A User's Guide to the Millennium

Best known for his novels Crash and Empire of the Sun, English author J.G. Ballard has a magpie intellect whose full range is evident in this collection of essays and reviews from the past 30 years. Whether he's writing about Andy Warhol (''a Valium-numbed Mickey Mouse in a white fright-wig'') or the future (''which in Britain has been dead for decades''), Ballard is at once brainy and accessible, fierce and funny. His trademark obsessions — car design, the foibles of the famous, and science fiction — animate these pages, but he offers just as many surprises, including a critique of Coke and a spirited defense of Salvador Dali. In closing A User's Guide to the Millennium, Ballard gives a fascinating account of his childhood years in a Japanese internment camp near Shanghai during World War II, where he was ''happiest and most at home.'' These are timeless, often prescient millennial meditations. A