And do we really need debate whether or not JGB belongs any longer to SF? Roger Luckhurst does, at agonising length, opening this short but dense Theoretical tract. Page after closely noted page is argued both to justify SF as a tag and JGB's place above it. It's dry and ultimately unnecessary and makes the reader wonder why Luckhurst simply didn't skip to page 180 where he defines JGB's work in terms of short - if contradictory - binaries: "mainstream/science fiction, high/low, modernist/postmodernist, fiction/autobiography".

No, the central struggle in The Angle Between Two Walls is between tedium and momentary inspiration. For the latter take, for example, Luckhurst's "uncanny embodiment" of The Atrocity Exhibition in the huge 1989 Warhol retrospective at London's Hayward Gallery (mistakenly cited as 1990). Or the largely excellent final chapter, in which JGB's twin confessional novels are unpicked in favour of pursuing autobiographical elements in everything but these books. Luckhurst's tautologous conclusion: that Ballard can only be defined in terms of his own "Ballardianism". This book collapses in on itself like a Black Hole.

In short, there is little that isn't immediately apparent from an thorough immersion in the original texts, and Luckhurst's final notes are inexcusable: a lazy assertion that "Bret Easton Ellis' American Psycho is the Crash of the 1990s"; and an unwarranted attack on Don DeLillo's work as "ungainly...novels pretending to be novels". "Does the angle between two walls have a happy ending?" asks Ballard. "Yes and no: oscillation," Luckhurst replies. By his own words shall we judge him.