JG Ballard's Apocalyptic Art

https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2024/09/jg-ballards-apocalyptic-art

by thinkingemote • 2 years ago

112 29 2 years ago

As someone exposed to some undergraduate 'social science', this is one of the funniest things I've ever read http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/archives/003268.html

DiscourseFan• 2 years ago

I don’t know many (or any) sociology departments teaching CCRU related authors

ghaff4• 2 years ago

Ballard was definitely part of the British gentle apocalypse school. Se also Wyndham etc. He also had a lot of other science fiction and experimental work in addition to Empire of the Sun.

jhbadger2• 2 years ago

For some value of "gentle". Typically people mean by that stories (mostly British in origin) where the apocalypse isn't too bad and even a bit of fun. I don't think the characters in The Drowned World, The Burning World, etc. are having a fun time.

ghaff4• 2 years ago

I forget where I took that term from. Certainly some of the stories from that era are darker than others.

0x69420• 2 years ago

kingdom come, the last book written before his death, at once falls tremendously short of his reputation for prescience on the literal level, but exceeds with flying colours in prescience on the metaphorical level. the median-age HN reader would probably do well to start with it, as its zeitgeist will still be kicking around somewhere in your memory and so it will be in some sense maximally relatable of his bibliography. then work backwards to taste.

ghaff4• 2 years ago

I'd actually recommend picking and choosing a number of his short stories. Quite a number are pretty experimental but lots of good ones.

nervousvarun• 2 years ago

Good call. Personally I point people towards High-Rise which is an older book but has the benefit of being made into a pretty good relatively recent movie staring Tom Hiddleston. US perspective here, but it seems prescient in a weird Ballardian way as well w/ what may or may not be happening (who can tell unless it happens to you anymore) in Denver: https://www.cbsnews.com/colorado/news/colorado-law-firm-repo...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Rise_(novel)

jhbadger2• 2 years ago

I didn't like the movie of High-Rise because it changes the whole point of the book. In the movie it was conflict between the rich and poor people in the apartment tower (basically redoing Snowpiercer but in a building). In the book, it was clear this was a luxury building. Everyone is wealthy if they can afford to live there. The point was that these people were so bored with their comfortable lives that they started fighting each other for no reason.

twic3• 2 years ago

I'd tentatively suggest The Concrete Island. It's not at all science-fictional, but it manages to wring a lot of weirdness out of a completely pedestrian (if you will) setting. It was written in 1974, but I think it works just as well today (just imagine his phone got broken in the accident).

optimalsolver• 2 years ago

I always recommend his short story "Report On An Unidentified Space Station":

https://sseh.uchicago.edu/doc/roauss.htm

kleiba• 2 years ago

Funny - I read "Ballard" and immediated thought this was about Fabrice Bellard... been on HN for too long, I guess.

zen_of_prog• 2 years ago

Haha, I just heard JG Ballard referenced in a recent podcast episode [1]. My first thought was if he was related to Geoffrey Ballard [2].

[1] https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/philip-ball/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_Ballard

atombender• 2 years ago

Ballard's fiction is great. I'm partial to the early novels (The Crystal World is one of my favourites) and to his short stories.

In his longer works, Ballard's ideas often wore a bit thin. In particular, his late novels (Cocaine Nights, etc.) are the longest — beautifully written, sure, but they are essentially reskinned versions of his earlier High-Rise and Running Wild, where he already perfected the motif of humans in gated communities reverting to base, animal, violent behaviour. We didn't really need those; he'd already made his point.

I do recommend getting his "The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard" (not to be confused with "The Complete Short Stories of J. G. Ballard: Volume 1" and "Volume 2", both of which it supercedes). It includes classics such as "The Concentration City", "Studio 5, The Stars", "A Question of Re-Entry", "Billenium", and "The Garden of Time".

While I've always enjoyed Ballard's coldly satirical perspective on modern life (The Atrocity Exhibition maybe being the pinnacle of this), I think he's at his best when he gets looser and a bit weird. Nature succumbing to strange mutations feature in The Drowned World, but The Crystal World is absolutely supercharged with hallucinogenic weirdness, a fever dream that turns magical-realist in the end. Later novels touch on this man/nature dichotomy, but not as strongly as his earlier work, although late short stories like "Dream Cargoes" revisit that theme.

ecliptik• 2 years ago

Agree with everything here, not a day goes by that I don't think about something Ballard wrote.

I've always liked the phrase "Inner space, not outer space" when describing his particular version of science fiction.

downut2• 2 years ago

Don't forget "Vaughn died yesterday in his last car-crash." That's right up there with "A screaming comes across the sky." One or the other lurks in my memory, bubbling up from time to time.

Animats• 2 years ago

No pictures? What are we supposed to be looking at?

brudgers• 2 years ago

The words.

hermitcrab• 2 years ago

I read quite a lot of Ballard and I found 'The kindness of women' provided some interesting context on the various themes of his work.

ggm• 2 years ago

If you liked "empire of the sun" read his biography because what happened to Jim across his life is just as interesting.

downut2• 2 years ago

"The Kindness of Women" was surprisingly moving to me, reading it after I spent years enjoying the ambiance of most of the rest of his works.

benrmatthews• 2 years ago

Ballard’s Kingdom Come, written in 2006, paints a picture that came true in 2016, with Brexit and Trump.

If we want to look ahead to 2034, who is writing the novel that defines the next decade?

Or to think of it another way, what would Ballard write about today that he would see coming in 2036?

JG Ballard's Apocalyptic Art

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