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Ballardian Days

BALLARDIAN: (adj) 1. of James Graham Ballard (J.G. Ballard; born 1930), the British novelist, or his works. (2) resembling or suggestive of the conditions described in Ballard’s novels & stories, esp. dystopian modernity, bleak man-made landscapes & the psychological effects of technological, social or environmental developments.

JG Ballard is arguably the defining novelist of the 20th century; a man who uses the clades of machine life that we have spawned to expose the twisted psyches of a culture in a state of permanent culture shock, stressed to the edge of immanent collapse. Inspired by the horror of the atomic bomb, the inexorable logic of technological automatism, and the face of madness. Reading him, one understands how the oppressive weight of all the change the human race has experienced has transformed us into strange new entities.

His stories are profoundly unsettling, bleak wastelands of concrete and disconnected fragments of memory from narrators who are losing their minds, or have already lost them. Obsessive, clinical, and isolated, Ballard narrators use the scalpel of scientific norms to strip away the lies that cloak the bitter truths of our society.

In a word, he is fucking brilliant, a penetrating writer, and one of the greats. Two weird for straight fiction, too literary for science-fiction. Ballard is one of my greatest inspirations. Having recently read way too much JG Ballard, I've decided to do a series of shorts inspired by and as a tribute to the man.


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