Ballardian

The political theorist John Gray has long been an enthusiastic admirer of J.G. Ballard, and Ballard often expressed appreciation for Gray’s work. Mike Holliday examines the essental nature of this ‘two-man mutual admiration society’.

Ballard’s final novel, Kingdom Come, a dystopian account of consumerism as a type of ’soft fascism’, received lukewarm reviews and suggestions that the author was, perhaps, finally losing his touch. Others were eager to point to parallels between it and events around us: aggressive car commercials, racist behaviour by sports fanatics. In this article, Mike Holliday re-examines Kingdom Come and asks: can we really equate consumerism with fascism?

The story of Savoy Books is one of the strangest in publishing history: a tale of lost opportunities, missed opportunities, repression, censorship, imprisonment … and, most importantly, an incredible legacy of work that continues to disturb, challenge and confront. Mike Holliday talks to Savoy co-founder Michael Butterworth about all this and more, including the guidance Butterworth received as a young writer from J.G. Ballard.

Mike Holliday gets to the bottom of the 1968 obscenity trial brought against Bill Butler and the Unicorn Bookshop, for stocking Ballard’s ‘Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan’. As prosecuting counsel Michael Worsley asked of Ballard’s work, “Is this not the meanderings of a dirty and diseased mind?”

Mike Holliday examines one of the strangest, most obscure artifacts of Ballard’s career: the concrete poetry and graphic art that make up ‘J.G. Ballard’s Court Circular’. As Mike discovers, even the most unremarkable of Ballard’s writings can repay close attention.

Mike Holliday investigates a strange interregnum in Ballard’s career, three short stories that return to earlier concerns: psychological dislocations and disturbances, somehow caused by human space-flight, in our perception of the flow of time.

Cover detail: The Unlimited Dream Company (Cape 1979; artwork by Bill Botten). Mike Holliday explains how to read J.G. Ballard’s 1979 novel The Unlimited Dream Company as a fascistic work. Ambiguity is one of the defining features of J.G. Ballard’s fiction. Consider, for example: + Empire of the Sun and The Kindness of Women – [...]

Michael Moorcock, J.G. Ballard and JGB’s partner Claire Walsh in September, 2006 (photo courtesy Linda Moorcock). ———————————————— Interview by Mike Holliday ———————————————— Michael Moorcock has been a prolific writer and editor for the last five decades. Born in London, he was editing his first magazine by the age of seventeen, and started writing genre fiction [...]

In 1970, Ballard put together an ‘exhibition’ centred on a number of crashed cars that had been retreived from a London scrapyard. The background to the exhibition, its wider place in Ballard’s ouvre, and the effect on attendees, are all examined by Simon Ford in an article published in the online journal /seconds: “Ballard’s choice [...]

JGB once complained about the "dismal jargon" of over-intellectualised SF criticism. Here is a wonderful example of this sort of stuff. In a short analysis of "The Crystal World", the author manages to name-check Heidegger, Deleuze, Levinas, Derrida, Richard Feynman, Stephen Hawking, Henry James, Kierkegaard, Jesus Christ, Saussure, Levi-Strauss, Lacan, Kristeva, Guattari, Barthes, Foucault, Althusser, [...]