircraft are as stylish as anything [Ballard] has done, and told with that meticulously apocalyptic sobriety which is scarcely to be characterised as whimsical or sentimental. But Dr Ballard has kissed the Blarney Stone. He is whimsical—though admittedly he has a whim of iron; and he has perfected an idiosyncratic literary form which, while not precisely sentimental, might be called the Art of the Neurasthenic. He is a sick man who fondles and caresses his illness into performing the most amazing tricks—but, awkwardly, one of Dr Ballard's major symptoms is repetition compulsion. Like so many of his characters, he endlessly permutates the arid fragments of disaster in an empty gesture of making whole. Buckmaster in 'The Ultimate City,' the longest piece here, creates monuments to vanished high technology in complex pyramids of televisions or automobiles; Dr Ballard shuffles his Tarot...