Guía del Usuario para
el Nuevo Milenio:
Ensayos y Reseñas
J. G. Ballard
Minotauro (2002)
Politics & Social Sciences

This Spanish edition of A User's Guide to the Millennium: Essays and Reviews is a smorgasbord of heady articles from newspapers, weeklies, and magazines by one of the most important writers of fiction to address the consequences of technology. The introduction to the issue 8/9 of Re/Search magazine, devoted to the writer, perfectly summarizes the author's work: “J.G. Ballard's work destroys the barriers between science and art; advertising and literature; politics and pop culture; ecological catastrophe and the Space Age; television and the new styles of sociopathic conformism; et al. He has identified and imaginatively expanded upon the new mythologies and symbolism of the imminent future. Sex, technology, advertising, this dying planet, increasingly innovative pathological behavior, the parallel world of the lives and deaths of famous celebrities-all intermingle in Ballard's cool explications of what is really going on.”

Looking for a cover that blended prophecy with ephemera, our cover cook took the archetypal pop icon of modern time, crushed it under his feet, and scanned the resulting wreck. Replacing the opening of a useless can with a keyhole that peeks into the truths about the contemporary world, boils down Ballard’s intriguing words: “The biggest developments of the immediate future will take place not on the Moon or Mars, but on Earth, and it is inner space, not outer, that needs to be explored. The only truly alien planet is Earth.”

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