Ballardian

“Greetings from London! Hope all is well with you. I’ve just attended the long-anticipated JG Ballard Memorial celebration at the Tate Modern and now I’m catching my breath — and a few beers — at a nearby Thames-side pub with fellow Ballardians. We’re having a wonderful time — wish you were here. But let’s start at the beginning. We have time to order some Alsatian off the barbie…” Love from Rick.

A new interview with Michael Moorcock, discussing Burroughs, Ballard, the Bomb and more.

The return of Moorcock, Hawkwind, Frendz… and Jim Cawthorn.

Bruce Sterling wrote: ‘For the cyberpunks … technology is visceral. It is not the bottled genie of remote Big Science boffins; it is pervasive, utterly intimate. Not outside us, but next to us. Under our skin; often, inside our minds.’ And Ballard’s influence was at the heart of it.

Thomas Disch on J.G. Ballard.

Borges y Ballard.

A recent interview at the Burroughs site Reality Studio brings Ballard, Burroughs, Britton and Butterworth together … along with Arthur C. Clarke.

Drawing inspiration from J.G. Ballard’s exhibition of crashed cars in 1970, the Crashman presents his own festival of Atrocity films: aviation disasters set to musical soundtracks.

by Dominika Oramus World’s first hydrogen bomb explosion, Eniwetok Atoll, 1952. Dominika Oramus teaches Brit.Lit. professionally at the University of Warsaw. The following is Part Two of the introduction to Grave New World: The Decline of the West in the Fiction of J.G. Ballard, her post-doctoral thesis. Grave New World currently exists as a (very) [...]

Dominika Oramus reads Ballard’s work as a record of the gradual internal degeneration of Western civilization: though we are not literally living amidst the ruins, the golden age is far behind us and we are witnessing the twilight of the West.

Cousin Silas has created two albums inspired by the works of J.G. Ballard. Simon Sellars spoke to Silas about Ballard, Lovecraft, Forteana, Moorcock, Eno, Tarkovsky — all the essentials.

I’ve created a YouTube outpost for this site, divided into six channels: (1) J.G. Ballard Interviews; (2) J.G. Ballard Documentaries; (3) J.G. Ballard Adaptations; (4) J.G. Ballard’s Top Ten Science Fiction Films; (5) Ballardiana; and (6) Ballardian Sound Art/Music.

I reread Iain Sinclair’s BFI book on Cronenberg’s Crash recently as research for my article on the Crash! short film. I have to say I am amazed the BFI ever agreed to publishing it in a series about ‘modern film classics’. Cronenberg and the film take back stage to Sinclair’s virtuoso reconstruction of Ballard’s life [...]

by Mike Bonsall J.G. Ballard in 1960. In the background is a poster of his ‘Project for a new novel’, made two years earlier. Chemistry & Industry … was a good place to work because, of course, the office of any scientific magazine is the most wonderful mail drop. It’s the ultimate information crossroads. Most [...]

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

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. [...]

Brunswick St, Fitzroy, Melbourne, Australia. Photo: Simon Sellars. All the evidence accumulated over several decades cast a critical light on the high-rise as a viable social structure, but cost-effectiveness in the area of public housing and high profitability in the private sector kept pushing these vertical townships into the sky against the real needs of [...]

REMINDER: The ‘call for papers’ deadline for ‘Shanghai to Shepperton: An International Conference on J.G. Ballard’ is three days away. See here for details, and here for more on the conference. J. Carter Wood, over at Obscene Desserts, has posted a long and thoughtful rebuttal of Rob Liddle’s recent dismissal of Kingdom Come. I posted [...]

Interview by Tim Chapman Iain Sinclair at the Barbican. Photo: Tim Chapman, © 2006. Iain Sinclair has been acclaimed as one of Britain’s most visionary writers and as an incomparable prose stylist. His early writing, notably Lud Heat (1975) and White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings (1987), was rooted in his adopted home of East London. It [...]

These days, with all manner of theorists, futurists, architects, musos, journos, self-mutilators and even UFO freaks claiming JG Ballard as one of their very own, it’s easy to forget that the man with his finger firmly impressed on the cult of today once wrote what was considered to be actual science fiction, albeit of a [...]

Judging from this recent interview with Iain Sinclair, it appears that Ballard is to write a piece for an upcoming anthology of writings about London, to be published by Hamish Hamilton. Petit, Sinclair, Moorcock and Ballard in the one place is A-OK by me. “SINCLAIR: I take great delight in the apparently forgotten. As Ed [...]