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Prophets of Doom
Author: Simon Sellars • Jul 29th, 2007 •Category: Ballardosphere, Philip K. Dick, Will Self, William Burroughs, dystopia, science fiction
In the Independent, Deborah Orr parses Ballard in her analysis of John Gray’s Black Mass:
In his latest book, Black Mass, the philosopher John Gray traces the history of Western millenarianism … For Gray, it is utopianism itself that is the problem. He suggests that ‘it is dystopian thinking we most need.’ We must, if we seek to understand our present condition, he says, ‘turn to Huxley’s Brave New World or Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Wells’s Island of Dr Moreau or Philip K Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Zamiatin’s We or Nabokov’s Bend Sinister, Burroughs’ Naked Lunch or Ballard’s Super-Cannes — prescient glimpses of the ugly reality that results from pursuing unrealisable dreams.’
Actually, there’s not even a need to trawl back five or so years to the publication of Super-Cannes, stunning a read though it is. Dystopian futures have of late become a staple of mainstream contemporary literature. While Ballard is for me quite possibly the pre-eminent living English novelist, he has long been considered as foremost a sci-fi writer rather than a proper literary type, with only his naturalistic memoirs Empire of the Sun and The Kindness of Women awarded the unequivocal reverence all his work deserves. Suddenly, though, sci-fi has acquired literary credibility. We are now so comfortable with the idea of a post-apocalyptic future that such subject matter has seamlessly become part of the until-now unyieldingly naturalistic mainstream English literary scene.”
[thanks, Mike]
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Deborah Orr is, by the archaic formation, Mrs Will Self. (You get used to these connections in England; William Burroughs said that literature here is run by ten people).
is that right? i wonder if it was a pre-requisite for marriage…