Ballardian: the World of J.G. Ballard

Pedro writes:
The canon of “Slipstream literature,” defined by a panel at Readercon has been posted by Paul DiFilippo. JGB is mentioned (Complete Stories as part of the “core canon” at number 10 and Empire of the Sun at 99). Kindness of Women was also suggested by one of the participants.
Here is a response by Paul […]

Mac Tonnies is a Kansas-based writer of post-cyberpunk science fiction (recently published by the redoubtable Rudy Rucker). He’s also the author of the book After the Martian Apocalypse, a speculative search for life on the Red Planet, as well as the originator of a ‘cryptoterrestrial’ philosophy that ambitiously seeks to explain (with ‘balanced skepticism’) […]

Something Awful is currently taking the piss out of ‘cyberia’ and the early days of the internet, looking back to a time when hyperlinks were revolutionary because ‘we don’t have to look at text as linear anymore, because it’s all connected now. Information wants to be free. It wants to rape itself and bear […]

Photo: Stephen Hughes.
Read recently…
+ Via Fanny Magnate, David Chandler’s essay on the work of photographer Stephen Hughes:
Over the last five years Hughes has worked all over Europe, developing an interest in what might be called ‘peripheral places’, sometimes places literally on the edge — of cities perhaps, or by the sea — but also pockets […]

RU Sirius has posted Part 2 of his mp3 interview with sometime Ballardian contributor, Chris Nakashima-Brown. They talk at greater length about the legacy of Ballard and JGB’s influence on cyberpunk and beyond. Includes Chris reading from his luminescent cyber-Ballardian works. This interview could be your only chance ever to hear a serious discussion about […]

Writer Chris Nakashima-Brown, instigator of the glorious Bruce Sterling/JG Ballard mashup on this site, and a man who has been described by a reviewer as “JG Ballard with a Texan twang”, was interviewed by cyberpunk holdout RU Sirius about “applied Ballardianism and the cyberpunk perspective on the war on terror”. Listen to the mp3 here […]

Here’s a review of an interesting-sounding Japanese cyberculture book, Full Metal Apache by Takayuki Tatsumi. In its analysis of Japanese popular culture — of ‘metal eaters’, ‘pink samurai and punk cats in space’ — Tatsumi brings into play Neuromancer, Blade Runner, Thomas Pynchon, JG Ballard, Burroughs, cyborg theory…
Wow — it all seems so…uh…last century.
>>Buy Full […]

from 2005: it’s old but good, it’s k-punk — where it at. Decipher at will.
“Wasn’t Postpunk in many ways already cyberpunk, the ‘post’ precisely signaling a break with lumpenpunk’s dull r and r orthodoxy? But the ‘cyber’ component of postpunk was not only, or even primiarily, sonic, it was also a matter of the incorporation […]

Bruce Sterling is a prolific science-fiction writer, futurist, social critic and design professor, best known for his bestselling novels and seminal short fiction, and as the editor of the Mirrorshades anthology that defined the ‘cyberpunk’ subgenre. His nonfiction includes works of futurism such as Tomorrow Now; a regular column and blog for Wired; and his […]