Ballardian: the World of J.G. Ballard

In 2007 I toured Shepperton using Ballard’s Unlimited Dream Company as my guidebook. Here are the results of that neurological survey, born from the torsion of “every cell in my body waiting at the end of a miniature runway”.

Reviewing Miracles, the Age newspaper drops a clanger. Still, I wouldn’t mind visiting ‘Shaghai’ one day…

I’ve been asked to contribute to a documentary on car parks. Here then, as preparation, is my Ballardian Primer to Car Parks, with quotes from Ballard’s novels.

The final version of Thomas Cazals’ tribute, ‘J.G. Ballard: The Oracle of Shepperton’, has been released. It’s one of the stranger JGB ‘adaptations’ around, and is told with considerable flair and skill.

Here’s the last in our batch of transcripts of recent Miracles promotions: James Naughtie’s interview with JGB for BBC Radio 4.

Here’s a transcription of the BBC Radio Front Row review of Miracles, presented by Mark Lawson and featuring Iain Sinclair and Hermione Lee.

This one’s a transcript of BBC 2’s Newsnight Review segment on Miracles of Life. It features Tony Parsons, Julie Myerson and John Harris and is presented by Kirsty Wark.

Vintage Ballard photos now online from RE/Search Publications.

Here’s a transcript of Philip Dodd’s recent BBC Radio 3 interview with JGB.

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 […]

Will Self was recently interviewed on BBC Radio 4 by Mariella Frostrup about his admiration for J.G. Ballard’s work. Here’s a transcript of that interview.

Still from Hari Kunzru’s interview with J.G. Ballard. © Waterstone’s Books Quarterly.
Waterstones is featuring a video interview with JGB, conducted by Hari Kunzru to promote Miracles of Life. There are no surprises here. Kunzru asks Ballard about the relationship of Miracles to JGB’s semi-autobiographical novels, Empire of the Sun and The Kindness of Women, and […]

Sam Scoggins has finally digitised his ‘lost’ 1983 quasi-doco on Ballard, loosely structured around themes found in The Unlimited Dream Company. There are plans for ballardian.com to interview Sam, but for now, enjoy the film.

Damien Love interviewed J.G. Ballard in September 1996. At the time Ballard was one of only a very few people in the UK to have seen David Cronenberg’s adaptation of Crash, which was wrapped in a controversy that was baffling then and seems truly mystifying now.

Above: the Ballard family’s former house, now lit up in the colours of capitalism. Photo: Rick McGrath.
“Do you believe in synchronicity?” Andy asked. “That’s the 10 o’clock signal for today’s national anniversary. Sirens are blowing all over the country right now.” He leaned in, conspiratorially. “It was precisely 70 years ago today the Japanese attacked […]

ABOVE: Youtube uplink for Shanghai Jim (BBC Bookmark, 1991; produced by James Runcie).

NOTE: The following is a transcription taken from J.G. Ballard’s commentary for the documentary Shanghai Jim. It also transcribes the film’s brief interviews with his daughters, Fay and Bea, and the film’s direct quotes from Ballard’s work.
See here for Pippa Tandy’s appraisal […]

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 of it […]

Stunning floods in England, of course; big, big news. And, as Blood & Treasure reports:
Life imitates Ballard, forces him out of own house:
‘In 1962 JG Ballard wrote The Drowned World, a fictional account of a flooded London, “a garbage filled swamp”. This week London has been under flood alert, with the water full of human […]

Cover detail: The Unlimited Dream Company (Cape 1979; artwork by Bill Botten).

Mike Holliday explains how to read J.G. Ballard’s 1979 novel The Unlimited Dream Company as a fascistic work.

Ambiguity is one of the defining features of J.G. Ballard’s fiction. Consider, for example:
+ Empire of the Sun and The Kindness of Women – to what extent […]

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 professionally as soon as […]

+ Three lovely Ballardian riffs…
1) Dan Lockton over at the awesome Architectures of Control, a blog that analyses the ways in which products are designed to restrict user behaviour, guides us through a new initiative at Heathrow Airport’s Terminal 5: the removal of seating so that patrons have no choice but to spend great wads […]

Self-portrait: next to the M3 in Shepperton (photo: Simon Sellars).
Apologies for the down time this site has experienced since the Ballard conference. I’m still in England where I’ve experienced many Ballardian and sub-Ballardian moments (and even some non-Ballardian moments, would you Adam and Eve it?) including exchanging views on ‘torture porn’ with Rick Poynor against […]

French filmmaker Thomas Cazals has onlined a 10-min preview of his film J.G. Ballard: Shepperton’s Oracle.
Synopsis:
‘On the occasion of the release of the next novel of the English writer James Ballard, two French reporter Thomas Cazals and Thomas Carter are sent to Shepperton, to interview him. In this town in the middle of nowhere, […]

Ballard’s study (photo courtesy the Guardian).
Rhys emailed to point my attention to a series in The Guardian entitled ‘Writer’s Rooms’, currently featuring J.G. Ballard:
My room is dominated by the huge painting, which is a copy of The Violation by the Belgian surrealist Paul Delvaux. The original was destroyed during the Blitz in 1940, and I […]

Check out these flood maps — dynamic maps predicting sea-level rise around the globe (found via Dissensus).
First, adjust the rising sea level to +14m.
Then focus on London.
Now zoom into Shepperton.
Result: a self-fulfilling prophecy for the Shepperton-based author of The Drowned World.

Friends, you ask me many questions, most of which I cannot answer, but Kate from Brighton wanted to know what my work-space looks like. I like this question. I reckon you can tell a lot about an artist from the environment in which he works. Look at J.G. Ballard. Look at Jack Henry Abbot. Look […]

Interview by Simon Sellars

JG Ballard. Photo: Paul Murphy.
In the year that this website’s been in operation, it seems to have had a momentum — a secret logic — all its own. Our interviews with such luminaries as Bruce Sterling, John Foxx, Mike Ryan and Iain Sinclair — even the irascible Jonathan Weiss — have […]

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:
“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:
“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; […]

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 did much to […]

I received an email from Thomas, the French filmmaker making a film about Ballard (which I posted about earlier)…he’s filled me in on the details…
He writes: “We’re producing the movie “Shepperton’s Oracle” with a team of French web designers (www.panoplie.org). The project is first an interactive website with a chat bot around the universe of […]

Came across this post from the blog called ‘Postcards from the Future’. Interesting how Dubai pops up yet again in discussions about Ballard…
The post says: “Working on the movie about J.G Ballard “The Shepperton’s Oracle”, i’ve found…an extract of General Motors vision for the future in year 56’. “The Shepperton’s Oracle”, the movie about […]

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 […]