New Delhi, Sept. 20 -- "I dreamed of other accidents that might enlarge this repertory of orifices, relating them to more elements of the automobile's engineering, to the ever-more complex technologies of the future. What wounds would create the sexual possibilities of the invisible technologies of thermonuclear reaction chambers, white-tiled control rooms, the mysterious scenarios of computer circuitry?"

If David Cronenberg didn't exist, these lines from J.G. Ballard's Crash would have invented him. This 1973 novel was about a group of people who find sexual satisfaction in car crashes. Ballard called it a "pornographic novel about technology"-what makes it particularly unnerving is the calm, cold manner in which its graphic ideas are d...