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“In television, images are projected at you. You are the screen. The images wrap around you. You are the vanishing point. This creates a sort of inwardness, a sort of reverse perspective.” – Marshall McLuhan.

“The TV image is nothing but a screen, not even that: a miniaturized terminal that, in fact, is immediately located in your head—you are the screen, and the TV watches you—it transistorizes all the neurons and passes through like a magnetic tape—a tape, not an image.” – Jean Baudrillard

“In her sophisticated eyes I was already becoming a kind of emotional cassette, taking my place with all those scenes of pain and violence that illuminated the margins of our lives – television newsreels of wars and student riots, natural disasters and police brutality which we vaguely watched on the colour TV set in our bedroom as we masturbated each other… Even my own pain as I lay in the hospital bed… seemed extensions of that real world of violence calmed and tamed within our television programmes and the pages of news magazines.” – J.G. Ballard

“The TV tube is like a flagging piece of nervous tissue—you need a bigger and bigger charge to get a kick out of it.” – J.G. Ballard

I’ve often wondered why s-f shows so little of the experimental enthusiasm which has characterized painting, music and the cinema during the last four or five decades, particularly as these have become wholeheartly speculative, more and more concerned with the creation of new states of mind, constructing fresh symbols and languages where the old cease to be valid. …

The biggest developments of the immediate future will take place, not on the Moon or Mars, but on Earth, and it is inner space, not outer, that need to be explored. The only truly alien planet is Earth. In the past the scientific bias of s-f has been towards the physical sciences – rocketry, electronics, cybernetics – and the emphasis should switch to the biological sciences. Accuracy, that last refuge of the unimaginative, doesn’t matter a hoot. …

It is that inner space-suit which is still needed, and it is up to science fiction to build it!

Later, as he sat on his balcony eating the dog, Dr. Robert Laing reflected on the unusual events that had taken place within this huge apartment building during the previous three months. (J.G. Ballard, High-Rise)

The residents had eliminated both past and future, and for all their activity, they existed in a civilized and eventless world. (J.G. Ballard, Running Wild)

| ballardian-review | reel23 | jonathan weiss-interview | review at ruthless culture |

“This … woman was a modulus … by multiplying her into the space/time of the apartment, he could obtain a valid unit for his own existence.” (J.G. Ballard)

[They] aren’t interested in having kids, they are their own kids. | link

God was a clever idea … The human race came up with a winner there. (J.G. Ballard)

“The 60’s was a fascinating decade that I mostly watched on television”. (J.G. Ballard)

“Remember, it’s not enough to make history – you’ve got to arrange for someone to record it for you.” (J.G. Ballard, “The Wind From Nowhere”)

“B returned home and switched on his transistor radio. The apparatus worked, but all the stations were silent.” (J.G. Ballard)

“We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind—mass merchandising, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the instant translation of science and technology into popular imagery, the increasing blurring and intermingling of identities within the realm of consumer goods, the preempting of any free or original imaginative response to experience by the television screen. We live inside an enormous novel. For the writer in particular it is less and less necessary for him to invent the fictional content of his novel. The fiction is already there. The writer’s task is to invent the reality.” J.G. Ballard

“The Adolph Hitlers and Pol Pots of the future won’t walk out of the desert. They’ll emerge from shopping malls and corporate business parks.” (J.G. Ballard, “Super-Cannes”)

“Meaningless violence may be the only true poetry of the new millennium.” (J.G. Ballard, “Super-Cannes”)

The Wind from Nowhere, first published in 1961 is the debut novel by English author J.G. Ballard. Prior to this, his published work had consisted solely of short stories. The novel was the first of a series of Ballard novels dealing with scenarios of ‘natural disaster’, in this case seeing civilization reduced to ruins by prolonged worldwide hurricane force winds. As an added dimension Ballard explores the ways in which disaster and tragedy can bond people together in ways that no normal experiences ever could. This, too, is a recurring theme in his works, making one of its first appearances here. Written in ten days, Ballard later dismissed this novel as a “piece of hackwork”, referring instead to The Drowned World as his first novel.

Vermilion Sands is a short-story collection by J. G. Ballard, first published in 1971. All the stories are set in an imaginary vacation resort called Vermilion Sands which suggests, among other places, Palm Springs in southern California. The characters are generally the wealthy and disaffected, or people who make a living off them, and parasites of various kinds. In the preface, Ballard himself wrote: “Vermilion Sands has more than its full share of dreams and illusions, fears and fantasies, but the frame for them is less confining. I like to think, too, that it celebrates the neglected virtues of the glossy, lurid and bizarre.”

Set in the year 2145 in a post-apocalyptic and unrecognisable London, ‘The Drowned World’ is a setting of tropical temperatures, flooding and accelerated evolution. Ballard’s story follows the biologist Dr Robert Kerans and his struggles against the devolutionary impulses of the environment. As part of a scientific survey unit sent to map the flora and fauna in the boiling lagoon, the tranquility and banality of their role is soon upheaved by the onset of strange dreams which increasingly plague the survivors’ minds. Amidst talk of the army and scientific team moving north away, Hardman, the only other commissioned member of the unit, a ‘burly,intelligent but somewhat phlegmatic man of about of about 30′ flees the lagoon and instead heads south, a search team unable to find his whereabouts.

When the other inhabitants of the lagoon finally flee the searing sun and head north, Kerans and two associates, the beautiful but reclusive Beatrice Dahl and fellow scientist Dr Bodkin settle down in the swamp into an isolated existence. Kerans is still tormented by his psycho-analytical tendencies, ever analysing and debating the regression of the environment into a neo-Triassic period, but the brief quiet is ended by the arrival of Strangman. A chaotic leader of a team of pirates seeking out and looting treasures within the deep, Strangman defies the remaining civilised reasons of Kerans’ mind and upheaves the world that the survivors have grown to know. When Strangman and his team drain the lagoon and expose the city beneath, both Kerans and Bodkin are disgusted, the latter attempts to blow up the flood defences and re-flood the area to no avail. With Kerans and Beatrice resigned to his fate, Strangman pursues Bodkin and kills him in revenge.

Strangman and his team grow tired and suspicious of Dr Kerans, and with Beatrice now under his web of control, Kerans is imprisoned and subjected to bizarre and tribalistic rituals intended to kill him. Kerans survives, though severely weakened by the ordeals, and attempts to save Beatrice from her own imprisonment to little avail. With the doctor and Beatrice facing the gun point of Strangman and his men and no apparent excuse, the army return to save them. With no reason and evidence to prosecute Strangman, the authorities co-operate with the captain, and Kerans once more grows frustrated by the inaction, finally taking a stand and succeeding in re-flooding the lagoon where Bodkin had failed. Wounded and weak, the doctor flees the lagoon and heads south without aim, meeting the frail and blind figure of Hardman along the way. Though he aids Hardman back to some amount of strength he soon continues onwards on his travels south, with little idea of an aim or objective, a “second Adam searching for the forgotten paradise of the reborn Sun’.

In contrast to Ballard’s earlier novel The Drowned World, The Burning World describes a world in which water is scarce. After an extensive drought, rivers have turned to trickles and the earth to dust, causing the world’s populations to head toward the oceans in search of water. The drought is caused by industrial waste flushed into the ocean, which form an oxygen-permeable barrier of saturated long-chain polymers that prevents evaporation and destroys the precipitation cycle. Since the novel was published, plastic islands such as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch have been discovered, which cover measurable percentages of the world’s oceans.

The Crystal World: The main character is Edward Sanders, an English medical doctor, who arrives to the river port of Port Matarre, in Gabon. From here he tries to reach a leprosy treatment facility where his friends, Max and Suzanne Clair, live. Soon, however, he starts to recognize that a mysterious phenomenon is crystallizing the jungle along with its living creatures. The same phenomenon is reported to be present also in the Florida everglades and in the Pripyat Marshes (Soviet Union) as well. Scientific explanations of the phenomenon are provided within the book: however, Ballard offers mostly an interior and psychological perspective about it, directly through Sanders’ experiences. Several facts, furthermore, remains unexplained: for example, the ability of jewels to liquefy the crystals. The crystals also have the property to keep objects and beings in a suspended state of existence. Many passages deal with this characteristic, pointing out its capability to stop time and life. In his route towards the deep of the forest, Sanders gets involved in a personal feud between Ventress, a Belgian architect, and Thorensen, the director of a diamond mine. In one of the most striking episodes of the novel, Sanders discovers the reason of the deadly rivalry to be Ventress’ former wife, Serena, who is terminally ill with tuberculosis. After a final confrontation, Thorensen decides to remain in his house within the jungle, in spite of the encroaching crystallization process. Two of the other characters met by Sanders in his voyage spontaneously make the same decision: Balthus, an apostate priest, and Suzanne. The latter, nearly gone mad and sporting the first symptoms of leprosy, is portrayed towards the end of the novel as the leader of a band of lepers who set for the interior of the crystallizing forest, clearly to never come back. After having barely escaped from the now quickly spreading crystallization, Sanders reaches Port Matarre. Here, however, he makes the same decision as Balthus and Suzanne. In the final pages, Sanders goes back to river to face the same fate as Suzanne.