All the members of the Apollo expedition, now anchored off the Brooklyn coast after their long voyage from Plymouth, are of some sort of American ancestry. The rest of the world, busy with its own survival, has largely forgotten about America - a nation whose destruction began with its bungling of the energy crisis in the 1980s. The expedition begins in Manhattan and moves west, stopping at Holiday Inns and abandoned theme parks until they experience - in the heart of a great Amazon forest - the shock that had been awaiting them in Las Vegas all along. Frank Sinatra, Charles Manson and forty-six Presidents of the United States play their part in J G Ballard's tribute to American dreams past and future. The drama is played out, as one has come to expect from Ballard, in a landscape of haunting vividness. It is America all right, but America as never before.