"A fierce and wayward beauty": Waste in the Fiction of J.G. Ballard, Part III
By William Viney • Dec 18th, 2007 •
Category: Jean Baudrillard, Lead Story, alternate worlds, architecture, dystopia, entropy, enviro-disaster, speed & violence, urban decay
According to William Viney, Crash presents a barrage of images that expresses collapse, dereliction, and waste; a seemingly endless carnival of sex and destruction; intoxicating, perverting, and desensitizing the reader, while Empire of the Sun can be seen as the terminus of Ballard’s treatment of waste, the epitome of all that has gone before. Although Ballard’s other works deal with the subject of death and the disposal of corpses, Empire of the Sun attempts to cope with this disposal on a mass-scale, or rather, during both war and peace, it explores the complex transition between the valued human being and lifeless, disposable cadaver.
