Ballardian

Jamie Sherry reviews a unique on-screen adaptation of Ballard’s work, now showing on BallardoTube: the Italian animation, Grande Anarca, based on JGB’s 1985 short story, ‘Answers to A Questionnaire’. Can the filmmakers succeed where other, big-name suitors have failed — decanting Ballard’s experimental literary narratives into a more linear cinematic language? Or does Ballard resist classification yet again?

Jordi Costa, the curator of J.G. Ballard: Autopsy of the New Millennium, currently exhibiting at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona, gifts us this incisive analysis of the major themes in Ballard’s work. Accompanying the essay is the alternate version of the exhibition’s promo trailer.

What can JGB’s handwriting tell us?

I had to smile when I read this from Wired’s Clive Thompson [via Boing Boing]:
If you want to read books that tackle profound philosophical questions, then the best — and perhaps only — place to turn these days is sci-fi. Science fiction is the last great literature of ideas. From where I sit, traditional [...]

A review of Demanding the Impossible, the Third Australian Conference on Utopia, Dystopia and Science Fiction, held at Monash University, Clayton, Melbourne, Australia, Dec 5-7.

LEFT: Johnny in his Crime days (1977; photo by James Stark).
Johnny Strike, lead vocalist and guitarist with original San Fran punk legends Crime, has just released a new collection of short stories published by Rudos and Rubes. Entitled A Loud Humming Sound Came from Above, it features ‘Jimmy Ballard’s Hospital Review’, first published here on [...]

More on the Dead Di meme, as Chris Petit reviews 12:23 by Eoin McNamee and The Accident Man by Tom Cain:
The princess, as a largely self-invented figure, is a gift to fiction, not least because the reasons she might have been killed are finally less arresting than speculation on her untimely death: the swansong of [...]

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 [...]

Image from Corridor #5, in which this interview appeared.
Recently, Keith S. emailed to tell me he’d come across a rare Ballard interview from 1974. It was published in Corridor, a small-press magazine that has been described as ‘a cheaper, thinner, New Worlds [featuring] many of the same authors’.
Corridor was the first partnership of Michael [...]

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 [...]

The UEA Studio: Conference Headquarters (photo: Simon Sellars).
I attended From Shanghai to Shepperton: An International Conference on J.G. Ballard at the University of East Anglia on the weekend, and I’m suffering a bit of a comedown. I always get a bit melancholy when these temporary autonomous zones collapse and everyone returns to virtual communication. Especially [...]

Interview by Gwyn Richards & Simon Sellars

Toby Litt is an English novelist who published his first book, Adventures in Capitalism (a volume of short stories), in 1996, when he was 28. He’s since won praise for the dark inventiveness of his writing, a combination of cinematic prose, apocalyptic imagery and sharp wit that freely dissects [...]

The Guardian has sparked off an unholy war:
When the Guardian referred to Martin Amis as ‘Britain’s greatest living author’ last week, one reader was so outraged she threatened to emigrate – or worse. So if not Amis, who? Stephen Moss assesses the field.”
[ via Ben Austwick ]
Again, Ballard doesn’t make the cut. But wait. In [...]