Introduction

JG Ballard once said that the greatest novel of the 20th century was the medical textbook Gray’s Anatomy. Always healthily sceptical of the creative capacity of fiction, he was enchanted by the fictive potential in factual writing, textbooks, advertising copy, engineering reports, black box transcripts, political interviews, the Warren Commission Report and a medical volume called Crash Injuries. He saw that mass media and information technology were weaving fiction into the fabric of everyday life, and that … well, we’ll get to that very shortly. But I want to preface my selections with that thought by way of justification. You see, I’ve bent the rules slightly. By which I mean, I have driven a coach and horses through them. Here are my short fictions (non-fiction edition).