SOURCE: A review of Cocaine Nights, in Insight on the News, September 21, 1998, pp. 36–8.

In the following review, Roberts makes a positive evaluation of Cocaine Nights.

British writer J. G. Ballard leads us once more into the dystopian future. Cocaine Nights, recently released in the United States, presents a world of leisure with a distinctly sinister side.

Because so many contemporary novelists are identified with the movies made from their books rather than the books themselves, they benefit or suffer from cinematic interpretations that have little relation to their body of work. Certainly this is the case with British writer J. G. Ballard, author of Empire of the Sun and Crash, dissimilar novels whose differences are exaggerated in their film versions.

Ballard's autobiographical Empire of the Sun, published in 1984, recounts the author's boyhood in Shanghai during the Second World War and his internment in a prison camp in Japan...