- Unknown Binding
- ISBN-10: 0007132719
- ISBN-13: 978-0007132713
- Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (39 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 2,929,467 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
Whenever Ballard gets near paradise, something goes wrong. Here he takes us to the South of France, and a multi-national science park with top executives, sunshine, and security. His characters live in a kind of compound where everything is organised to make them happy and efficient. But where some would want to make a social or political critique, Ballard goes straight to the core of human frailty and shows us desensitisation; perversion, and murder. This book is a dark vision. How far his readers will follow him is an open question, but this remains a fine piece of work.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
Twenty years or so ago Ballard would have done this entire book in a couple of paragraphs. Now he fleshes his ideas out with a scenery that seems to be borrowed from touring companies of Noel Coward and second-rate thrillers. It's as if he's been dipping into his original store that was The Atrocity Exhibition and systematically expanding them all into longer forms. This was the man who produced the condensed the novel. Now he's produced the diluted novel. He can never be anything but interesting and his work shines out of the dross, but if you've been following Ballard's and Moorcock's careers as long as I have you'll see that this whole idea would have been an aside in a Jerry Cornelius story. And Moorcock's Cornelius stories are still as tight and packed with ideas as ever. Ballard is the kind of writer who hones a few ideas into wonderful, precious instruments, while Moorcock gives us the whole cauldron of raw white hot steel and flings it into the world, to see what new shapes he can make. These are my two favourite writers. They have been since I started reading them in New Worlds in the late 1960s. It seems to me that Ballard was always at his best when associated with Moorcock and New Worlds and maybe the same goes for Moorcock -- who was at least able to pay Ballard for his work by writing those hack S&S stories which seem to outsell all the good stuff! Could be I'm nostalgic for the New Wave Golden Age, but I would dearly like to see Ballard tackle a real, rather than a notional, subject again. Gordon Oliver.
6 of 7 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Super-cannes is a nightmarish vision of a corporate future where highly-paid and overworked executives take regular outings into violence and madness in order to... keep their sanity. Encouraged by the business park's head psychologist, the executives of Eden Olympia descend on groups of immigrants, prostitutes and foreigners to rape, pillage and occasionally murder. These therapeutic excursions into every-greater and more depraved violence improve the health and wellbeing of the executives, and increase the profitability of the resident companies. The police turn a blind eye, victims are too afraid to talk and critics tend to meet violent ends. Ballard successfully explores a society where accountability and community have started to disintegrate, and morality is seen as little more than an old-fashioned religious dogma to be discarded.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
Retro dystopia
Written in the usual elegant Ballard style but I had to keep on reminding myself that this was set round the millennium rather than in the 60's or early 70's like his other... Read more
Published 4 months ago by A. Mackintosh
Disappointing
This book started so well, painting a great picture of a realistic brave new world on the French Riviera, and setting up an intrigue that promised to blossonm into an exciting... Read more
Published 6 months ago by Thomas Hunter
dystopic dreams
Ballards dystopian novel, seemingly aimed at the future is based upon what is occuring within the present. Read more
Published 11 months ago by Dr. Delvis Memphistopheles
Pathology the essential ingredient of contemporary life
Although Ballard has been described, and highly esteemed, as a science fiction writer, this book may technically be so described but is temporally and in terms of subject matter so... Read more
Published on 11 Jan 2010 by Martin White
Well written, but too similar to Cocaine Nights
My edition of this novel contains gushing praise from critics, and if you have never read other Ballard novels, this indeed comes across as an original and exciting thriller. Read more
Published on 1 Feb 2009 by John Hopper
Brilliant
This is a book that can stand to be re-read, it's intelligent but also very entertaining (in a dark sort of way. Read more
Published on 12 Jan 2009 by Herman Melville
Pretentious Moi?
The sterile paranoia of Stepford Wives merges with LA Confidential to give us Supercannes. Ballard is unquestionably a brilliant writer with vivid imagery that is incredibly unique... Read more
Published on 22 July 2008 by J. S. Meins
More Ludlum than Orwell
This was a disappointment. Ballard had the basis for a very interesting book, but has sailed off into light entertainment; unfortunately he is not a great thriller writer. Read more
Published on 24 Jan 2005 by Stephen McCaffery
Super-Cannes & Cocaine Nights . A New Novel?
J.G. Ballard is back with his usual brilliance, passion, extremes and cynicism in his 2000 novel "Super-Cannes" which the sceptics could call a re-write of his masterly written... Read more
Published on 12 Dec 2004 by Faik Genc
Super-Can't
For frustratingly brief moments Super-Cannes delivers the reader into the familiar yet unsettling universe for which Ballard is best known; an arena of stultifying heat and empty... Read more
Published on 20 Mar 2004 by WaxWorks
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