An odd look came into Manson’s eyes, a dead dream of all the empty highways and drained swimming-pools of America.

It’s a hundred years in the future, a hundred years since America was abandoned because of some vast environmental disaster which led to the desertification of the entire continent.

The novel opens as a steam-powered ship ‘from a tired and candle-lit Europe with its interminable rationing and subsistence living’ arrives on an expeditionary mission to explore the long-abandoned continent.

Sounds promising, doesn’t it, and in another author’s hands this scenario might have made for a gripping adventure story, but by the late 1970s something bad had happened to Ballard’s writing.

Almost all Ballard’s earlier works are carried by the brilliance of the idea – from The Drought to High Rise you are as dazzled by the basic premise as by the treatment, and read on to find out how the basic premise will unfold. But by 1981 it feels like his store of ideas was played out. By 1981 I felt I had read enough descriptions of abandoned resorts and empty cities and derelict hotels and drained swimming pools covered in shifting sand dunes to last me a lifetime.

The steamship which the explorers are arriving in is officially titled Survey Vessel 299 but the crew vote for a name change to SS Apollo in honour of the optimism which fuelled the long-defunct space programme. As it pulls into New York harbour, it is holed below the waterline by one of the spurs of the crown of the Statue of Liberty which is now lying along the bottom of the East River. I think we are meant to experience that frisson which the best science fiction can give you, a sense of the brilliantly unexpected and uncanny intersecting with the world we know, that secret thrill which well-done dystopian stories give us. Except that, for some reason, it’s an all-too-expected image, it feels all too inevitable.

Same goes for many of the other images: when we read about the millions of windows of the glass and steel skyscrapers of Manhattan staring at the sun, or the long canyons of Fifth Avenue et al buried under ten-feet-high drifts of sand, it all feels dreadfully familiar.

As if to compensate for the well-trodden subject matter and treatment, Ballard concentrates more on the characters than in previous books but, unfortunately, this tends to highlight his inability to create believable characters.

The best of the earlier novels and stories led with the weird scenario and the characters tended to be functions of the weird situation, mostly going mad in their own private and intriguing ways.

But this is a long book by Ballard’s standards, 236 pages in the Grafton edition, and so more weight is thrown onto the characters to carry it, to be plausible enough to maintain our interest. Unfortunately, Ballard is losing this game right from the start:

• Wayne is the young stowaway who has come to find his father, a scientist who went missing on a previous expedition to abandoned America 20 years earlier, and who has spent years poring over yellowed old copies of Time and Life magazines, learning everything he could about the culture of Old America: is his name a joke reference to John Wayne?
• McNair is the grizzled chief engineer of the ship, a descendant of refugees from America who settled in Scotland, who volunteered for the expedition excited at reviving the lost technologies of the abandoned continent
• Captain Steiner is the imperturbable ship’s captain, an ex-Israeli with characteristically ‘mixed motives’, who is on ‘a private quest’
• Dr Ricci is the ship’s doctor
• Professor Anne Summers is the only female character, the leader of the scientific cohort of the expedition, beautiful but aloof – is her name a jokey reference to the ‘multinational retailer company specialising in sex toys and lingerie’?
• Gregor Orlowski is the Russian political commissar in charge of the expedition

The characters all have the trademark Ballardian difficulty making out each other’s motives and, once they’ve landed and found their feet, almost immediately become more absorbed in their own thoughts and obsessions than in working together as a team. In the earlier novels this made the entire experience feel bewildering and strange, but now it makes them come across as dim, their puzzlement at each other forced and contrived.

What was Steiner playing at, this curious man with his intense, unsettling eyes, forever gazing at her?

Everyone was retreating into their own dreams… Already Wayne felt a sense of challenge – the five of them were effectively alone on this continent, free to behave in any way they wished. Their only loyalty was to their own dreams, and to the needs of their own nerve-endings…

It feels like the characters are going to follow the exact same narrative trajectory of pretty much every previous book Ballard wrote i.e. becoming self-absorbed and losing the ability to communicate with each other – but this time without the conviction or novelty.

During the next few days Wayne noticed that the expedition began to lose its momentum, or at least to change direction, its compass turning to some new internal bearing…

It feels like he’s applying the style or approach which made sense in his avant-garde psychodramas to a set-up which ought to be a straightforward adventure story. The classic Ballard moments when characters go into distracted fugue or fantasy states, when the story becomes about ‘inner space’ and not the real world, no longer have the same punch, no matter how many times he repeats the trope.

Under the guise of crossing America, as Wayne soon discovered, they were about to begin that far longer safari across the diameters of their own skulls.

You won’t remember them, but the 1970s saw a spate of Hollywood disaster movies which were astonishingly cheap and cheesy, humiliating able actors by placing them in silly catastrophe stories with pathetic special affects (Airport, the Poseidon Adventure, The Towering Inferno, Earthquake, The Swarm). Writers, directors and actors who had all made wonderful, innovative and exciting movies in the 1960s now seemed incapable of making anything except bloated, overblown and flatulent stinkers.

This novel feels the same. All the elements are here which made Ballard’s stories from the 1960s so thrilling, but they’ve been spun out to inordinate length, hampered by cardboard characters, and distracted by a litany of over-familiar effects.

When, a few days after they’ve been in New York, Wayne comes across the physicist Dr Ricci in a private room where he’s dressed up in a gangster suit, cradling a tommy gun and surrounded by dollar bills which he’s looted from somewhere, ‘ a dream of gangsters in his dark eyes’, you feel this isn’t how any real physicist would behave – this is how a Ballard character behaves in a typical Ballard fantasy.

At moments like this you realise that Ballard had stopped being an innovative writer and was becoming a parody of himself.

The disaster explained

Chapter Seven gives a detailed description of how it all went wrong. Basically, the oil ran out. In this version of the future the last barrel of oil was pumped in 1999. From then on a paltry amount of electricity was generated from renewable sources, but the age of cars was over, and of heavy industry. Electricity was rationed, food production (powered by oil, fertilised by oil-based fertilisers) collapsed. The first emigrants left. Crucially (and typically for Ballard) there was a profound psychological collapse. Americans stopped believing in the future.

The socialist states of Europe and the Communist bloc had a tradition of central planning which met the emergency more efficiently. Also, living standards and expectations were already pretty low in the USSR and much of Europe so a downward adjustment was manageable by lots of the population.

But the thing which really triggered catastrophe in America was the epic engineering achievement by the Soviet Union of damming the Bering Straits. This had the positive effect of drawing warm Gulf Stream type oceans over north Europe into the Arctic, and thus bringing huge new areas of Siberia into food production; but as the resulting freezing water was pushed over the Bering dams into the Pacific they froze Japan into a block of ice and diverted the temperate Humboldt current away from the American Pacific seaboard, the gap being filled by hot water flowing north from the equator.

Thus unprecedentedly hot ocean streams now impacted on both the East and West coasts of America and it was this which racked the temperature up a couple of degrees and resulted in the massive desertification of America. Hence the sand dunes filling abandoned New York, and stretching away inland as far as our explorers can see.

Accounts of future disasters are always oddly heartening to read, and this chapter is no exception. It’s obviously inspired by the very real oil price hikes and energy crisis of the early 1970s and the resulting morbid popularity in the 1970s of all kinds of doomy, end-of-the-world scenarios, in popular culture but also among the educated commentariat.

However, the much vaunted energy crisis of the 1970s turned out to be a chimera: new reserves of oil continued to be discovered, and it is currently predicted there will be plenty of oil into the 2050s. In fact for the first time in nearly 50 years, America is the world’s largest producer of oil:

• America is now the world’s largest oil producer

As to the book’s fundamental premise that all of America is turned into a desert as flat and lifeless as the Sahara, this has more to do with Ballard’s personal obsession with deserts and dunes washing over abandoned cities and clogging once-busy roads than it does with any sober examination of the facts around global warming.

Plot summary

Not only has America become a wasteland but Russia has taken over much of the rest of the world. Hence the presence of Gregor Orlowski as Russian political commissar in charge of the expedition. Partly the expedition has been prompted because rising levels of radiation have been detected emanating from the deserted continent: is a reactor failing, a nuclear weapons dump degrading? Orlowski hopes to identify the problem, report it to his superiors, then set sail back for Europe with a clutch of antiquities which will bring him a fortune.

They go ashore in New York. The city is buried by ten-foot sand dunes created when the Appalachian Mountains were destroyed. The exotic foliage growing out of skyscrapers and the gilla lizards eyeing them from windowsills come straight from imaginarium of The Drowned World. The long-abandoned showrooms with their mannequins sitting round tables piled with plastic food are almost word-for-word copies of the same scenes in The Ultimate City.

They head south

The five core characters – Captain Steiner, Commissar Orlowski, Wayne the stowaway, creepy Dr Ricci, and the token woman Dr Summers – set off on an expedition south along the coast. McNair is left behind to supervise repairs to the SS Apollo (which I am surprised can be repaired given that it was holed below the waterline and had heeled down onto the sunken Statue of Liberty; given that there is no dry dock, no heavy equipment, and no power source of any kind. Still, plausibility isn’t the point of this book which is more of a soaring fantasy).

Everywhere is desert with no discernible rivers or even streams. Thus they have to locate water tanks on the top of apartment buildings or hotels and siphon it into their distilling apparatus which they fuel with wood from chopped-up furniture. This is a laborious process and doesn’t produce enough water.

Just outside Trenton, New Jersey, they encounter a strange sight – a small group of ‘aborigines’ i.e. three men and a woman wearing desert cloaks and Arab burnouses and riding camels. They are nervy but friendly enough, speak English, and identify themselves as Heinz, GM, Pepsodent and Xerox – i.e. named after long-defunct consumer brand names. The woman is named Xerox because all women are named Xerox: ‘they make good copies’.

These ‘natives’ share roast rattlesnake with Wayne and Steiner and tell them about the other ‘tribes’ of America, being the Executives from New York, the Governors from Washington, the Gangsters from Chicago, the Gays from San Francisco, and the Divorcees, a women-only tribe of tough ladies with blue-rinse hairdos.

This satire on contemporary American society is so crude it shifts the book onto a different register, making it feel more than ever like a cartoon.

The natives tell our guys they see bright lights in the sky, flying silver objects, great explosions like the ones which appear to have devastated Cincinnatti and Cleveland.

Washington DC

Our heroes move on and finally arrive at Washington DC. This is the opportunity for an orgy of sci-fi Schadenfreude and crude satire. The sand has covered the Mall and the legs of that huge statue of Abraham Lincoln, the huge freeways and concourses are all empty and abandoned – spooky sci-fi feeling. But it’s accompanied by satire about mid-70s America, because the characters refer to a fictional ‘Nixon Memorial, and to the ‘Jerry Brown Islamic Centre’ (Brown was a notable liberal in the 1970s) and to the three terms of President Teddy Kennedy (brother of the assassinated JFK and for decades afterward a figurehead of liberals).

It’s like Ballard’s jokey reference to the fictional ‘OPEC tower’ in New York. This kind of heavy satire on what was then contemporary American society feels terribly dated in a way which the earlier novels, by avoiding this sort of thing, manage not to.

The characters roam about the abandoned city, increasingly succumbing to their own personal obsessions and dreams, as Ballard characters typically do. Wayne and Commissar Orlowski are having a stupid argument in the Oval Office about which one of them can sit in the President’s old chair when Summers runs in to interrupt them with the news that there’s been a massive explosion in Boston, her and Ricci’s scientific equipment has picked it up. Not only that but they left radiation detectors (the main aim of the expedition being to locate the source of the increasing radiation) atop the Pan Am building in New York and these are now showing radiation levels which are lethal. Summers and Ricci fear that McNair and the rest of the crew must be dead by now.

They wait impatiently for the radio message they’d scheduled for 7pm that evening, but when McNair comes on air it’s clear that it’s a recorded message scheduled to be played by a tape machine, which sounds bright and cheerful and doesn’t refer to fleeing the radiation cloud which must have enveloped them. Summers and Ricci conclude that McNair et al must be dead by now, and with them went the expedition’s hopes of a) rendezvousing with the ship b) ever getting back to Europe.

Our five characters hold a team meeting at which some are for pressing on south to the location of the scheduled rendezvous with the SS Apollo but the casting vote falls to Wayne and he, by now, is dominated by dreams and fantasies about America, about is hidden promise, about reviving this sleeping goliath and so he casts the deciding vote that they head in the traditional American direction – West! They barter some of their horses for the natives’ camels and set off.

Wayne’s diary and deterioration

The text switches to a verbatim transcription of Wayne’s diary, describing how they head West for weeks, trekking across the vast desert and becoming ever more dehydrated, ill and malnourished.

Orlowski picks up an infection from bad water, becomes delirious and dies. Ricci recedes deeper and deeper into his gangster fantasies. Captain Steiner keeps disappearing off on his own, following his own ‘ambiguous motives. Anne Summers discovers make-up and spends increasing amounts of time at the end of each day’s slow march across the desert, holed up in the derelict room of whichever motel they’ve taken shelter in for the night, applying heavy make-up. His diary gives the impression he is keeping the expedition together but the people who find them, later, report that Wayne had liberally applied make-up to himself – clearly he’d been deteriorating as quickly as the others. In fact all the members of the dying expedition were covered in swathes of make-up which seemed like tribal masks.

On 21 September they arrive at Dodge City, famous for its Wild West legends, and crawl up to a Wild West theme park. Here several things happen. Delirious, Wayne realises that Ricci has stolen the last of the water. Lying against the wall of a theme park Western saloon clutching a rifle, Wayne sees Ricci coming up the hill towards him, wearing full Wild West cowboy outfit complete with gun in a holster, obviously hoping to re-enact the gunfight at the OK Corral or some such.

He realised that the whole secret logic of their journey across America had been leading them to this absurd and childish confrontation in a theme park frontier street, in a make-believe world already overtaken by a second arid West far wilder than anything those vacationing suburbanites of the late twentieth century could ever have imagined. (Chapter 14, Wayne’s Diary: Part One)

Wayne’s account of events becomes blurred and confused, but we later learn that at the last minute the confrontation is avoided because Captain Steiner, from some hidden location, shoots Ricci through the head. The expedition’s not going well, is it?

Wayne sets off looking for Summers and spends hours blundering round the theme park till he comes to the Boot Hill cemetery and slumps exhausted. He sees the Captain walking across the car park towards him and, seized with resentment, shakily raises his rifle to shoot him.

But at that moment an immensely weird thing happens: vast cowboy figures appear in the sky. Thousands of feet tall the images of first John Wayne then Henry Fonda then Alan Ladd appear in the sky towering over Wayne and he passes out.

Rescue by McNair and the steam-cars

Hours pass. He wakes up to see something flying in the sky overhead. It is a propeller-powered glider, a kind of microlight. To his amazement he realises, as it swoops low, that it is being steered by none other than McNair, the ship’s engineer they’d assumed had perished in New York. He lands and comes to help Wayne at the same moment as three enormous steam-powered motor cars come roaring into the car park, driven by Heinz, GM, Pepsodent and Xerox.

They gives Wayne water and food and nurse him back to health as McNair explains that, back in New York he and the crew had felt the Boston nuclear bomb, then gone up to the roof of the Pan Am building and read the radiation meters, and decided to leave town quickly. Almost all the crew escaped except two who were off ransacking New York shops and couldn’t be contacted.

McNair had discovered the three steam-cars – hand-built for America’s last President, President Brown, but then abandoned – in a Brooklyn warehouse and had been tinkering with them in between repairing the SS Apollo. Now he and the crew jumped into them and high-tailed it south. They came across Heinz, GM, Pepsodent and Xerox who confirmed they’d seen Wayne et al and took them with them onto Washington. Here the ship’s crew opted to stay, near the sea, treating the natives who, they discovered, are suffering from leukaemia and a range of radiation-caused illnesses, and can search for batteries and radio equipment to rig up and make calls back to base in Moscow to send a rescue ship.

McNair, Heinz, GM, Pepsodent and Xerox opt to head West in search of our guys. McNair had discovered the microlight, The Gossamer Albatross (‘a delicate pedal-driven glider, now a dusty relic but once a poem to challenge the sun’) on display in the abandoned Smithsonian Museum, fixed it up (like so many of the characters fix so many old machines, in this frictionless dream of a story) and has flown ahead of the steam-cars as they head West, till he saw a tell-tale of wreckage and dead camels (the camels they set off with had died one by one; as they left each town behind the increasingly deranged Dr Ricci had set fire to it) and eventually traced what was left of the expedition to this Wild West theme park.

Ballard tells us that the steam cars are pulling a truck which is full of coal. OK. But what about the water? The whole point of Wayne and team nearly dying is they couldn’t find any water. Wouldn’t a steam-driven car need water, a lot of water? It was paying close attention to details like this which made his early, disaster novels so harrowing. Maybe writing the wild fantasy of The Unlimited Dream Company liberated Ballard, but he no longer lets facts and plausibility get in the way of the increasingly ridiculous fantasy.

California is now an Amazonian rainforest

So they now carry on pounding West in the three noisy exciting steam-cars, slowly climbing into the foothills of the Rockies, higher and higher until they encounter something they’d forgotten about – snow!

After some frolicking and snowball fights they carry on, crossing the Rockies and descending the other side to discover that California has become a vast extension of the Amazon rainforest. The hot ocean currents which now run from South America up the Pacific Coast and have helped desertify most of the country have, on the contrary, led to heavy tropical rainfall on the west side of the Rockies, turning it into a tropical jungle. Through it wander descendants of the animals set free from various zoos including elephants and giraffes, leopards and cheetahs. Which lets Ballard’s imagination run riot and allows him to write sentences like:

The giraffe paused among the pools of water in Fremont Street, raised its delicate muzzle to the rain-washed air and gazed at the glittering facade of the Golden Nugget. (Chapter 21, Crash Landing)

Las Vegas is ablaze with light

But the main thing that happens is that they head for Las Vegas because from up in the microlite McNair has seen it all lit up with lights. I was puzzled by the geography of this because I thought Las Vegas is east of the Rockies, but… anyway, they drive into Las Vegas to find all the lights fully functioning, the casinos and hotels all lit up but nobody at all around. They park up and hear sound from the Sahara Hotel. They push through the heavy theatre doors into the auditorium and discover a packed audience applauding like crazy as Frank Sinatra sings My Way on stage. Then Ol Blue Eyes introduces Dean Martin who saunters on, and little Judy Garland runs onstage too. Entranced, Wayne blunders up onstage and bumps into Sinatra who falls over knocking Dean Martin off the stage into the orchestra pit where the band goes berserk, poking themselves in the eye with their instruments

As the music trailed away into a painful see-saw the spotlights swerved across the auditorium. Waiters dashed about like maniacs, one of the blue rinses poked out her right eye, the huge Texan in the plaid jacket stood up, jammed his cigar down his throat with one hand and knocked his head off with the other. When Dean Martin splashed the last drops of whiskey into his face the audience applauded so vigorously that their hands came off. Judy Garland’s winsome skipping had become a St Vitus-like blur, she moved to the edge of the stage and fell into the woodwind section, where the musicians were calmly stabbing themselves in the face. (Chapter 18, The Electrographic Dream)

They are robots.

President Manson

Wayne, McNair and the ‘natives’ are just processing this surreal vision when they are arrested by a small group of Chicano teenagers carrying guns. These teenage toughs (including a girl, Ursula) drive them in real, petrol-fuelled cars (a Buick, a Pontiac and a Dodge) down the light-filled Strip to a huge hotel, the Desert Inn, last refuge of the mad millionaire Howard Hughes. In they go and up in the lift to the penthouse where they are introduced to ‘President Manson’. Now presumably this is one more ‘joke’, satire or piece of satire at America’s expense, because Manson was of course the name of the psychopath who ran the gang which murdered Sharon Tate on 9 August 1969.

Anyway it’s not the same guy, obviously. This flabby white man, naked except for a towel, lies on a medical couch in front of a rack of TVs with a disinfecting aerosol can in his hand in front of a battery of TV screens. He is intended to be a strange and eerie figure.

The man’s strong forehead, fleshy nose and jowls reminded him immediately of the former President Nixon, now sitting out a century’s exile in the old Hughes suite in Las Vegas. The resemblance was uncanny, as if the man in front of the television screens was a skilful actor who had made a career out of impersonating Presidents, and found that he could imitate Nixon more convincingly than any other. He had caught the long stares and suddenly lowered eyes, the mixture of idealism and corruption, the deep melancholy and lack of confidence coupled at the same time with a powerful inner conviction. (Chapter 19, The Hughes Suite)

Now we discover that Manson’s people, about 100 in number, are running a nuclear fission reactor at Lake Mead. The lights are all on at Las Vegas because the reactor generates so much power it needs to be burned off somehow. This makes the TV cameras and sets go. Not only that but he has TV monitors in cities across the country. And it was his people who projected the 1,000 feet tall holograms of Hollywood cowboys over Wayne’s head in the Dodge City theme park. ‘Manson’s team had been moving from city to city, putting on these laser shows to warn the Indians away.’

Manson himself made the long trek across America from East to West a generation ago, one of the men who helped him was a professor who helped revive the nuclear technology at the Lake Mead reactor and so restore Las Vegas (and who spent his time building the life-sized replicas of Sinatra and Martin who our heroes saw earlier). But Manson is convinced he picked up some virulent virus or bacterium. Manson has big plans which include a) moving on from Lake Mead to reactivate some of America’s other 300 nuclear plants b) destroying the cities of eastern America in order to kill off the virus he’s convinced he’s got, to stop the spread of this ‘plague’. He’s clearly psychopathic.

This impression is rammed home when Manson takes Wayne on a random three-day trip to his outpost at the Beverley Hills Hotel in Los Angeles. Partly this is to allow Ballard to poke fun at all the self-important movie people who used to inhabit it and are now as dead as the sand b) it leads into a stomach-churning scene where Manson takes control of the helicopter gunship they’ve flown there in and machine guns all the wild tropical animals he can see, including a bull elephant and any number of pink flamingos. Perhaps this is some last after-flicker of anti-Vietnam war satire, but it just felt unpleasant.

Nonetheless, Manson has played successfully on Wayne’s own feverish dreams of single-handedly making America great again. Manson jokily suggests that maybe Wayne can be the 46th President. Yes. He gives a speech at one of the meetings Manson chairs with some of his young helpers in which he proposes advertising for more young people to come from Mexico (where the present helpers originated), jokily saying they’ll get an old Coca Cola and burger factory working to attract them, then get them restoring old tech – more helicopters, cars, and then the nukes. He and Manson share an uneasy ambition to get the nukes revitalised, though for differing reasons…

Wayne is woken in the night by alarms and shouting. Paco and the other helpers are running around, the TV screens are flickering. Apparently a rescue ship from Europe has docked in Miami. Should Wayne throw in his lot with President Manson and his nuclear arsenal and his dreams of reviving America… or stay true to his background and help the rescue ship?

Dr Fleming

Wayne is out flying in the microlight when a combat helicopter deliberately flies close – Manson’s Chicano friends resent his influence with the President – ripping the delicate frame to bits and Wayne tumbles down into the jungle.

When he regains control he is surrounded by Presidents. Robot replicas of all 44 Presidents of the United States who all march forward giving their most famous speeches simultaneously till he screams. At which point a short, bearded, twinkly eyed professor in a white coat emerges from between them. This allows Ballard to write this sentence:

Sidestepping through the Kennedys, he smiled reassuringly at Wayne.

Which, like so many of the sentences and scenes in the book, you sense was written more for Ballard’s entertainment than ours. You can almost hear him chortling at his surrealist brilliance.

Anyway this caricature prof declares that he is Dr William Fleming (if I had a pound for every Ballard character who is a doctor), he was part of the expedition which came to America twenty years ago and was also dying in the desert when Manson saved them and took them in. Fleming is the brains behind restoring all the old tech, getting the nuclear plant running again, and all the lights in Las Vegas, and restoring the cars and all the other things Manson’s young technicians are now working on. This is all so wildly improbable it’s not worth troubling your mind about. On the other hand, it gives Ballard permission to write descriptions of Fleming’s extensive robot workshops which sound like a novelistic version of the 1973 movie Westworld complete with Ballard’s by-now trademark extreme obviousness.

One section, at the rear of the auditorium, resembled the studio of a demented sculptor. Here the faces and hands were cut and modelled from sheets of flesh-tinted plastic, then moulded on to the metal armatures of the arms and heads. Dozens of familiar figures stood around, a pantheon of popular Americana gathered dust. Huckleberry Finn and Humphrey Bogart, Lindbergh and Walt Disney, Jim Bowie and Joe Di Maggio, lay stiffly across each other on the floor like drunks. Bing Crosby stood golf club in hand, throat exposed to reveal his voice synthesiser. Muhammed Ali posed in boxer shorts, the stumps of his wrists trailing veins of green and yellow wires. Marilyn Monroe smiled at them as they hurried past, her breasts on the floor at her feet, open chest displaying the ball-joints and pneumatic bladders that filled the empty spaces of her heart. And last of all there were the Presidents, a jumble of arms, legs and faces lying on the work-benches as if about to be assembled into one nightmare monster of the White House. (Chapter 23, The Sunlight Flier)

Fleming also happens the very man that Wayne’s mother, in one of her rare sober spells, told him was his father.

But once, during a brief moment of lucidity while recovering from an overdose of Seconal, his mother fixed Wayne with a calm eye and told him that his father had been Dr William Fleming, Professor of Computer Sciences at the American University, who had vanished during an ill-fated expedition to the United States twenty years earlier. (Chapter 2, Collision Course)

Way back at the start of the book we were told part of Wayne’s motivation in coming to America was to find the father who left when he was small. Well, here he is and Wayne immediately dismisses any thought that this funny little man is his dad. Which is a bit of an anticlimax.

Fleming is mad. He explains his plans. He is converting his 44 robot Presidents into a production line. They are creating an air force of microlights out of a special kind of laser glass which was developed at the end of the Oil Age in the 1990s, a type of high tensile glass which incorporates miniature lasers which super-heat the air below them, thus creating the thermals on which they can fly. If this sounds like nonsense, it’s because it is. Fleming’s plan is to create an air force of these glass microlights and then escape to the sun!

He also tells him the truth about Manson. Manson was originally incarcerated in Spandau Prison in Berlin, which was turned, after the end of the Oil Age, into a lunatic asylum. Before Manson broke out, blagged his way onto a ship to America, survived crossing the great desert and changed his name, adopting Manson as a new name. He is, in fact, genuinely insane.

Las Vegas under attack

Fleming keeps Wayne prisoner for a week in the Vegas Convention Centre, occasionally expanding on his mad plan. Helicopter flights overhead become more regular and urgent. Then they hear guns, missiles. Then the ceiling of the Convention Centre shatters and in the confusion Wayne escapes.

Outside the city is a warzone with areas round Manson’s hotel surrounded by sandbags. Making an escape in a car, Wayne bumps into a fleet of cars coming the other way carrying Anne Summers and a badly injured McNair. She tells him that 1. a rescue fleet has landed, three ships carrying some 500 soldiers and six aircraft, a smaller expedition coming up from Phoenix, and both have joined forces with Mexican and Indian mercenaries; and that 2. Manson has gone quite mad and has his ginger on the button of eight missiles tipped with nuclear warheads. ‘Wayne, we have to do something!’

There is a prolonged description of the battle for Las Vegas, dominated by the radio controlled helicopter gunships Manson has had built for him, but also by the last fling of the 1,000 feet high holograms which he tries to intimidate the invaders, images of John Wayne as marine, which morph into other Hollywood figures, before finally settling into the nightmare image of the actual Charles Manson, the black-eyed psychopath.

Slowly the lights go out across the ruined town as the smoke from napalm floats across the Strip and Wayne makes his way through the wrecked cars toward a final showdown with President Manson in Caesar’s Palace which has been converted into a war room, complete with map of the world.

Nuclear roulette

Manson is sitting naked in a chair by a roulette table with the map of America louring over them. As the roulette wheel turns it highlights the names of American cities, lights come on by each city, and the illuminated names flicker across Manson’s naked body. It is meant to be a macabre image of twisted madness. Manson rolls a big marble ball into the roulette wheel and the name it stops at will be nuked. Minneapolis. Manson programs the missile and Wayne watches remote control cameras record its firing sequence and then blasting into the sky on its journey to obliterate the mid-West city.

This makes no sense because Manson can see, on other cameras, the expeditionary force working its way through the jungle from the coast, cutting through with machetes and tanks. It will be at Vegas in a few hours. There seemed a total absence of logic in why Manson was blasting mid-West cities and not his enemies near at hand.

Wayne joins in the macabre game and they let off six cruise missiles at six abandoned American cities, but then Manson reveals there is one left, one Titan. Wayne rolls. It lands on zero. Manson reveals zero means Las Vegas. It will launch in three hours time, go up vertically, then descend on Las Vegas and cleanse it of its germs.

Wayne makes to attack Manson but Paco, his faithful bodyguard, clouts him round the head. When he comes to, he has been handcuffed to the ornate doorhandles of the War Room.

The military expeditions arrive

Over the next hour the military expeditions arrive in a lightless abandoned Las Vegas. They think the war is over and Manson fled. Wayne is astonished to see – on the array of Manson’s TV monitors – a small plane land and an obvious leader of the troops emerge, none other than Captain Steiner. Ballard gives half a page explaining what happened to him after he abandoned the expedition at Dodge City, was picked up by Mexicans, then volunteered to help the invading forces, felt guilty about abandoning them etc etc. It doesn’t matter, it’s all twaddle by this stage.

Then Manson makes a broadcast over the loudspeakers hidden around the city to the effect that a nuclear bomb is about to go off and cleanse them all. As the soldiers, Captain Steiner, injured old McNair, plucky Anne Summers all start panicking up the street marches a cohort of men in tight formation though with a bewildering variety of uniforms.

It is the robot Presidents. Directed by Dr Fleming they storm Caesar’s Palace, burst through the locked doors of the War Rom, surround Manson in an android firing squad and riddle his body with bullets.

Freed, Wayne stumbles out into the main strip and is reunited with Summers, McNair and hugged by Captain Steiner. They are all wondering what to do, it’s less than an hour till the nuke explodes over them, Manson told Wayne that there were no recall codes, and they can’t get far enough away in just an hour…

But oh yes they can. Emerging from the wrecked Convention Centre come the glass microlights steered by the survivors of Manson’s Chicano army. Many have room for two, three or six passengers. All the soldiers climb in, Steiner, McNair, Summers and then, last of all, the man who was briefly 46th president of America.

The glass microlights rise up into the air and chunter off at speed towards the Rockies. Looking back Wayne sees a vapour trail rise suddenly from the jungle south of Vegas. That’s the Titan rocket launching from its silo. But he and the others are safely behind the shield of the mountains when the missile descends and evaporates Las Vegas for ever.

Clustering together, like fireflies warming themselves in their own light, the squadron of Fliers hovered above the jungle canopy, safe behind the protective bulk of the mountain. Wayne embraced Ursula’s shoulders, reassuring the suddenly panicky young woman. Already his confidence was returning. As he waited for the flash that would signal the death of Manson’s empire, Wayne briefly mourned the end of his own short Presidency. Yet the dream remained, he would enter the White House one day and sit in that office he had cleaned, without realising it at the time, in preparation for himself. He would arrive at his inauguration in one of these crystal aeroplanes, be the first President to be sworn in on the wing. The old dreams were dead, Manson and Mickey Mouse and Marilyn Monroe belonged to a past America, to that city of antique gamblers about to be vaporised fifty miles away. It was time for new dreams, worthy of a real tomorrow, the dreams of the first of the Presidents of the Sunlight Fliers. (Chapter 32, California Time)

Thoughts

Some Ballardians are cross that the academy doesn’t take him seriously as a writer, doesn’t acknowledge him as a great contemporary writer, doesn’t teach him on courses about ‘literature.’ Remind anyone who ever makes that argument about this book: it is slack-minded, half-arsed garbage.

Credit

‘Hello America’ by J.G. Ballard was published by Jonathan Cape in 1981. Page references are to the 1985 Triad/Panther Books paperback edition. All quotations are used for the purpose of criticism and review.

Related links

• Hello America Wikipedia article

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