And as for what crashman says about the state of American publishing – that makes fairly depressing reading. My local library isn’t too bad; neither is the one bookshop in town. I personally have very few books in my house.

Why doesn’t Ballard have editions in the USA? I’ll tell you – because almost NO ONE over here in the Pillar of Consumerism reads seriously anymore! It’s all TV and the Net!

Thriller-trash completely dominate the paperback-racks and even in the SERIOUS
bookstores (which are all clone-chain-store entities now, BTW) you find only coffee-table picture-books and a few doggedly-hanging-on ancient classics and niche-books in hardback. The SERIOUS literature-readers are a dying breed over here, and even surveys show that our Univ.- grads read about only ONE book of serious literature a year. Even our MOST educated people DO NOT READ!

I hardly even bother with the large bookstore-chains anymore, and find all my real gems
in the used-bookstores, which are also a dying breed over here…. Go to ANY US library and you will find NO Ballard (except by accident), and the patrons are ALL young students with no interest in history except current events, and a few die-hards like me.
The ONLY way I can get my hands on any more Ballard in the USA for my collection is to go to Amazon and buy British or other foreign editions…. SAD to say, but it’s true!
The saying I absorbed at University was “A 4-year degree in English Literature plus
$1 will get you a cup of coffee – nothing more.”

I have NEVER been able to buy a new-edition JGB in the USA except thru Amazon. We have become a nation completely dominated by light-throwaway consumerism, as the Oracle well knows- and predicted! Even pseudo-serious literature here has become only light current-events and celebrity-political trash-entertainment! A glance at the NYTimes best-seller list will show you it’s true…. the books that sell well here are now strictly light entertainment or scurrilous expose’ -genre. Never have so many read so meaningfully less, (to paraphrase Churchill). The attention-spans of our US youngsters now are sadly diminished by their constant exposure to this light-throwaway trash and the TV and video games – they HONESTLY don’t have the attention-span to handle JGB! Or ANY great work of literature. I know personally a 4-year University B.A. graduate in “Communications” (whatever that is) who CANNOT write a single English paragraph without SERIOUSLY laughable mistakes in grammar, diction, spelling, syntax, etc.

SERIOUS modern literature has a VERY tiny following here, and even that is viewed with a vague suspicion by the average American. My house is packed with books in every closet and cranny, because I (unlike 99% of American readers, few as they are) NEVER throw a good book away. To most Americans books are as disposable as last week’s episode of a soap opera! A book once read is seen as throwaway trash! Yet I go over and over JGB’s work, re-reading and finding new depth and correlations EVERY time! (Like all great works of literature). I call this generation “If it’s not at the Mall, on TV, or currently hot on the Internet I don’t know about it!” For SHAME!

We are living in a world that has lost its connection with 99% of Man’s great discoveries and insights -which are ALL in printed books! The ignorance of the contemporary American outside his/her work-specialty is STAGGERING – most people on the street cannot locate MAJOR countries on a globe! And we Americans rarely travel except as
“look-at-these-funny-natives!” tourists.

Funny aside: since I was British-schooled in the West Indies as a child (in the early 60s) I STILL have and TREASURE all my “Just William” and Biggles paperbacks, so I can at least claim that connection with JGB – although Biggles(worth) series books were postwar-children’s books popular in Britain. No one here can understand why these were not trashed LONG ago, nor why my house is FILLED to bursting with books! I answer: “This is my REAL wealth – and it can NEVER be stolen by a burglar!” (imagine a burglar trying to tote away boxes and boxes of heavy, dusty books with NO market value). They are perceived to have NO value here – but I count them ALL as my most precious possessions. I even have 1964 editions of science -fiction magazines with JGB’s early SF work in them! And my best intellectual friend has named his personal website “Vermilion Sands” – as early as 1993.

OK enough ranting at American anti-intellectualism (ingrained in this culture since the birth of the country). But I wanted to explain what SAD shape the serious literary scene is in, over here…. Now off to Amazon to pre-order “Miracles of Life”!!

thanks, johnny.

regardless of jgb’s health, i am not sure i will be continuing the site for too much longer. it is simply becoming far too much work, being an unpaid labour of love. i hope though, that before i pull the plug, that the site will have generated a bit of extra interest in jgb’s writing, and that i will have somehow done the man justice.

“I haven’t got a future” said Ballard in the first Beeb broadcast-interview about “Miracles of Life”. For the first time I would differ with the Oracle of Shepperton – he is already
functionally immortal by means of his incredible and lifelong stream of incomparable
literary works! And I feel sure that the indefatigable Simon Sellars, our gracious and learned host here- WILL continue this tributary – and also incomparably rich- website
after JGB goes to stand in the shadows with Aristotle and Shakespeare and all the
other true greats who have enriched our collective consciousness with the “invisible
world.” we all have in our heads Thanks to you both!