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aegiandyad In reply to DouglasHumphries [2011-12-13 15:57:18 +0000 UTC]

It's so unusual to find anyone who has read them. Most people think his career started with Empire Of The Sun... This is just one of at least a dozen Ballardian deviations in our gallery. For convenience they are collected together on this page: [link] .

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DouglasHumphries In reply to aegiandyad [2011-12-14 02:51:09 +0000 UTC]

Hello ! - I'm really most into Ballard's first 4 post-apocalyptic books and esp his early short story collections .... never saw or read Empire Of The Sun - after that I liked High Rise and Concrete Island ( with some reservations ) ... I used to go into our local Sci Fi bookstore ,years ago , - and got the impression that most sci -fi readers were not that crazy about him --so I was happy to see that most bookstores today put him in the literature section.

Thanks for the link .........cheers, douglas

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aegiandyad In reply to DouglasHumphries [2011-12-14 09:11:27 +0000 UTC]

J.G.Ballard was alwaysd a literary stylist first and a science fiction writer second. His SF ideas simply set the stage for explorations of what he called 'inner space'. The novels are about human psychology rather than manuals for anticipating and dealing with disaster or the shock of the new. I think this is most apparent in the Vermilion Sands collection, set in some kind of artists' colony or faded, quondam coastal resort of the future. I illustrated one with 'The Sound Sweep' and another with 'Coral-D Of The Cloud Sculptors. Critics have said that the plot devices in these stories don't stand up to scientific scrutiny or make no 'hard SF' sense, which is true. They are the jumping off point for poetic flights of surrealistic imagination and various kinds of human drama. Concrete Island [link] and High Rise seem to be part of an 'urban disaster' trilogy which culminated in CRASH, his controversial novel of eroticised carmageddon, filmed by David Cronenberg.

After Empire Of The Sun and The Kindness Of Women, which were clearly autobiographical, Ballard returned to the modern 'urban nightmares' of the gated community [Running Wild], the ex-pat coastal retirement enclaves of southern Spain [Cocaine Nights]and the modern 'business park' as exemplified by the setting of Super Cannes in a final trilogy of 'sociological disaster' novels. Like you, I am still very fond of the early work, especially that first, fabulous story collection, The Voices Of Time.

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aegiandyad In reply to killerpine [2011-11-21 11:21:23 +0000 UTC]

I don't know if this will whet your appetite further [link] . It's an excellent review of the story and the collection in which it appears. My advice is to try to find, and read first, his previous collection' The Voices Of Time' [link] . It was the first writing of his I had ever read and I am still waiting for a deviation to occur to me which would do it justice in the same sort of way as my 'illustration' for The Terminal Beach.

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aegiandyad In reply to tbandersen2011 [2011-09-27 09:23:42 +0000 UTC]

If Len Deighton was 'the poet of the spy story' then J.G.Ballard was the poet of 'new wave' science fiction with his obsessed, vivid, hallucinatory prose. The constant theme is 'mind as a state of landscape' suffering some kind of nervous breakdown or realignment of human psychology when faced with the horrors and stresses of apocalyptic disasters or just life in the modern built environment of high rise city blocks, multistorey carparks, traffic islands and motorway interchanges. He is a literary stylist and might prove difficult if English is not your first language. Ballard has been called a 'national treasure' and has written significant works of 'straight' fiction, including the autobiographical 'Empire Of The Sun', which has been filmed, its sequel The Kindness Of Women and the sociological 'disaster' novels, Running Wild, Cocaine Nights and Super Cannes. He is without doubt a significant author.

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