There is always a hit of recognition when starting a new Ballard novel, and for those in need of a fix then his latest, 'Super-Cannes' comes up with the goods. The archetypal characters are all there: the pilot with the injured leg, the doctor, the psychiatrist and the usual collection of obsessives locked into their own heads. Like 'Cocaine Nights' the story takes place on the Mediterranean Coast, a transplanted suburbia that Ballard is increasingly making his own. In 'Cocaine Nights' the story was set in Spain, here he has moved westwards into France and the Riviera. This familiar conjunction of time, place and character is not to say that this is a rehash of the previous novel(s). Ballard, like one of the obsessives that people his fictions, traverses the same ground but each cycle is subtly different, imperceptibly changing and evolving but never breaking away from the psychic landscape that is uniquely his own.

Super-Cannes, is set in Eden-Olympia, a high-tech business park that overlooks Cannes and represents the wave of the future. As the name suggests, it is a paradise for the new Gods, the technocracy for whom work is everything and everything is work. The apparent calm of this idyllic community of hard-working corporate executives, researchers and technicians is suddenly torn asunder when David Greenwood, a paediatrician at Eden's health centre, goes on a killing spree which ends only after he has killed several of his colleagues and three hostages before taking his own life.

Greenwood's replacement at Eden is Jane Sinclair, a colleague from London, who arrives with her husband, Paul, a pilot recovering from a leg injury sustained in a plane crash. It is the latter, with time on his hands and an inclination to explore, who becomes involved in trying to figure out what it was that drove Greenwood to turn on his colleagues. What he finds, guided by psychiatrist Wilder Penrose, is a new society where controlled psychopathy is used an instrument of therapy. As the story unfolds Sinclair finds himself drawn into the psychotic environment engineered by Penrose, where child porn, racist violence, robbery and gangsterism become tools to preserve the charged atmosphere at Eden.

Like much of Ballard's work, Super-Cannes is firmly rooted in the world around us. Through the lens of his own fixations he peels back the fascist possibilities inherent in 'business park culture'. The recreational hatred that Wilder Penrose engineers at Eden Olympia mirrors the new fascism sweeping through Europe. The ubermensch of Eden Olympia have more in common with the middle-class and outwardly respectable Jorg Haider and his cohorts than the skinheads who flock to the banner of unreconstructed Nazism.

Like Maria del Rey's pornographic novel, (co-incidentally titled Eden Unveiled), and my own disastrous Games of Deceit, the idea of a high-tech community which turns to sexual kinks and to fascism, is central to Super-Cannes. It is the new work ethic which is the driving force of this weird journey. The old categories of work and play no longer exist. Corporate culture now demands total identification between the individual and his or her job. People are expected to work all hours, to give everything, to put the job first. But it isn't the fear of unemployment which underpins this new work ethic, rather it is because that is what the culture expects, it is the norm rather than the exception.

With the boundaries between work and play blurred, what is there left? How can a society which cannot relax remain sane? How can a society that is in danger of dying of boredom live with itself? As always Ballard asks uncomfortable questions, and in searching for an answer he delivers unsettling visions of the world we live in.