J-g-ballard

I had low expectations for "Hello America", the next in the series of Ballard novels that I started reading over seven years ago. However, it turned out to be a hoot. A couple of years ago, this novel would have been a wig-out bit of standard Ballard weirdness (a bit like "The Drowned World" or "The Crystal World") but given recent events "Hello America" is starting to take on an eerie prescience.

I last wrote about a JG Ballard novel nearly three years ago. That one - "High-Rise" - has since been made into a film. The subject of this post is "The Unlimited Dream Company", my favourite among his novels: a silly romp through suburban sexual repression that glitters with sinister wit. Even after many read-throughs I still can't work out whether it is a crazy masterpiece or something light that we're meant to throw away after reading.

After a few false starts I managed to finish "High-Rise", the next in my collection of JG Ballard novels. For a book that I had trouble getting into, it turned out to be a pretty good read - even if it was also a pretty unpleasant one. Published in 1975, "High-Rise" is perhaps ahead of its time in exploring the effects of social breakdown in stylised and artificial situations where people are in close contact. You might think the plot, about a luxury high-rise that goes to hell, is in some way political or sociological but it really isn't. It's just a big playground in which Ballard throws around some of his most twisted ideas, all the while remarking on the very artifice of the situation.

Ages ago I set out to write a post for each of JG Ballard’s novels. In fact it is the oldest post on this blog. Most of the novels (I don’t have the two autobiographical novels Empire Of The Sun or The Kindness Of Women and the late period novel Milennium People) are sat in a row on top of my broken bookshelf, part of the weight there that bowed outer frame of the unit and made the inner shelves collapse. Had I known that it would be a task unfinished nearly eighteen months later and destroy a piece a furniture that I did not yet own, I may have been less ambitious.

No man is an island (not any more)

Form and function, deformation and dysfunction

Crystallising the world, the body, or the mind?

The world created by nature versus the world constructed by humans

Does Science Fiction have to be believable to be meaningful?

Reading "Crash" at 17 left me in a state of numb shock. It got me hooked and left me with J. G. Ballard as one of my favourite authors. I then devoured a short story collection called "Myths of the Near Future" around the same time. You may recognise it because the Klaxons appropriated the title for their debut album. Those stories captured my imagination, in particular the eponymous story of a world gone to run amid "space sickness".