Review

"Ballard is amongst our finest writers." -Anthony Burgess

Product Description

Vermilion Sands - populated only by forgotten movie queens, solitary impresarios, beachcombers and malignant obsessions - is a fully-automated desert resort languishing in uneasy decay: a place where psychosensitive houses are driven to murder by their owners' neuroses, and love palls before evil.

From the Publisher

'Ballard is a magician and a literary saboteur' Guardian

‘One of the brightest stars in post-war fiction’ Kingsley Amis

‘He is one of the few genuine surrealists this country has produced, the possessor of a terrifying and exhilarating imagination – and a national treasure’ Guardian

Vermilion Sands is a fully automated desert-resort designed to fulfil the most exotic whims of the idle rich, but now languishes in uneasy decay, populated only by forgotten movie queens, solitary impresarios and the remittance men of the artistic and literary world. It is a lair for beachcombers, hangers-on and malignant obsessions – a place where sensitive pigments paint portraits of their mistresses in a grotesque parody of art; where prima donna plants are programmed to sing operatic arias; where dial-a-poem computers have replaced poets; where psychosensitive houses are driven to murder by their owners’ neuroses; and where love and lust, in the hands of jewel-eyed Jezebels, pall before the stronger pull of evil.

‘A writer of enormous inventive powers, Ballard has a remarkable gift for filling the empty, deprived spaces of modern life with invisible cities and the wonder worlds of the imagination’ Malcolm Bradbury

‘Ballard is amongst our finest writers of fiction’ Anthony Burgess

'One of the grand magicians of modern fiction' Brian Aldiss

About the Author

* #17 in the Millennium SF Masterworks series, a library of the finest science fiction ever written * 'One of the brightest stars in post-war fiction' -- Kingsley Amis * 'There are those (I am among them) who would back Ballard as Britain's number one living novelist' -- John Sutherland, Sunday Times * 'This novel, with its brilliant descriptions of an inundated London and an ecology reverting to the Triassic, gained Ballard acceptance as a major author' -- Encyclopedia of Science Fiction --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.