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Slomgom_Commie
Joined: 23 Sep 2003
Posts: 7909
Location: Hiding in your house.
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 Posted: Wed Apr 22, 2009 2:34 am Post subject: J.G. Ballard - RIP |
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Another legend bites the dust:
| Quote: | On Sunday April 19, 2009, after a protracted and courageous
battle with prostate cancer, James Graham Ballard succumbed to his
disease at the age of 78. His most recent publication at the time of his
passing was his autobiography, Miracles of Life (2008), the book in which
he first revealed his terminal condition.
But of course it is for his science fiction and his brilliantly unclassifiable,
surrealistically mimetic and prophetic contemporary fiction that Ballard
was best known, and will continue to be honored (despite US publishers
shamefully neglecting to offer him American editions recently).
As an adolescent, Ballard was resident in Shanghai with his parents when
the Japanese invaded China at the start of World War II. He and his
parents were rounded up with other foreigners and sequestered in a
prison camp. These deracinating, absurd, frightening and deadly
experiences were to mark the boy and the man permanently, helping to
form his coolly alienated, wryly outraged and subsurface-penetrating
worldview. His most famous book, Empire of the Sun (1984), fictionalized
this period and was adapted for film by Steven Spielberg.
Repatriated to England, Ballard studied medicine, began to write, and
served time in the RAF. Inspired by certain American SF writers with
whom he felt an affinity, such as Jack Vance, he began to write science
fiction and sell it to the UK and US genre magazines. His earliest stories
and novels, including the "disaster quartet" of The Wind from Nowhere
(1961), The Drowned World (1962), The Burning World (1964), and The
Crystal World (1966), hewed to the conventions of genre writing, but also
added unique and disturbing subtexts, such as protagonists who seemed
half in love with their various apocalypses.
These tendencies made Ballard controversial among the fans, and this
fannish attitude of rejection or ignorance was heightened when he began
his more outrageous experimentation as part of the "New Wave"
movement in SF, creating "condensed novels" collected as The Atrocity
Exhibition (1969), a book deemed so repugnant by its first American
publisher that the entire print run was pulped when executives belatedly
learned of its imminent release. But although his mainstream reputation
and audience increased as his genre audience decreased, he never
repudiated or abandoned the methodologies of science fiction.
Ballard focused mainly on novels in the latter part of his career, although
his Complete Short Stories volume from 2001 features a fair number of
late-period items. In such books as Crash (1973; film by David
Cronenberg, 1996), The Day of Creation (1987), and Super-Cannes
(2000), Ballard deployed his standard troupe of characterswounded,
overly cerebral heroes; insane and insanely attractive women; authority
figures mad on power and megalomaniacal delusionsin surreal morality
plays that anatomized the pathologies Ballard saw all around him, in
luridly seductive narratives. His influence upon several subsequent
generations of writers, from cyberpunks to humanists to practitioners of
the New Weird, is almost incalculable.
Ballard's home life stood in utter contrast to his fiction. After the
premature and tragic death of his wife Mary, Ballard was left a single
parent raising three children. Having moved to the quiet suburb of
Shepperton in 1960, he remained there for almost five decades, relishing
the town's stability and normality which allowed him to chase, capture and
dissect the myriad specters and phantoms conjured up by his powerful
imagination acting upon the postmodern world he simultaneously loved
and loathed. |
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Max Action
Joined: 24 Sep 2003
Posts: 1445
Location: wasteland wandering
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| Posted: Thu Apr 23, 2009 12:16 pm Post subject: |
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| Oh crap, I'm right in the middle of a collection of his short stories right now. |
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Slomgom_Commie
Joined: 23 Sep 2003
Posts: 7909
Location: Hiding in your house.
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| Posted: Fri Apr 24, 2009 2:16 am Post subject: |
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| Which means you're going to die. |
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Slomgom_Commie
Joined: 23 Sep 2003
Posts: 7909
Location: Hiding in your house.
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| Posted: Mon Jun 08, 2009 1:29 am Post subject: |
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| So how did the book go, Max? Did you die? |
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Max Action
Joined: 24 Sep 2003
Posts: 1445
Location: wasteland wandering
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| Posted: Mon Jun 08, 2009 5:39 am Post subject: |
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Nope, I lived to get into a similar collection of Harlan Ellison stories.
He's no Ballard. |
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Slomgom_Commie
Joined: 23 Sep 2003
Posts: 7909
Location: Hiding in your house.
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| Posted: Mon Jun 08, 2009 6:16 am Post subject: |
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| Got that right. |
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verle
Joined: 23 Apr 2008
Posts: 572
Location: 2012
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| Posted: Fri Jun 12, 2009 6:09 am Post subject: |
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| I just read the Drowned Giant. Now I want to read a whole book. |
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Slomgom_Commie
Joined: 23 Sep 2003
Posts: 7909
Location: Hiding in your house.
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| Posted: Fri Jun 12, 2009 6:59 am Post subject: |
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I know a place you can pick up a book.
Unfortunately his older stuff is hard to find. I guess American publishers don't like Ballard. |
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verle
Joined: 23 Apr 2008
Posts: 572
Location: 2012
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| Posted: Fri Jun 12, 2009 11:11 am Post subject: |
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| Is it near your sock drawer? |
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Slomgom_Commie
Joined: 23 Sep 2003
Posts: 7909
Location: Hiding in your house.
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| Posted: Fri Jun 12, 2009 6:33 pm Post subject: |
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| It's called the fucking INTERNET. Fuck off about the porn drawer overflow situation in my zone. |
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verle
Joined: 23 Apr 2008
Posts: 572
Location: 2012
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| Posted: Wed Jun 17, 2009 12:59 pm Post subject: |
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| The internet is full of shit. |
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Slomgom_Commie
Joined: 23 Sep 2003
Posts: 7909
Location: Hiding in your house.
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| Posted: Thu Jun 18, 2009 1:58 am Post subject: |
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| CORRECT-O-MUNDO! |
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gurkin
Joined: 15 Jun 2005
Posts: 2030
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| Posted: Thu Jun 18, 2009 3:03 am Post subject: |
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| i liked the crystal world, actually that whole series was pretty good. |
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