Ballardian: the World of J.G. Ballard

From amazon.co.uk:
Synopsis
‘Miracles of Life’ opens and closes in Shanghai, the city where J.G.Ballard was born, and where he spent the most of the Second World War interned with his family in a Japanese concentration camp. In the intervening chapters Ballard creates a memoir that is both an enthralling narrative and a detailed examination of […]

I’ve reproduced publishers’ synopses and added links to essays and reviews for most works; many thanks to Rick McGrath for the first-edition scans, much more evocative than the current crop of covers (but that’s another story). I’ve also added some rudimentary thoughts — placeholders — of my own, and will flesh these out as I […]

JG BALLARD
Novels
• The Wind from Nowhere (1961)
• The Drowned World (1962)
• The Burning World (1964) (aka The Drought)
• The Crystal World (1966)
• The Atrocity Exhibition (1969) (aka Love and Napalm: Export USA)
• Crash (1973)
• Concrete Island (1974)
• High-Rise (1975)
• The Unlimited Dream Company (1979)
• Hello America (1981)
• Empire of the Sun (1984)
• The Day of […]

I’m only covering the major collections, here.
J.G. BALLARD
Short Stories & Non-Fiction
• The Atrocity Exhibition (1970) (aka Love and Napalm: Export USA) (1972)
• Vermilion Sands (1971)
• A User’s Guide to the Millennium (1996)
• J.G. Ballard: The Complete Short Stories (2001)
..:: MORE
• Novels
• Filmography (coming soon)
• Artography (coming soon)
• Secondary bibliography (off site; compiled by Umberto Rossi).

OPENING LINE:
“The dust came first.”
From the Penguin edition, 1976:
The wind came from nowhere … a super-hurricane that blasted round the globe at hundreds of miles per hour burying whole communities beneath piles of rubble, destroying all organized life and driving those it did not kill to seek safety in tunnels and sewers – […]

OPENING LINE:
“Soon it would be too hot.”
From Amazon UK:
In the 21st century, fluctuations in solar radiation have caused the ice-caps to melt and the seas to rise. Global temperatures have climbed, and civilization has retreated to the Arctic and Antarctic circles. London is a city now inundated by a primeval swamp, to which an expedition […]

OPENING LINE:
“At noon, when Dr Charles Ransom moored his houseboat in the entrance to the river, he saw Quilter, the idiot son of the old woman who lived in the ramshackle barge outside the yacht basin, standing on a spur of exposed rock on the opposite bank and smiling at the dead birds floating in […]

OPENING LINE:
“Above all, the darkness of the river was what impressed Dr. Sanders as he looked out for the first time across the open mouth of the Matarre estuary.”
Ballard’s fourth novel. My 1993 Flamingo version has quotes on the back:
Through a ‘leaking’ of time and a supersaturation of matter, a forest area in West […]

OPENING LINE:
“Apocalypse. A disquieting feature of this annual exhibition — to which the patients themselves were not invited — was the marked preoccupation of the paintings with the theme of world cataclysm, as if these long-incarcerated patients had sensed some seismic upheaval within the minds of their doctors and nurses.”
For many, The Atrocity Exhibition is […]

OPENING LINE:
“All summer the cloud-sculptors would come from Vermilion Sands and sail their painted gliders above the coral towers that rose like white pagodas beside the highway to Lagoon West.” (from ‘The Cloud-Sculptors of Coral D’).
I’m not covering every one of JGB’s short-story collections in this bibliography — with the release of the Complete Short […]

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OPENING LINE:
“Vaughan died yesterday in his last car-crash.”
If The Drowned World was the book which cemented Ballard’s literary reputation (in Britain, at least), then Crash was almost certainly the one which made him a non-entity in America’s eyes. Following on from publisher Nelson Doubleday’s outrage at an earlier Ballard story, ‘Why I Want to Fuck […]

OPENING LINE:
“Soon after three o’clock on the afternoon of April 22nd 1973, a 35-year-old architect named Robert Maitland was driving down the high-speed exit lane of the Westway interchange in central London”.
This short novel represents the second installment in JGB’s ‘urban disaster’ trilogy (Crash was the first; High-Rise was to follow).
Architect Robert Maitland crashes his […]

OPENING LINE:
“Later, as he sat on his balcony eating the dog, Dr Robert Laing reflected on the unusual events that had taken place within this huge apartment building during the previous three months.”
From the opening scene of Laing tucking into his canine dinner — the spoils of urban warfare — to the final ascent of […]

OPENING LINE:
“In the first place, why did I steal the aircraft?”
The Unlimited Dream Company is “one of the titles featured in Anthony Burgess’ Ninety-Nine Novels: The Best in English since 1939″.
It’s also one of Ballard’s most surprising and underrated works, and deeply personal, too, given that it takes place in his home town of Shepperton. […]

OPENING LINE:
‘There’s gold, Wayne, gold dust everywhere! Wake up! The streets of America are paved with gold!’.
From the Carroll & Grad 1981 edition:
A century after America’s financial collapse and the climactic upheavals of the 1990s, Wayne stows away on SS Apollo, bound for the New World on a voyage of rediscovery. He and the crew […]

OPENING LINE:
“Wars came early to Shanghai, overtaking each other like the tides that raced up the Yangtze and returned to this gaudy city all the coffins cast adrift from the funeral piers of the Chinese Bund.”
There’s not much left to say about the autobiographical Empire, perhaps Ballard’s most popular book and the work that catapulted […]

OPENING LINE:
“Dreams of rivers, like scenes from a forgotten film, drift through the night, in passage between memory and desire.”
Another misunderstood book in the Ballardian canon, although Samuel R. Delany, in his 1998 review, gives it a red-hot go. Still, you’d be forgiven for thinking he was reviewing Kingdom Come, so similar are the critical […]

OPENING LINE:
“25 August, 1988. Where to start?”
This novella is just 87 pages long. Ballard calls it a ‘whydunit’ (rather than a ‘whodunit’), and it’s as uncanny as that implies. The shadow of Columbine hangs over this work (or, rather, vice versa).
The murders happened shortly after 8 o’clock on the morning of 25 June, 1988. Media […]

OPENING LINE:
“Every afternoon in Shanghai during the summer of 1937 I rode down to the Bund to see if the war had begun.”
I have a real soft spot for The Kindness of Women, an autobiographical work that’s loosely described as a sequel to Empire of the Sun. Here, Ballard is honest, self-deprecating and wildly vivid […]

OPENING LINE:
” ‘Save the albatross! Stop nuclear testing now!’ “.
From the 1994 Picador edition:
Led by a charismatic and slightly unhinged woman, a group of environmentalists wins control over a small atoll in the Pacific and sets up a utopian community. Breeding other threatened species and among themselves, these homesteaders slowly transform an Eden of their […]

OPENING LINE:
“Crossing frontiers is my profession.”
From the 1996 Flamingo edition:
“To an outsider, the retired British residents of the Spanish coastal resort of Estrella de Mar belong to an idyllic community, enjoying a lifestyle of constant cultural and sporting activity — based around the thriving Club Nautico. But the image is shattered when five people die […]

OPENING LINE:
“In his prime the Hollywood screenwriter was one of the tragic figures of our age, evoking the special anguish that arises from feeling sorry for oneself while making large amounts of money”. (from ‘The Sweet Smell of Excess’).
From the 1996 Harper Collins edition:
The first-ever collection of J.G. Ballard’s articles and reviews, published over the […]

OPENING LINE:
“The first person I met at Eden-Olympia was a psychiatrist, and in many ways it seems only too apt that my guide to this ‘intelligent’ city in the hills above Cannes should have been a specialist in mental disorders.”
From the 2002 Picador edition:
“Eden-Olympia is more than just a multinational business park, it is a […]

OPENING LINE:
“A small revolution was taking place, so modest and well behaved that almost no one had noticed.”
From the 2003 Flamingo edition:
Violent rebellion comes to London’s middle classes in the extraordinary new novel from the author of Cocaine Nights and Super-Cannes.
When a bomb goes off at Heathrow it looks like another random act of […]

OPENING LINE:
“I first met Jane Ciracylides during the Recess, that world slump of boredom, lethargy and high summer which carried us all so blissfully through ten unforgettable years, and I suppose that may have had a lot to do with what went on between us.” (from ‘Prima Belladonna’).
From the 2001 Flamingo edition (originally one volume; […]

OPENING LINE:
“The suburbs dream of violence.”
From the 2006 Fourth Estate edition:
Richard Pearson, unemployed advertising executive and life-long rebel, is driving out to Brooklands, a motorway town on the A25. A few weeks earlier his father was fatally wounded at the Metro-Centre, a vast shopping mall in the middle of this apparently peaceful town, when a […]