Ballardian

Readers hoping to solve the mystery of J.G. Ballard’s ‘The Beach Murders’ may care to approach it in the form of a card game. Some of the principal clues have been alphabetized, some left as they were found, scrawled on to the backs of a deck of cards. Readers are invited to recombine the order of the cards to arrive at a solution. Obviously any number of solutions is possible, and the final answer to the mystery lies forever hidden.

‘Iterative Architecture: a Ballardian Text’
by Brian Baker

..:: CONTINUED from >> Part 1 ::…

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The Joker. The Joker in the pack is the card that, in some games, can replace (or substitute for, take the place of) any of the others. In this sense, the Joker is the empty sign.
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Hearts ♥
(A♥) Time Drill. ‘I don’t remember much [...]

“As Michael Jackson reached middle age, the skin of both his cheeks and neck tended to sag from failure of the supporting structures. His naso-labial folds deepened, and the soft tissues along his jaw fell forward. His jowls tended to increase. In profile the creases of his neck lengthened and the chin-neck contour lost its youthful outline and became convex.”

RIP James Cawthorn, illustrator for New Worlds and Savoy Books; pastichist of Ballard.

Is Woody Allen a Ballard fan? Lucy Vickery at The Spectator certainly is.

Illustration by Rick McGrath.
“Television crime series…were filled with their huge carapaces, swerving in and out of alleys, reversing in a howl of burning rubber. Watched with the sound down, episodes of Starsky and Hutch resembled instructional films on valet parking”.
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J.G. Ballard, 2005
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Announcing the winner of our J.G. Ballard Pastiche competition, sponsored by the kind people [...]

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Lyle Hopwood uncovers a lost Ballard work, apparently the only surviving fragment from JGB’s novelization of David Cronenberg’s film of Alien, before the studio infamously got cold feet and replaced Cronenberg with Ridley Scott and Ballard with Alan Dean Foster.
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It’s only the cat, Ripley.
Squatting in the brine strained from the ore above, Kane pressed the [...]

The Atrocity Exhibition is a collection of J.G. Ballard’s most extraordinary short stories. Written in the few years following the tragic death of his wife, they are his most difficult work, representing the extremes of anguish, desire, alienation and horror. Compact and repetitive, they pick over the same questions of psychopathology, sexuality and death in [...]

What might have happened if J.G. Ballard had used his medical training to its fullest potential and become a doctor rather than a writer? Well, there would be no pen name for a start; ‘Jimmy Ballard’ would be a different man indeed, as Johnny Strike discovers. In this fascinating snapshot into an alternate Ballardian universe, [...]

by Kristoph Eggleston

J.G. Ballard photo courtesy of Steve Double
This is a work of fiction concerning one of the 20th-century’s more controversial writers, J.G. Ballard. It utilises the method Ballard himself employed as part of a short piece in the RE/Search reprint of his Atrocity Exhibition collection. In that piece, “Mae West’s Reduction Mammoplasty”, Ballard recontextualised [...]

by Annik Hovac

GRAVITY’S PEAK IS SURVIVABLE
“About midnight, Diana walks out, all green eyes and friendly breast velocity. Dodi, her Prince, is there to sweep her away from the insatiable paparazzi.”
The following extract is presented by the JG BALLARD INSTITUTE for the Study of Eroto-Responsive Kinetics, Canberra.
“On August 31, 1997, Princess Diana and her lover Dodi [...]

by Andrés Vaccari

The following is an excerpt from an official report prepared by Andrés Vaccari, on behalf of the JG Ballard Institute for the Study of Eroto-Responsive Kinetics, Canberra.
DISCLAIMER: The following photos have been modified by the patients referenced by this report. The JG Ballard Institute for the Study of Eroto-Responsive Kinetics, Canberra implies no [...]