J.G. Ballard RIP

Wow, I only just picked up, what was it, "Atrocity Exhibition" and "Unlimited Dream Company", or "Concrete Island"... last week (on Tom's insistence), and given that I couldn't get into "Cocaine Nights" for some reason I thought I'd better have another go at some of his shorter stuff. I had read "Crash" of course (and watched it), and "Drowned World" (decades ago) and watched the "Empire of The Sun" movie a squillion times... Like Kavan, J.G. Ballard was someone I felt I needed to get back into, and was just on the point of doing so. Like BS Johnston, like Ann Quin, those weird English experimentalists from the 1960s, Ballard was both atttractive and yet threatening. Difficult, opionated, emotional, slightly to majorly fucked up.

Izzy was sitting by the pool on Saturday reading "Atrocity..." as I was finishing of Kavan's "Asylum Piece"... Weird, leh?

Wasn't it Ballard (or was it Brian Aldiss) who insisted on Kavan's "Ice" as the Science Fiction Book Of The Year in 1967? Ah, no it was Aldiss. Nevermind, Ballard's dystopias and "Ice" have been compared, similarly being pigeon-holed marketing-wise as Slipstream Fiction - the category for otherwise uncategorisable not-quite-SF, not-quite-not-SF stories.

Martin Amis has been a huge fan of Ballard too, so it is politically permissable to read his stuff even though it has been made into movies.



Don't you feel weary, walking along the road of time, watching the inevitable new gravestones appear as milestones on your journey? I suppose so long as you don't read your own name for a while yet, hey?

E@L