Ballardian

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 – to what extent [...]

Michael Moorcock, J.G. Ballard and JGB’s partner Claire Walsh in September, 2006 (photo courtesy Linda Moorcock).
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Interview by Mike Holliday
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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 professionally as soon as [...]

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 of [...]

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, [...]