Super-Cannes

SF but with the edgy feeling that it's really about now; in the foreword he describes the High-Tech Cote d'Azur that is rapidly replacing the old, a Silicon Riviera in more ways than one, I doubt not. Ballard has no problem running out his own obsessions, but in his case it's more like the disease / mind control obsessions of William S Burroughs than anyone just retreading personal ground. All Ballard is really part of the same overarching work, a passport to paranoia. Super-Cannes tells of jittery professionals in a southern French residential science park - part holiday camp, part university, part barracks I suppose - where recently there was a mass shooting. It turns out that this was no isolated madness but other weirdness is afoot, and an injured and therefore grounded pilot who investigates: given the current French climate of intolerance against les arabes it would hardly be surprising if night raids on the poor quarters of Marseille by leather-jacketed businessmen really did take place; and not surprising also that this is a book about those who deny the past being condemned to repeat it. Narrator Paul Sinclair finds there isn't much else he can do.