Book Description

Customer Reviews (5)

Another 'must have' book for the Ballard enthusiast.
"Re/Search 8/9: J G Ballard", which dates from 1984, is the single best book that's been published on Ballard. This latest offering from Re/Search brings us right up to date, containing a variety of interviews and discussions with the author taken over the period 1983 to 2004. There's lots here on Ballard's usual themes - psychopathology, death of affect, and so on. But the guts of the book lies in the three lengthy interviews in 2003 and 2004, in the course of which Ballard also visits such contemporary issues as 9-11, neo-cons, globalization, the end of the 'Age of Reason', and terrorism. As a counterpoint, there's a series of more informal, and often amusing, discussions that the Re/Search people have had with Ballard over the years they've been associated with him.

Whilst the interviews don't quite reach the heights of those in "Re/Search 8/9: J. G. Ballard", it's a worthy addition to Re/Search's portfolio of books by or about J.G.B., and a great companion to "J. G. Ballard: Quotes".

conversion via conversation
like a chisel blow to marble, each interview within the pages of "jg ballards: conversations" reveals the fascinating form that is the mind of one of contemporary fictions most innovative writers. 'conversations' is a collection of, funnily enough, conversations with the science fiction author, along with contributions from friends, colleagues and assorted associates, rounding the man and provocative thinker into one of the most astute in literature.
especially illuminating is an interview with david pringle, the editor of the magazine 'ambit' who has worked with ballard for more than 30 years.
if you are already aware of ballard's sensibility and vision then this compendium is a MUST. if you aren't already aware of ballard, then this compendium is DEFINITELY a must.

sparkling bathers in near-futuristic water-slide playground utopias somehow magically growing out of vast deserts
The work that has earned J.G. Ballard his reputation as a prophet of the present runs the full gamut from the perverse to the catastrophic, from the utterly Surreal to the deeply personal. In J.G. Ballard Conversations, a new collection of interviews from RE/Search, Ballard exercises his trenchant observations live and uncensored. Running jags on the politics of paranoia are illumed with scientific/poetic clarity and a critical sense of the absurd on every page. But to say that Ballard is ahead of his time or a proponent of "science fictions" is misleading. The opposition that at one time may have existed between realistic fiction and "fantasy" or "science fiction" has been dismantled. Society's skewed relationship to realist fiction is explained by Ballard as the failing imaginations of contemporary men and women of letters to ascertain a world quickly leaving their ilk in the perfumed car exhaust.

"I think realist fiction has shot its bolt--it just doesn't describe the world we live in anymore. We're not living in a world where you can make a clear separation (as you could, say during the heyday of the 19th-century realist novel) between the external world of work, commerce, industry and a fixed set of values, and the internal world of hopes, dreams and ambitions. It's the other way around--the external world is a fantasy nowadays. It's a media landscape generated by advertising, and politics conducted as a branch of advertising.
There's an envelope of fantasy that is just pouring out of the air all the time, shaping all of our most ordinary perceptions... Fiction surrounds us--it's more than fiction, it's fantasy of a very peculiar kind that creates our environment. And to describe you've got to get away from realism. Yet the bourgeois novel survives and of course it's immensely popular--which is a bit of a problem."

Ballard's ability to lay open our present like a surgeon with a scalpel never fails, although his often satirical wit more closely resembles a butcher hacking us to pieces on his block. The real gravity in reading Ballard's musings lie in mapping his recurring obsessions, which even in the candor of casual conversation articulate the core themes of his novels. Ballard literally seems pathologically transfixed with the collective pathologies of modern society, how these pathologies manifest themselves and grow through individuals and in culture at large. His often fatalistic perspective on how individuals may or may not be able to cope with this transforming psychological landscape is a major concern throughout much of Ballard's thinking spanning years of acute insight:

On page 60, interviewed in 2003,
'I don't want to make an apocalyptic prophecy--I hardly ever do anything but make apocalyptic prophecies [!]--but I see elective psychopathy as the coming thing."

Or on page 136 discussing the politics of unconscious media manipulation embodied in figures like Ronald Reagan, in an interview from the 1980s,
"He clearly has the possibility within himself for people to impose their fantasies on him. That's the key thing... It's almost as if what one needs is a sort of reverse charisma now. Not a light that shines outwards, but the ability, like a black hole, to draw light inwards."

Or on page 100, from an interview in 2003 speaking of more direct modes of herding the masses:
"Psychopathic behavior seems to appears to immensely increase the possibilities of life--that's how whole nations can embrace, quite voluntarily, psychopathic acts. One could argue that both Nazi Germany and Stalin's Russia were elective psychopathies on a nationwide scale... There may be profound masochistic strains running through modern industrial man, that every now and then summon forth these demons like Hitler and Stalin who then do what is expected of them. It's a frightening prospect, but I think the Age of Reason is over."

And on page 166, in a 1991 interview with Lynne Fox, on the larger implications of the Surrealist legacy and whether creative insight into these cultural phenomena can serve as a satirical antidote or if it is never more than a harbinger of the end:
"It would be very difficult to make the Dali/Bunuel films made at the end of the 1920s today because the sight of people dragging dead donkeys through a drawing room would [seem to be] some sort of advertising stunt--a beer commercial. The external world is so strange, so full of fantasy, that you can't use the classic Surrealist approach."

The affinity Ballard feels with the Surrealists comes from the need to map a new mythology, one which recognizes the deeper strata of human consciousness skewered out on the pig poles of the everyday. "I'm trying to suggest that there is a new psychological order awaiting us, I'm as convinced of this as an ordinary individual as I am as an imaginative writer..." (167).

Whether discussing the co-optation of Surrealism by product advertisers, the ever-evolving romance of technology and human sexuality, or how the fictions of our day-to-day existence are now more fantastic than the bravest works of literary endeavor, Ballard's ability as a conversationalist and thinker never leaves a moment dull.
RE/Search has done a marvelous job in assembling and maintaining a recorded archive of an extraordinary and sadly-overlooked point of view. The photographs illustrating this collection create a pervasive feeling of some bizarre and quintessentially Ballardian mental landscape. Airbrushed models pouting their desirous and desiring faces juxtaposed upon dirty and transpiring buildings, sparkling bathers in near-futuristic water-slide playground utopias somehow magically growing out of vast deserts, and campy-looking old laboratory portrait photographs where without much suggestion the scientists could easily be mistaken for costumed sadists committing acts of sexual barbarism upon comely supine machines and more-than-willing control consuls. The publishing brilliance of RE/Search shines through in this perceptive coupling of words and images. This is the same sensibility that expertly paired the illustrations of Phoebe Gloeckner with the text of the Atrocity Exhibition to create the definitive and now infamously classic RE/Search edition of that twisted masterpiece. J.G. Ballard Conversations, with little doubt, will garner a similar following amongst those who know and appreciate Ballard's genius.

Converting Conversations.
This excellent volume from the seminal underground SF publisher RE/Search is a definite must for anybody who is a fan of JG Ballard or of intelligent, thought-provoking discourse in general. Transcripts of conversations with various people with Ballard from over a couple of decades veer, often presciently, over subjects as diverse as internet sex, 9/11, the psychology of George W Bush and Tony Blair, the Stockholm syndrome/masochistic victim mentality methodology necessary to keep Western society running, psychopathology, violence, literature, and a thousand other subjects Ballard always has an original opinion on.

I found myself stopping frequently when reading this book to digest the information (overload) I had just ingested, and it certainly gave me food for thought and many interesting topics of conversation with my wife. Subsequent readings after the first reveal different layers of thought and theory after the initial culture shock of reading about things like religions regulating against a sane, peaceful society wears off. Buy this book. You won't regret it. Seriously. It certainly opened my eyes in a brilliant, innovative way to many latent strands and strains of faulty or faultline thought in modern life, and I'm definitely grateful for that.

Check out www.laurahird.com/newreview/jgballardinterview.html for more information on this and J.G. Ballard Quotes.

CONVERSATIONS is a rich collection of Ballardian riffs
J.G. Ballard has spent most of his adult life quietly in a UK suburb.This collection of conversations is like being able to spend a surreal tea time with Ballard himself.Spanning discussions held in the early 1980s up through interviews held in the past few years, CONVERSATIONS is a compendium of Ballardian thought in the raw, composed freestyle like jazz music only between two people speaking.

The 20 year time span allows a good perspective on how political and social patterns predicted by Ballard in his writing during the 60s and 80s have come to pass as cultural reality.A Cronenberg Brundlefly will be quite at home on the wall overhearing these conversations. ... Read more

Book Description

Customer Reviews (9)

A NATURAL HISTORY OF THE ILLUMINATED MAN
Owing more than a passing salute toward Conrad's HEART OF DARKNESS, J. G. Ballard's THE CRYSTAL WORLD also resembles a more obscure work by one David Lindsay, A VOYAGE TO ARCTURUS.Just as in Conrad's masterpiece, Ballard's complicated protagonist Dr. Edward Sanders must venture up a West African coastal river to discover not only his own fate, but the fate of the world.Once a devoted caregiver to lepers in a hospital in Fort Isabelle, Sanders goes to find two friends, Dr. Max Clair and his wife, Sanders' ex-lover and aide-de-camp at the leproserie, the lovely but dark Suzanne, living now at a jungle clinic in a remote outpost far upriver.He has received a strange letter from Suzanne in which she describes the great forest as "glistening like St. Sophia," herself as "becoming excessively Byzantine," and the native peoples as "walk[ing] through the dark forest with crowns of light on their heads."Understandably, Sanders is both intrigued and distressed--and, we soon decipher, still very much in love with Suzanne, or at least his memories of her.

First Dr. Sanders, who appears to us as something considerably less than Burrough-esque but more than a mere clod, is forced to wait in the river station of Port Matarre for someone willing to take him further up the Matarre River to the almost mythical Mont Royal, where the Clairs may be found.Port Matarre is an exceedingly strange, purgatorial place, steeped in shadow, a place where, as Sanders remarks to a traveling priest, "The sun seems unable to make up its mind."Here he meets a young journalist, Louise Peret,who bares more than a passing resemblance to Suzanne Clair, although Louise is lighter of complexion, a somehow brighter version of her "somber twin" Suzanne Clair.This play of contrasts, of light and dark, good and evil, perfection and corruption, is maintained throughtout Ballard's work here.

Sanders does finally locate a willing host to take himself and Louise Peret upriver to Mont Royal.There they find the military has been busy attempting to cordon off huge tracts of the forest in an attempt to slow the creeping transformation of it into a world of bright crystal-like encrustations, beautiful, we are made to understand, even beyond Ballard's brave and incessant attempts to describe.(This same phenomenon is being reported in other parts of the world, notably Miami, FL.)This veritable cancer of crystals proves too malignant for all the men and their science to withstand, and soon Ballard's story itself seems hopelessly trapped inside it.The claustrophobic quality here is palpable and disturbing.In the end, we are confronted with a fantastic vision of Sanders tramping through a jeweled nature, glittering in crystalline petrifaction, bearing a large wooden crucifix encrusted with crystal-solvent gemstones, which he desperately waves around like some mad Christian.Suzanne, having contracted some latent form of leprosy, has been lost to the forest, "frozen like an icon," while two men Sanders can never really know are locked in battle over the fate of a dying woman, until the forest claims them too.

Just as in Lindsay's A VOYAGE TO ARCTURUS, Ballard has given us metaphysical allegory dressed up as science fiction.While Ballard's work seems to me more Christian in its manifest accretions than Lindsay's more gnostic, Blakean rendering, still they tell much the same story:The hero's journey through a world of opposites, constantly in flux, always toward something not yet seen, that, once envisioned, proves powerfully seductive, yet noble enough to cause our hero to sacrifice himself or herself to it completely, to dissolve back into that world that was always there but never fully realized until the end.

J. G. Ballard's THE CRYSTAL WORLD is science fiction genre writing about as much as Plato's REPUBLIC is a tableau about table manners.Good writing always transcends genre.(For myself, genre has ceased to exist.There is only good writing, bad writing, and everything in between.)In the end, what is truly remarkable about THE CRYSTAL WORLD is Ballard's deftness to ally ourselves with him on Sanders journey into light and darkness.In very short order, we are swept up, unquestioning the astonishing, deeply disturbing world he creates for us.And that, my friends, is just good writing.

A Fragile Tale of Good and Evil
Ballard's The Crystal World is more Christian allegory than science fiction.In it, Ballard presents the theme of man's spiritual and psychological struggle between light and darkness, good and evil, Heaven and Hell, and, especially, perfection (symbolized as crystals) and corruption (symbolized as the flesh, especially leprous flesh).Ballard's tone is subdued, his characters more derived more from archetype than reality ('The Woman of Darkness,' 'The Woman of Light,' 'The Pilgrim Journeying to the Sacred'), and his images beautiful.It is Dante journeying through a leprous Hell and a crystal Paradise, attempting to find meaning in his life.

The only flaw in the book is that, in places, Ballard feels the need to point out the symbolism in this book and translate its meaning.This is the job of the critic, not the writer, and one suspects that Ballard was instructed to do this by a nervous editor who was afraid the book was to 'literate' for a mass audience.But whatever the reason, it is a flaw of the book that detracts from its crystal perfection.

Spellbinding
This is an interesting piece of literature, not quite a fantasy story, but not quite within the bounds of reality. The characters are normal people, the setting is a small town with nothing special about it, except that it is beside a jungle where jewels grow out of the ground like weeds, and as a tumor, overtake anyone or anything in their way. If you can find your way out, before becoming a frozen statue of gems, the crystals melt away as you cross an invisible threshold. It's mesmerizing, and out of this world.

What I liked most, is that Ballard never offers an explanation for this garden of jewelry. The rather simple story takes our characters on adventures in and out of this jungle, where some move swiftly enough to make it through with only a thin layer of "frost" on their clothes, while others find themselves trapped, and eventually buried under a rising ocean of diamonds and sapphires.

The prose is simply wonderful. Ballard is a master of language.It is a joy to find yourself tangled in the elegance of his wording, so simple and so fluid, yet as enchanting as the jewels of his strange, dreamlike jungle.

If you are looking to read a story with a clear, structured plot, where event A leads to event B and is resolved by event C, then avoid this book. This does not build up to a climactic revelation, and the mystery is not solved by a dramatic courtroom confession. But if you're hoping to find yourself lost in another world, then imagine the possibilities of a place where you can fill your pockets with opals and rubies, and where lepers grow emerald limbs glazed with topaz! Definitely something I plan to read again.

Mark McGinty is the author of "Elvis and the Blue Moon Conspiracy"

Lost in a Crystal Haze
This brief novel offers a rather pointless speculative fiction take on Conrad's Heart of Darkness. A ridiculous and under-explained premise is used to prop up some equally under-explained ruminations from Ballard on the human condition and spirituality. Here the action takes place in an African jungle that is becoming crystallized, as all objects slowly become encrusted with luminous jewels. Ballard doesn't explain how this process works except for some weak references to the "crystallized" time and space aspects of relativity. This implausible premise leads to curious changes in the people who also find themselves crystallized, with some sort of inner peace and spiritual fulfillment being found in the process, though Ballard leaves this aspect of the story anemic as well, other than some flimsy philosophical ramblings. Meanwhile, the action of the story mostly involves a pointless chase sequence connected to a blood feud between two shallow supporting characters, which is never resolved within the story. Add to all of this the book's outdated colonialist conceptions of the third world and its inhabitants, and the weak premise and theme of this novel retreat further into the crystal haze. [~doomsdayer520~]

It's barely science-fiction but who cares?
Even by the most basic definition of "science-fiction" this book barely makes the cut . . . it doesn't really take place in the future, doesn't feature new technology, doesn't try to rewrite the laws of physics, you can even understand it without a degree in higher mathematics.Ballard's always been too concerned with the psychological and what lies inside the human heart to be a real SF writer but in the end, it's the story itself that counts, whatever genre label you want to slap onto it.What makes this book so effective is the calm contrast of the utterly unfathomable with the completely normal.Dr Sanders receives a letter from friends in a part of Africa saying really weird stuff about everything turning to crystal . . . curious, he travels there and finds that there weren't speaking metaphorically . . . everything, trees and all, are slowly being converted to crystal, and there's mounting evidence that the rest of the world is going to soon follow suit.Against this backdrop Ballard lets Sanders attempt to make some sense of what's going on.The unwaveringly calm tone of the novel only accents the subtle creepiness of the whole affair and every time you think Ballard's run out of ways to describe crystals and jewels, he figures out yet another one.Symbolism and imagery run amok in this story, there's definitely some sort of quasi-religious (or at least good/evil) aspect to all the crystalization going on but I'll be darned if I can figure it out.Which is another good thing about the book, unlike most SF writers Ballard doesn't take the conceit that everything we encounter in this Universe we can understand and while possible explanations for what's happening abound (most of which don't make any sense anyway) there's never a definitive reason given, so at the end of the book you're left with a lot of questions, but the good kind, the kind that make you think.Thus readers expecting neat and tidy endings are advised that will be disappointed if they go into this book with that sort of attitude.In the end it's Ballard's realistic tone set against fantastic events and his ability to draw the reader into his world and make it come alive (even while the world itself is fossilizing) that causes the book to linger in your mind.His haunting depiction of a crystal world won't be something you'll easily forget. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (10)

Disappointing
I spent years waiting for this novel. And then I finally got it from my wife for my birthday. I have to say that I was quite disappointed.

First, the conflict in the story is presented in such a fashion that it is hard to be anything but detached from it. While I am aware that I am from Generation Why and am divorced from the concept of caring about fictional or real characters and their trials and tribulations, the fact of the matter is that it was remarkably difficult to really care about ANYTHING that happened in this book, including the gang rape of the inhabitants of the tower.

What should have been an interesting study in the strife and malfunction of human relationships, the stranding of a thousand people on a desert island in the middle of a society that they are functionally free to escape to at any time, was underdeveloped and overprocessed. The result was that a wonderful story premise was destroyed. We know why three or four of the characters stayed in the tower. What about the rest? We only know anything about three of the characters in the entire story, and their motivations seem...lacking for the determination to survive and thrive in this environment that they are presented in.

If you want a dystopian epic about what can go wrong in a building like this, go pick up Neal Stephenson's The Big U. It is far more credible and far more entertaining. Much better overall.

The two good things about this: The first paragraph and the last page. The nihilism and the destruction wrought by the people in the first tower makes reading the book tolerable. And the first paragraph is the single most interesting beginning of a story that I have ever read. These two things are why it is getting a star above minimum.

Go read something better. This is overrated.

Harkius

One of Ballard's best
I'd only add that, like all of Ballard's work, it's also very funny.
Those of you who think this novel is unbelievable or preposterous have never lived in a large apartment complex.

Freakish, Obsessive . . .
I've read this book twice now, and I wouldn't say it's my favourite Ballard book so far, which isn't to say it doesn't have its good points. Freakish, creepy and obsessive, the story tracks the disintegration of a newly-built highrise from the pinnacle of modern convenience to a twisted and perverse enclosed world of primitive survival.

I found a lot of repetition in the narrative, which got a little annoying at times. Typical themes found so frequently through Ballard's work are here - internal psychology in relation to external environment, voyeurism and perversion of the affluent, and so on. Some parts even made me feel quite squeamish, and I wouldn't say this would be one for the fainthearted.

Certainly worth the read for Ballard fans and fans of literature in a similar vein, I don't think this would be my first choice to new readers.

Depressingly negative view of humanity
I found this story to be totally unbelieveable and depressing. I realize that a distopic satire is not generally uplifting, but I have read many others that were more effective, and placed me in a vividly described future in which I could imagine myself being compelled to behave the same horrific way as the characters they describe. An example is George Orwell's 1984. Unlike the Orwellian future, the high rise didn't seem like a real place in which the characters would truly have behaved the way they did. I never felt an empathy for any of the characters in High Rise that would have made this example of the genre effective. If you are an eternal pessimist who has no real hope for humanity, maybe you will enjoy this book. I don't believe that simply living in a high rise building with 2000 occupants would cause wealthy people to stuff excrement into the poorer peoples' air conditioning vents. I don't believe that if people were forcing the elevators to remain on a single floor, violently preventing occupants from using certain floors, throwing furniture off balconies and damaging expensive cars, that nobody would call the police. It's just a ridiculous downer.

Technology as the Ultimate Destroyer
J.G. Ballard's 1975 novel "High Rise" contains all of the qualities we have come to expect from this author: alarming psychological insights, a study of the profoundly disturbing connections between technology and the human condition, and an intriguing plot masterfully executed. Ballard, who wrote the tremendously troubling "Crash," really knows how to dig deep into our troubling times in order to expose our tentative grasp of modernity. Some compare this book to William Golding's "Lord of the Flies," and there are definite characteristics the two novels share. I would argue, however, that "High Rise" is more eloquent and more relevant than Golding's book. Unfortunately, this Ballard novel is out of print. Try and locate a copy at your local library because the payoff is well worth the effort.

"High Rise" centers around four major characters: Dr. Robert Laing, an instructor at a local medical school, Richard Wilder, a television documentary producer, Anthony Royal, an architect, and the high rise building all three live in with 2,000 other people. Throughout the story, Ballard switches back and forth between these three people, recording their thoughts and actions as they live their lives in the new high-rise apartment building. Ballard made sure to pick three separate people living on different floors of the forty floor building: Laing lives on the twenty fifth floor, Wilder lives on the second floor, and Royal lives in a penthouse on the fortieth floor (befitting his status as the designer of the building). Where you live in this structure will soon take on an importance beyond life itself.

At the beginning of the story, most of the people living in the building get along quite well. There are the usual nitpicky problems one would expect when 2,000 people are jammed together, but overall people move freely from the top to the bottom floors. A person living on the bottom floors can easily go to the observation deck on the top of the building to enjoy the view, or shop at the two banks of stores on the tenth and thirty-fifth floors. Children swim and play in the pools and playgrounds throughout the high rise without any interference. Despite the fact that well to do people live in the building, with celebrities and executives on the top floors, middle-class people on the middle floors, and airline pilots and the like on the bottom ten floors, everyone gets along reasonably well-at first.

Then things change. The gossip level increases among the residents, and parties held on different floors start to exclude people from other areas. In quick succession, objects start to land on balconies, dropped by residents on higher levels. Equipment failures, such as electrical outages, lead to mild assaults between residents. Cars parked close to the building are vandalized, and a jeweler living on the fortieth floor does a swan dive out of the window. Every incident leads to further acts of violence and increasing chaos in the lives of those in the building. People begin to take a greater interest in what's going on where they live than in outside activities and jobs. As the violence escalates, elevators and lobbies on each floor turn into armed camps as the residents attempt to block any encroachments on their territory. What starts out as a book about living in a technological marvel quickly morphs into a study of how technology can cause human beings to regress back into primitivism. Moreover, Ballard tries to draw a correlation between the technology of the building and this descent into a Stone Age mentality. He shows in detail how the residents of the apartments sink back into the morass, passing through a classical Marxist structure of bourgeoisie-proletariat, moving on to a clan/tribal system, to a system of stark individuality. In short, Ballard tries to equate our striving towards individuality through technology with how we started out in our evolution as hunter-gatherers, as individuals seeking individual gains. The promise that technology will liberate the individual is not the highest form of evolution, argues Ballard, but is actually a return to the lowest forms of human expression.

Within a few pages of the story, I thought this might turn out to be very similar to a Bentley Little book. Little, nominally a horror writer but often a social satirist, often takes a situation like this and shows how people collapse under the pressures of modern life. My belief was not born out, however, not because Ballard doesn't take certain situations over the top but because he imbues his work with a significant philosophical subtext that Little would never write about. Bentley Little is all about focusing on the over the top, outrageous incidents of humanity's decline, whereas Ballard is more interested in serving as a preacher on anti-humanistic technology, thundering out a jeremiad concerning where we might go if we do not take the time to think very carefully about the society we wish to create.

"High Rise" is a dark, forbidding tale of woe that is sure to get a reaction from anyone who reads it. There seem to be few out there who can deliver such devastating blows to our love of technology as Ballard does in his works. This author is often referred to as a science fiction writer, but "High Rise" works just as well on a horror level. So does "Crash," when I think about it, although the cold, detached prose of that book is not present in "High Rise." Whatever genre Ballard falls into, this book delivers on every level. ... Read more

Amazon.com
J. G. Ballard's graphic, violent novel is controversial wherever it is read, even on Amazon.com's own Web page! The book's characters are obsessed with automobile accidents and are determined to narrate the horrors of the car crash as luridly as possible. In the words of the novel's protagonist, the wounds caused by automobile collisions are "the keys to a new sexuality born from a perverse technology." Read this novel and learn why David Cronenberg, who had previously adapted Dead Ringers and Naked Lunch for the screen, fought to turn it into his latest film.Book Description
In this hallucinatory novel, the car provides the hellish tableau in which Vaughan, a "TV scientist" turned "nightmare angel of the highways," experiments with erotic atrocities among auto crash victims, each more sinister than the last. James Ballard, his friend and fellow obsessive, tells the story of this twisted visionary as he careens rapidly toward his own demise in an intentionally orchestrated car crash with Elizabeth Taylor. A classic work of cutting edge fiction, Crash explores the disturbing potentialities of contemporary society's increasing dependence on technology as intermediary in human relations. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (112)

the importance of us seeking to avoid a reality that could become our world if we cease to love.
In reading most works by J.G. Ballard you need to be prepared for dystopian modernity, with bleak man-made landscapes and the psychological effects of technological, social or environmental developments.Crash 1973 is central to that view of his writing.It is a phonographic depiction of sexually fetished car crashes and the resulting body deformities. You know you are in for a bumpy ride(yes I know) when one of the scenes is about sex witha willing invalid car driver (remember the little green boxes on wheels) who because of wounds and missing or damaged limbs has more holes capable of penetrative sex.

The story starts with a couple that have an open sexual relationship so sleeping with different partners carrying out any type of penetrative sex imaginable and more you haven't. And get their kicks in telling each other etc.On the way to work "Ballard"kills someone in a head on car crash gets drawn into a sub world of men and women who get their sexual kicks from sex in crashed or crashing cars and attending car crashes. He had noticed Vaughan photographing him at the accident and the hospital. Through him "Ballard" gets drawn into ever more violent sexual activity, including becoming aroused and having sex with him using his scars as a scaffold to...

A central story line is the plot by Vaughan to die having sex while crashing into a car containing the hottest top female film star of the day."Ballard's" wife in between a lesbian affair gets the hots for him and gets xxxxed in the backseat as "Ballard" drives at dangerous speeds watching them in the rear mirror.

How much of this is about Ballard's own sexual kicks is unclear as in 1970 Ballard organized an exhibition of crashed cars at the New Arts Laboratory, appropriately called "Crashed Cars". The crashed vehicles and their sexual potential were displayed without commentary, inspiring vitriolic responses and vandalism.The main character of Crash is called James Ballard living in Shepperton as did the author.And he suffered a serious automobile accident shortly after completing the novel.

The book must not be confused with the 2004 film Crash which is an Academy Award-winning drama film directed by Paul Haggis. This film seeks to depict and examine not only racial tension, but also the distance between strangers in general. The film of the book is 1996 film directed by David Cronenberg.It was praised and attacked in equal measure and won a special prize for daring, audacity, and originality at the Cannes film festival.

So why ,if you are still with me, would you bother to read what appears to be such a distasteful book?The clue is in the structure and descriptions of the book repetitive phraseology of medical sexual teams and the descriptions of the car and body parts. It means that you the reader experience the alienation and emptiness that is the heart of the story.The story is not erotic in any sense as it point to the emptiness of lives that depend on more and more extreme highs and drugs to keep the sexual tension going. Death then becomes the ultimate sexual act. Nowhere does love and community figure in a world of motorways, airports, roundabouts and technological emptiness. What ever the feelings and motives of the writer, the story serves as a warning of a society that obsesses objects and appearances over personal relationships and social community-who cares for the children in this vision of our lives?

I didn't find it an easy read and was reluctant to spend time reading it but would recommend it for the importance of us seeking to avoid a reality that could become our world if we cease to love.

The success of love is in the loving; it is not in the result of loving. Of course it is natural in love to want the best for the other person, but whether it turns out that way or not does not determine the value of what we have done.

Mother Teresa

Amazing wordplay but fails to deliver, 2.5 stars
As a newfound fan of cinematic auteur David Cronenberg, I was intrigued when I discovered his controversial 1996 film 'Crash' was based on the novel of the same name by renowned Brtish author JG Ballard. As someone who had read numerous Ballard shorts (on top of being a big fan of his 'Atrocity Exhibition,' which is some of the best hallucinatory writing post-Burroughs I've ever read), I was enamoured with the thought of reading this before digging into the film. It is with much disappointment that I confess this is far from being as captivating as my previous Ballard encounters.

With this book, Ballard has enough plot for maybe--just maybe--a third of the book's 224 pages, sacrificing narrative and character development to enhance the theme of dehumanization via the escalation of technological prowess. It's not that I don't get why Ballard did it, or at least have my own interpretation as to why he chose such a route; I imagine he wanted the reader to feel that lack of warmth, that cold distance that one would find in such a situation of loss of self. Instead, the disappointment comes from the fact that Ballard fails to garner continual interest in any of these people, and as such, there is no sympathetic corner to hold onto. It is simply a trek through the sludge of the darkest souls imaginable. Of course, dealing with people like this shouldn't be really enjoyable, but it shouldn't bore you to tears either. Take the writing of Chuck Palahniuk, who manages to create extremely unsympathetic characters that one can loathe and find disgusting but capture your interest for the book's duration.

While I do admire Ballard's prose and command of the English language, and he is quite masterful here at times, with many inventive sentences and metaphors (the comparison of an intense coupling inside of a car to an erotic act inside the Apollo capsule on page 80 is quite unique, for example), here, however, he feels extremely over-indulgent if not outright masturbatory at times, going for an overkill approach of descriptive content that generally adds only gristle to the meat of the book, and not genuine flesh. While at times his style adds considerable flavor and flair to the narrative, it is much to my dismay to find Ballard's use of language only sends this one further into the dregs in the long run.

That being said, anyone who is considering reading this book should not avoid Ballard based on the negative reviews. As many others have pointed out, Ballard is a gifted literary talent with short stories, and the aforementioned 'Atrocity Exhibition' is likely to be impressive to those who found 'Naked Lunch' rewarding. However, Ballard is just simply not as skilled with writing anything of length--he is much more effective with a shorter tale. I will say that I have not read any of his more recent novels, so I do not know if perhaps he has become better developed with time. I cannot recommend this book however, as I have found it to be overly tedious and underdeveloped. Still, I would suggest 'The Best Short Stories of JG Ballard' and 'The Atrocity Exhibition' for a glimpse of Ballard at his most brilliant.

Somewhat of a car crash in itself, Ballard's prose deserved a much better execution...
About a year ago I was driving down the interstate when I noticed a few police cruisers up ahead, their lights blaring, parked in uniformed manor on the side of the road, just under the overpass.As I approached, slowing down with the flow of traffic that always seems to coagulate in front of a crash, I noticed the front end of a black sedan, the make and model escape me, smashed in and almost nonexistent.The windshield was completely gone; glass littering the pavement, and a young and beautiful woman was lying over the steering wheel facing out at the passing vehicles.I remember staring at her face, her dark hair falling over her bloodstained face, her eyes closed to her wounds, her jaw swollen and bruised, her neck black from the impact against the wheel, and I couldn't help but feel this overwhelming sadness that was masked in a strange serenity.She looked so peaceful, so calm in her death.It was at that moment that I decided to read J.G. Ballard's novel `Crash'.I had heard a lot about it and had wanted to give it a read through.Now this happened to me a year ago, but I just finished his novel about three minutes ago.I just never really got around to reading it, but about a week ago I finally delved in.

I will say this, that all the controversy surrounding this novel is very well deserved.`Crash' is not a novel for the weak of stomach or the faint of heart.It's outlandish and blunt, straightforward and explicit.I will say that I was turned off a bit at times and in the end am ultimately disappointed with Ballard's execution of his prose.The novel itself would have blossomed had Ballard used a little more subtlety and tact, but instead he went for the gusto and shock-value of his events, high on perversion and blatant grime with mixed results.Some have likened this novel the `Fight Club' but in my opinion what Palahniuk did with `Fight Club' is far superior to what Ballard does here.

The very idea that sex is linked to the heart of human emotion is a very essential point to the understanding of this novel.It's also a very true statement.Sex is the most universally understood way that any living breathing creature can express themselves.We can convey happiness, sadness, anger, frustration, confusion, lust...you name it and we can express it through the otherwise intimate act of sexual intercourse.Throughout Ballard's novel the characters talk of an awakened sexuality due to their automobile accidents, but in actuality the prose has the opportunity to carry much more weight than that.I strongly fell that it was poor judgment on Ballard's part to make this novel as explicit as it was.If you look at another extremely controversial novel `American Psycho' you will see the advantages to the use of subtlety.Bret Easton Ellis understood the power of the underlying motive, and so while `American Psycho' has it many moments of grotesque macabre it still ushers in the serene examples of pure mood changes and allows the reader to wrap their head around the real meaning of the atrocity.`Crash' just paints a lurid and abnormal picture without giving us to opportunity to grasp what this all could have meant.

I don't know if I'll ever really understand why some laud this novel.It attempts to convey a deep meaning but in my opinion it fails to capitalize on it.It's so intent of shocking the reader that it forgets its purpose and tries to become something it's not.It screams for someone to take it seriously and understand it's tortured implications but it falls flat and far from it's intended destination.In effect, it crashes and burns instead of sours like it could have.Maybe that was the intention though, maybe that is the ultimately ironic conclusion, that a novel so obsessed with the violent link between sex and the car crash would in essence crash in it's attempt to convey an emotional response.I for one am not impressed, but it's a novel that deserves to be read if not to contemplate where Ballard went wrong.

Tiwsited, compelling
J. G. Ballard, Crash (Doubleday, 1973)

So I finally got round to reading Crash, J. G. Ballard's novel, the basis for the good movie of that name, which has been sitting at the top of the TBR pile staring at me for close to two years. While I didn't find it as disquieting as many reviewers I've read did, I have to say I was shocked by the book's explicitness, given that it's almost thirty-five years old at this point. How on earth did Ballard get away with having a book this explicit published by a major house? I could see Grove putting it out, sure, but Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux? Kudos to both author and publisher for having the guts.

What I didn't expect was how profoundly David Cronenberg had changed things for the screenplay. While the book does still focus on the interplay between Ballard and Vaughan, it seems Cronenberg did a lot of character combining to streamline everything. The plot remains roughly unchanged: Ballard, the narrator, begins to understand and explore the erotic side of car crashes after having a particularly nasty one in which he killed a man, a doctor named Remington. Remington's wife Helen and the enigmatic crash fetishist Vaughan, as well as Ballard's wife and assorted other characters, help Ballard come to understand this new sexual terrain as it reflects on Vaughan's obsession with causing a crash that will kill Elizabeth Taylor (yes, the movie star).

I finished the book roughly a week ago, and I've been wrestling with the idea in my head ever since that Cronenberg's film is actually better, empirically, than Ballard's novel. It's leaner, more spare. The changes Cronenberg made improved things. But there's certainly no denying that Ballard's novel has a power all its own. Much of this comes from Ballard's seductive style of writing, which is at the same time both far too forward for any conventional setting and so obsessively detail-oriented that it's hard to not see what Ballard and Vaughan are on about when they're describing the man-machine connection. (Not hard to see how Cronenberg got intrigued by the source material, is it?) In other words, Ballard manages to keep his focus on the details while messing with your mind in the background through word choice, phrasing, and pace. It's masterfully done. That said, the "it" in the preceding sentence is a bit tough to define; while Crash certainly meets the somewhat flip definition of a piece of literature (its main character most certainly changes through the course of the novel), there's not terribly much to it. In that regard, it has the feel of an existential-angst book, but there's far too many things getting destroyed here for that to ring true; it'd be like Kieslowski directing a remake of Bullitt. Perhaps I'm making too much of this disjunction (which may not even exist) because I'm culturally conditioned to expect that existential angst can't really coincide with action and have both pieces of the puzzle come off successfully, but when I finished the book, I felt oddly unsatisfied. I still don't know exactly why. Technically, it's a brilliant book, and it succeeds at everything it sets out to do. But I'm still only giving it four stars for, well, reasons I can't honestly define. Read it, and decide for yourself. ****

GOVT 490 -- BALLARD's BOOK
J. G. Ballard's "Crash" is a novel that puts together ideas foreign to one another in a masterful, at times tasteless, depiction of a world where technology mixes with sex, speed, and cars.

Violence is an essential to this book. And it offers a glimpse into the inner workings of a demented, but understandable human mind. Ballard shows the reader the impacts of technology on humanity and the society we are all involved in.To be able to write about such a perverted, twisted mindset and yet not fully disgust it's reader is the key to Ballard's work.

To see an object like an automobile as erotic and arousing is so foreign to most people--Ballard tackles this idea head on in this work.

Let's not miss the point. Ballard didn't write this novel to gross us out; he wrote the novel to literately show us just how much humanity has come to rely on technology.To the point where technology can change our most animal, non-technological feature--sex.This book will become more and more relevant as we continue to develop new technologies, and I find it more interesting that was written decades ago, where we were much less reliant on technology as we are today.

Concepts like emotion from pain, sex, cars, technology and humanity are what Ballard attempts to link in this book. "Erotic fiction"? I think not. A gross depiction of where we could be heading? Perhaps.

... Read more

Book Description

Customer Reviews (7)

Great collection of short stories
All the stories here are great.I really liked Manhole,the Cloud-sculptors of Coral D, and Thirteen for Centaurus.Most of the stories here really show Ballards visionary view of the world and its future.

The Best Short Stories of J. G. Ballard
I am much displeased to see that the current version of this story collection features such lackluster cover art.My original copy features a breathtaking portrait of a crowd and some cars in the desert, dwarfed by a towering pink collosus, while hand gliders dots the sky above and an enormous unicorn appears in the clouds.But what's most amazing is that this isn't just whimsy on the artist's part; it's actually a scene from one of Ballard's stories.That's the thing about Ballard.To him the idea that a ragtag but energetic crew of pilots might create enormous sculptures out of clouds in the desrt sky wasn't just possible, it seemed perfectly natural.His imagination ran to places that most science fiction authors couldn't even conceive, and once there it plopped into an armchair and started spinning a story that readers won't ever forget.

In Ballard's view, the human race is in decline.It's not because of human weakness or bad political decisions, it's just in the nature of the universe that we'll fade out, and (possibly) make way for something else.In "Concentration City", we live in a gigantic metorpolis stretching out in every direction with no open spaces.One man sets out on a quest to reach the city's edge.Along the way, he finds troubling signs of encroaching urban decay.But if nothing other than the city exists, does this spell the end of the world?In "The Deep End", technology sets of a chain reaction of unintended consequences, leading to Earth's oceans running dry.Most people depart for other planets, but one crotchety old-timer insists on staying behind, hoping to protect the world's last fish.

Other stories more directly tackle social issues.Some folks believe that modern society is too obsessed with schedules and deadlines.In "Chronopolis" we respond by outlawing clocks and watches.But as always there will be rebels who refuse to accept the revolution.Which side will win in the end?"Billennium" takes on overpopulation, while "Thirteen for Centaurus" looks at scientific ethics while also considering how easy it is to fool people ... or then again maybe not.

Among the most memorable images in this collection is "The Drowned Giant".The title is self explanatory: a giant washes up on shore near a major city.Ballard worries less about where it comes from, more about how we'll react to seeing it.While the unnamed narrator reflects on the giant's mythological appearance, the body ends up getting chopped up and used as fertilizer, while the bones decorate doorways around the city.You can try tagging metaphorical meaning to that ending if you wish, but to Ballard it was just one analysis of how modern society functions, which isn't too well.

parts of this book are brilliant
I would rate a few of the stories contained in this book with five stars, but other stories bring the total rating down to 3 stars.These are the stories which I would rate with 5 stars: "The Concentration City", "Chronopolis", "Thirteen for Centaurus", and "The Sublimiminal Man"."The Concentration City" is set somewhere in the future where somethings taken for granted now have long been forgotten.Hence things have to be reinvented and rediscovered.Because of "development" however, there are almost insurmountable barriers to reinvention."Chronopolis" is a fascinating story of how using watches and clocks became illegal."Thirteen for Centaurus" is about a space station supposedly travelling to a distant gallaxy."The Sublimiminal Man" is aptly named because it is about exactly what the title says.The rest of the stories just didn't hold my interest.Some of them were very complex while others were simple but didn't have a good plot.Indeed, some of the stories had no plot at all.As far as climax is concerned, none of his stories had a climax.Most of his stories should be read mainly for the experience as opposed to a good meat and potatoes story.One thing about J.G. Ballard is that he certainly is very imaginative and creative.

Food for Thought
Ballard is one of the great "conceptualizers" of modern literature. The premises of his stories are the most immediately striking thing about them. Sometimes the story doesn't live up to the expectations he creates, but this is probably because he sets the bar so high.

In any case, whether a Ballard story is a total or only a partial success, it invariably provides plenty of food for thought. Three of them--"The Overloaded Man", "The Drowned Giant", and "The Garden of Time"--rank among my all-time favorites for their perfect fusion of speculative and mythic qualities. The more technology-based stories ("Concentration City", "The Voices of Time") are more interesting for their ideas than their execution.

In the introduction to this volume, Anthony Burgess hits on the central importance of Ballard's work: "Ballard considers that the kind of limitation that most contemporary fiction accepts is immoral... Language exists less to record the actual than to liberate the imagination." If you agree, buy this book.

Some of the best short fiction
This is some of the best short fiction ever written. A friend of mine lent me this book. I've read a lot more J.G Ballard because I loved this book so much, but have not enjoyed Ballards other work as much.Most of the stories deal with mans struggle to cope - with technolgy, with fear, with relationships with change etc.There's a few dud stories but most are home runs. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

(Middle) Class Warfare
With Millenium People, author J.G.Ballard pens an unforgettable story of rebellion in a cozy enclave of Greater London.

When a bomb explodes on a baggage carousel at Heathrow Airport, killing his ex-wife, protagonist David Markham attempts to unravel the skein surrounding her seemingly pointless death. But with unresolved questions about himself, his job, and his loving but adulterous wife, he soon finds himself immersed in the deeper waters of middle class revolution. Fed up with double yellow traffic lines, parking fees, rising rents and the cost of private schools for their children, the residents of Chelsea Marina begin a violent insurrection.

When a generic protest at a cat show turns ugly and he is beaten up by angry cat lovers, then arrested and tried, Markham enlists in the cause of the rebellious Chelseans - imagining he will uncover the persons and causes responsible for his ex's murder. Gradually, unwittingly, he succumbs to the call of subversion and embarks upon an exciting but troubled odyssey as a terrorist functionary. Along the way we meet an assortment of wonderfully ballardian characters: Markham's wife, who continues to use her arm canes though her leg injuries from an auto accident have completely healed. A sociopathic, college film studies lecturer/terrorist cell leader who takes Markham for a lover; a hoodlum priest and his chinese girlfriend; a former MI5 bombmaker turned revolutionary. And a kindly pediatrican cum terrorist mastermind. Ultimately, Markham learns the reasons behind his former wife's murder have a very different logic than he'd imagined.

Ballard has a fine, dry wit, and Millenium People shows this to good effect: Along with their tumultuous cat show protest, the Chelsea Marina revolutionaries worry about property values. And after a violent street brawl with the London Police, the rebels tidy up their lawns, sweep up broken glass, and return burned out Volvos to their usual parking spaces in front of their burned out homes.

Millenium People is full of those distinctive flashes that color Ballard's writing:
"Cat lovers, they're very violent."
"Heathrow approached, a beached sky-city, half space station and half shanty town."
"Dust lay on the coffee table and writing desk, a nimbus that seemed like an ectoplasmic presence..."
"They sat together, black astronauts of the road, in no hurry to dismount, preparing themselves for re-entry into the non biker world."

One might fault Millenium People for a lack of character development and the ambiguous females; but by now, such quirks have passed into part of Ballard's legend, and the literary world has had to accede to them. Even those who may not be Ballard fans will find it hard to dislike Millenium People. Enjoy!

Still at (or near) the Peak of his Powers
Just about finished with the English version of Millennium People. (Since there's no translation involved, why does an English book like this take so long to come out in America? Does it really take a year to change double quotes to single quotes?) Like his two previous novels, Ballard uses the mystery for a plot device, and while in Cocaine Nights and Super Cannes, he came to the form cold in his old age, but immediately asserted his mastery, in Millennium People, he falters somewhat with his resolution of the mystery.

Moving away from his familiar theme of how the jaded West has to keep ratcheting up how it gets his kicks, he deals with senseless terrorism. Prescient, especially in light of the March 2004 attack on a hotel in Baghdad, which set a new low in terrorism in that it didn't seem to have any victims targeted. That is, Iraqis and Arabs were killed. Its aim seemed simply to create chaos like in Millennium People. While the plot is not Ballard's best, he still imbues his characters with these drop-dead little quirks that illuminates them in one line of text.

Millennium People does little to discredit him in this reviewer's eyes as the leading serious novelist in the English language. A must read for followers, and not a bad start for those new to Ballard. ... Read more

Book Description

Customer Reviews (7)

Not Free SF Reader
A doctor, sick of the corporate shill he is becoming goes to work in Central Africa.He gets obsessed with finding water, as well as being in the middle of a small military conflict.

When lots of water does happen to come around he starts to get loopier and loopier, hunting for its source, with a young girl he has a demented Lolita thing for, while he does his little Heart of Darkness adventure on a boat.

improbable adventure
This is not so much a story as a fable, or fever-dream.

'Dr. Mallory' arrives in a poverty-ridden African country to run a WHO clinic. Messing about, Mallory improbably exposes a natural spring in the arid landscape, which rapidly becomes a substantial river.
Mallory names the river after himself and sets sail along it in a derelict ferry, the Salammbo, to discover its source, along with characters such as a former guerrilla, a 12-year-old girl he names Noon. Strangely some of the characters resemble real people I have met, myself, in parts of Africa.

One of the most interesting characters is the half-blind Mr Pal, who entertains us with an occasional monologue of the passing scenery:

" . . . wild magnolias and many small tamarinds, with comfortable footing for passerine birds . . . the river is some eight metres in depth, moving through an ample basin of washed granitic marl, well stocked with aquatic life. The warm waters offer friendly refuge to snakes and lizards . . . "
"Mr. Pal . . . " I cut the throttle in protest. "For God's sake - you sound as if you're stocktaking on the last day of creation . . . "
"Well put doctor, that describes it exactly . . . "


Mallory finds that the 'benefits' of the river are becoming cancelled by its dangers, and decides he must destroy it, but he disintegrates into delirium as he tries to reach the source, harrassed by the guerillas, the local 'peace forces' - arguably more 'evil' than the guerillas -and nature itself.

Ballard has long impressed me with his incredibly vivid ability in imagery, evident as long ago as his early work "The Drowned World" (now prophetically coming true as the ice caps melt); but in this book, The Day of Creation, Ballard revels in imagery at the cost of making the story realistic. There were too many spots where this reader simply felt 'thrown out' of the narrative, caused by a failure to suspend disbelief in this outrageous tale, due to the extreme improbability of certain of the events.

An interesting idea that falls flat.
This is one of those books that clearly isn't meant to be taken entirely literally, the kind where all the events have some kind of metaphorical significance and the exterior landscape is an obvious externalization of an interior one.When done well, this can result in extraordinarily rich and rewarding fiction, the sort of story that does profound things to deep parts of your brain and can provide new insights and emotional resonances every time you return to it.Sadly, when it's done, er, less well, what you end up with is a story that fails to work on two levels instead of just one.And while it does have a few points of interest -- enough that I almost talked myself into giving it three stars instead of two -- this novel unfortunately is one of the latter kind.The metaphors and the imagery they're captured in never seem quite rich enough or subtle enough to be really engaging, either emotionally or intellectually, and the plot in and of itself is neither particularly interesting nor especially plausible.It's been quite a while since I've read any of Ballard's other work, but from what I remember he's not exactly untalented at this sort of thing.Even talented writers occasionally fall flat, however.I wanted to like and appreciate this story, I really did.But, in the end, I was counting down the pages until I was finished and could go and read something else instead.I suspect I only finished it because I'm stubborn.My advice: If you've never read anything by Ballard, start somewhere else.And if you like some of his stuff but don't feel a burning desire to read every word he's ever read, you might as well skip this one.

Waste
RIDING HIS PREVIOUS COATAILS INTO OBLIVION ...ONCE HE WAS GOOD, AND THEN HE JUST GOT WORSE AND WORSE .PROiSE IS REALY DEAD. THIS BOOK IS LEADEN .ITS CURSED. I KEPT TRYIND ;..TO READ ON and on, BUT IT WAS EXCRUCIATING IN ITS EMPTINESS, like in the sixtiesHE WAS GOOD, in the seventies, he was almost brilliant, AND THEN THE MIND ROT [ THE ENTROPY.. the callousness the alien here, in the everyday,hOw wasTHE so goodEXAMPLE day of forever SUPERENCLOSEDURE brillianceExclipsed by the MADDENING BAD? ]anything after the very early early eighties] TAKES OVER.. HIS WRITINGS, AND SAD, HE BECOMES WHAT HE PREACHES AGHASTat ;SURELY GHOSTILYMAYBE ITS POST MODERNISM OR SOMETHING this is the most tedious book ive ever had the un pleasure of not finishing,

A delirious psychological odyssey...
Ballard's 1987 novel "The Day of Creation" is a sinuous odyssey through a surrealized Africa drunk on the potential of Western technology. Ballard's narrative voice is rich and engaging, the fluctuating exterior and interior landscape rendered with delirious conviction. "The Day of Creation" reads like a particularly brutal 20th century fable, deftly pointing the cool lens of technology on our secret fascination with the Dark Continent.

"The Day of Creation" has been compared to Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness." But Ballard's novel is at once deeper and more topical; by infusing his story with a compelling and unlikely romance, Ballard reveals a sensual versatility lesser writers would gladly kill for. Read as an adventure story or as erotic allegory, "The Day of Creation" is a pleasure. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

The History of the Future
In 1968, the day after the Apollo moon landing, PanAm, one of the USA's biggest airlines at the time, began accepting reservations for flights to the moon.NASA, some time later, announced plans for a permanent moon base by the 1980s.It is difficult for someone who was not much more than a twinkle in someone's eye at the time, to imagine the mood of optimism that surrounded the landings and the extent to which it entered the psyche and fired the imagination.

Ballard's collection of short stories presented in "Memories of the Space Age" were written between 1962 and 1985, spanning the moon landings and shuttle flight and are largely a reaction to that optimistic mood.The reader is placed in a recogniseable future and shown back over the desolate terrain of the space race.The grand and rotting folly of the Cape Canaveral launching towers populate many of the stories yet it is often seen from a distance - from the long-shadowed, evening enclosures of equally rotting tourist hotels.Hotels that might once have served as layovers for space tourists.

Ballard's memories are the future memories of 1960s consumerism which manifested in aerodynamically designed fridges and toasters.He is fascinated with the way science shapes itself in the popular mind.We are like the cargo cult in the story "A Question of Re-Entry" who stumble across a re-entry capsule.We are the cargo cult of tourism, the consumption of destination, the consumption of science.Ballard questions these apropriations of science in the service of tourism/consumerism but it is with a dream logic that is no logic at all.
'Where are we going and what for?'
We are like the character Melville from "My Dream of Flying to Wake Island".He dreams of the journey and the pull is strong, but he doesn't know why or even exactly where it is.He shuns offers of journeys to other exotic locales as he works at freeing his aircraft (creating the means) to go there.In the end we leave him as he watches the wind cover his aircraft once again with sand.

The antidote to this is Scranton, the ex-astronaut in "The Man Who Walked on the Moon", the penultimate story.When asked what it was like to *be* on the moon he replies that it was "just like being here."In what way does time and space really shape our existence?


Ballard is in fine form, his seemingly languid prose delivers compact descriptions and dream-like action to form an open narrative that requires and rewards interrogation.Likewise, the accompanying illustrations by Jefferey Potter are complex and multi-layered.The images both set a scene and challenge it by their surreal detail and juxtaposition of such incongruous elements as the space shuttle with a Sopwith Camel.

I have offered one of many possible readings of this book which is truly dense with meaning.I mentioned that the space age optimism that Ballard comments on is distant history to my generation, however, we do live in an age when a similar optimism pervades the use of information and communication technologies and it is in this light that Ballard makes sense to me.In fact, in many ways, there is a direct lineage from Ballard's musings on the 'space age' and more recent cyberpunk authors' musings on the 'information age'.Perhaps we need to take stock in apropriations of our new 'space age' - communications technology - when we are faced with the future memory of an internet fridge.Is this just aerodynamic styling for the 21st century?

End of "The Dream"
I read the book several years ago in its Arkham House first ed.It floored me and has stayed with me ever since.These stories are amazing work.The idea, from one of the Canaveral stories, of people taking pieces of dead astronauts and making them into objects of religious veneration was astounding, and seemingly incredible until pieces of Columbia began to show up on eBay. This is simply one of the finest collections of sociological SF ever written--period.Ballard is proactive and prophetic here; I've read this collection again and again, and it's probably most haunting for those of us born during the Camelot era.We watched as Apollo 11 touched down and then we dreamed of space tourism to the moon and Mars bases by 2000.Now, as The Dream (with a capital D) of space travel limps along like a blind, poor beggar attacked by feral dogs, I keep returning to Ballard's collection.Read it, as my students will do this year, and weep for a lost dream.

Memories of the Sun
I could hardly agree more with the previous review, except to give this fine book five stars. Ballard's stories are not so much literary inventions as they are dreams of worlds that exist in some yet undiscovered realm,which Ballard has been generous enough to describe for us.His bright, attimes incandescent, use of metaphor and surreal imagery contrastswonderfully with a cool, detached and beautifully fluid prose style. Readers of these stories may not appreciate what they find, but they WILLrecognize that they have been someplace very different.

Spacey, surreal, dreamy
Ballard repeats, develops, and resolves his ideas about the psychological impact of space-travel and the temptation of breaking out of the constraints of Time. It's almost like watching someone hone a chess game,moving similar characters around in a similar fashion, but the smallchanges make all the difference...The reader is consoled for the narrativesimilarities by some of Ballard's most vivid imagery--sun-bleached aviatorsand the Cubist beauty of a world released from the fourth dimension. Twostories break away from this somewhat; one is a journey into the Amazonjungle in search of a downed spacecraft that gives a nod to Conrad's Heartof Darkness. In addition, the last story in the anthology, unusually downto earth (for Ballard) and set in an unnamed tropical/South Americanlocation, seems almost like a collaboration between Ballardand--possibly--Ray Bradbury. A worthwhile read for a Ballard fan, a touchchallenging for other readers. ... Read more

Book Description
On a day in April, just after three o'clock in the afternoon, Robert Maitland's car crashes over the concrete parapet of a high-speed highway onto the island below, where he is injured and, finally, trapped. What begins as an almost ludicrous predicament in Concrete Island soon turns into horror as Maitland-a wickedly modern Robinson Crusoe-realizes that, despite evidence of other inhabitants, this doomed terrain has become a mirror of his own mind. Seeking the dark outer rim of the everyday, Ballard weaves private catastrophe into an intensely specular allegory. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (19)

A revelatory experience
Like all of Ballard's writing Concrete Island is about a particular locution of the contemporary mind; it explores the kind of empty dread, the failure to connect that spells the end of empathy and humanity and the beginning of some new kind of consciousness that doesn't recognize the importance of compassion or community. His work parallels that of David Cronenberg whose explorations of the "new flesh" in films like Videodrome and The Fly posit a future that is both less than and more than human. Ballard, in contrast, is more interested not in the way our bodies will be shaped by the present and future fetishes of display, but how our minds are likewise affected by new modes of interaction.

Ballard's books, as a result, aren't interested in the comfort of linear narrative or sympathetic characters, but take a kind of primitive glee in avoiding anything traditional. Concrete Island is no different from any of his other work, using a tense matter of fact voice to tell a story of delirium and failure. It's also an amazing read.

islands of the mind
a fascinating foray into the human mind from the perspective of being scarily trapped. I could not help but think that the creators of "Lost" owe much to the brilliance of Ballard.

This novel gradually sucks you in and compels you to venture into a strange and surreal "mindspace" that is in parts terrifying and intriguing.

One comes away with a newfound appreciation of freedom in any sense and a curious enlightenment about the ways in which others are usually living lives of desperation and tragedy. The walls between "us" and "them" are thin, indeed.

I am the island
This modern 'Robinson Crusoe' tale tells the story of an architect trapped in a concrete traffic island after a car crash. Man's selfishness is exposed by the fact that nobody stops for him.
He meets his 'Friday's in the form of two outcasts surviving in a shelter on the island, 'their last hiding place, appropriately in the centre of this alienating city.'

Like the main character in Kobo Abe's 'The Woman in the Dunes', the architect tries to escape. But, when eventually he is free, he considers his escape as 'meaningless. Already he felt no real need to leave the island.'

J.G. Ballard has written a forceful portrait of man's solitude in a concrete city, illustrating violently Robert Frost's profoundly human sentence 'Every Man is an island'.

Not to be missed.

More a Writing Exercise Than a Story
This is a modernized update on the Robinson Crusoe story, which accomplishes next to nothing in theme or plot development. Ballard has used the premise as an exercise in man-against-nature and man-against-self conflict construction. Here, a man named Maitland, in busy London, has crashed his car into a traffic island that is cut off from the rest off the world by freeway ramps. He finds himself in an unknown place that he can't escape, a la Crusoe. The fact that he is actually just a few feet away from the bustling city and its millions of people, though is isolated in an invisible small space, gives the reader an interesting sense of irony that lasts for about a minute. But otherwise, the book mostly becomes tiresome character developments as Maitland fights through exhaustion and evaluates how he really feels about being isolated. Another problem is the two supporting characters, homeless denizens Jane and Proctor, who are poorly constructed to the point of incomprehensibility, and whose psychoses are merely literary vehicles for Ballard to clumsily shed light on Maitland's foibles. It seems that Ballard merely decided to take some stock settings and themes, and perform a quaint exercise in building a sense of urban isolation through predictable inner conflicts within poorly drawn characters. Others may be amazed by this book's supposed "surreal" or "allegorical" qualities. Fair enough, but that doesn't mean it has a storyline that goes anywhere interesting. [~doomsdayer520~]

A spectacular disappointment
Mr. Ballard's novel CONCRETE ISLAND starts out somewhat promising, with a successful English salaryman unintentionally finding himself trapped beneath a freeway overpass. What could have been an interesting study on modern alienation becomes a bizarre parody of Steinbeck's OF MICE AND MEN, with the George Milton character supplanted by a teenage runaway. An incredibly frustrating novel that sucks you in with promises of something better but never delivers. ... Read more

Amazon.com
When travel writer Charles Prentice arrives at Estrella de Mar, a resort town near Gibraltar populated primarily by British retirees, to find out why his brother Frank has been jailed, he's shocked to find that Frank has confessed to a spectacular act of arson that left five people dead. Charles tries to find the real culprit by hanging around Estrella de Mar, which one resident describes as "like Chelsea or Greenwich Village in the 1960s. There are theatre and film clubs, a choral society, cordon blue classes.... Stand still for a moment and you find yourself roped into a revival of Waiting for Godot." But the longer he stays, the more confused Charles is by the residents' breezy lack of concern about the constant background of vandalism, rape, prostitution, and drug dealing.

Things become clearer as Charles makes the acquaintance of local tennis pro Bobby Crawford, who has some interesting hypotheses about how to maintain the quality of the inner life in the age of affluence. As another of the locals explains, "Leisure societies lie ahead of us, like those you see on this coast. People ... will retire in their late thirties, with fifty years of idleness in front of them.... But how do you energize people, give them some sense of community?" Bobby's succinct answer, provided to Charles in another context: "There's nothing like a violent reflex now and then to tune up the nervous system." Bobby convinces Charles to help him replicate his social experiment in an adjacent retirement community, slowly convincing him that crime and creativity really do go hand in hand. But who, if anybody, takes the responsibility?

Cocaine Nights resonates quite neatly with Ballard's earlier science fiction and experimental stories. As early as The Atrocity Exhibition, Ballard was speculating about the salubrious effects of transgression, and his science fiction novel High Rise also deals with the introduction of violence to a self-contained paradise. Cocaine Nights differs from that earlier work primarily in that it is a naturalistic fiction set in a world that is much more ostensibly real, a world that, with a little less detached theorizing (even at his most natural, it seems, Ballard cannot help but be clinical) on the part of its characters, might even be mistaken for real. --Ron Hogan Book Description
J. G. Ballard once again reveals his visionary mastery in this warped tale of the unexpected

The setting for Cocaine Nights is the Costa del Sol and the stylish resort of Estrella de Mar. Into the queasy beauty of this artificial environment steps Charles Prentice, a travel writer from London who has come to visit his brother Frank, manager of the resort's Club Nautico.

Frank is in jail, having confessed to setting an explosive fire that has taken five lives. Certain that the confession was coerced, Charles launches his own investigation. As he allows himself to be drawn further into Estrella de Mar's dark underworld, this explosive novel accelerates toward a disturbing climax. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (23)

Good writing saves a weak plot.
A mild ride through the motivations of culture Ballard is so well-known for. His premises: a community needs crime to coalesce into a working, interesting place to live - and - if the community joins together to cover-up a heinous crime that community will thrive successfully.
I don't buy the fact that he necessarily succeeded in his premises, but it was fun to read his attempt.

"Crossing frontiers is my profession."
If there's anything crazier than coffee, it's cocaine, and this novel revels in the cultural effects of the hyperstimulant. Hyperstimulation is my middle name, man, and this book'll hit your frontal lobes like a weekend in Vegas with all the pretty lights. The main character goes on a journey from a wild coastal town in Spain to a massive social experiment carried out by a guy who makes Jim Jones (of the Kool-Aid party) seem like just another evangelist. Ballard crosses every frontier, from the boundries of civilization to the borderline of the sane.

If you like your books hot and twisted, read Rabid: A Novel by Kenyon, Tree of Smoke: A Novel by Johnson, The Pugilist at Rest: Stories by Jones, and Fight Club: A Novel by Palahniuk.

The Bookeater!

Bobby Crawfords biggest fan
an interesting novel about what people are willing to do to create and keep a small community active and interested in life.

Devilishly charming tale of evil masking as good intentions
_Cocaine Nights_ is what you get when a writer of the caliber of J.G. Ballard develops what could have been just another novel of murder and suspense into an "immorality tale" of hero worship that goes terribly wrong.

Bobby Crawford is a handsome and talented tennis instructor who wants to transform the sleepy retirement village of Residencia Costasol, situated on the coast of Spain, into an artistic, theatrically oriented, and civic minded community as a front for a den of drug dealers, pornographers, prostitution, and thieves.Crawford previously did the same for the Spanish resort of Estrella de Mar, home of Club Nautica, managed by Frank Prentice, a Brit recently jailed after he confessed to settingablaze the home of the elderly and wealthy Mr. and Mrs. Hollinger that snuffed out their lives and those of three other people.Charles Prentice, a travel writer and Frank's older brother, believes in Frank's innocence, despite the latter's repeated protestations to the contrary.Charles goes to Estrella de Mar to investigate the matter.

Charles is slowly sucked into the charming and cunning Bobby Crawford's web of corruption, as are many others in the book.They believe that Crawford is basically a do-gooder, in spite of his penchant for petty and not so petty crimes, to which the police repeatedly turn a blind eye.

I was caught in the grip of this unbelievably suspenseful tale of a later day Sodom and Gomorrah that just never lets up. I could not help comparing the character of Bobby Crawford with that of the late Jim Jones of the Jonestown Massacre infamy.Jim Jones was a handsome, charismatic man of many talents who led his naive followers into the promised land of Guyana.Like Bobby Crawford, a cult of personality formed around Jim Jones, and like Bobby Crawford, Jim Jones was a psychopath.Each man believed he was the Messiah, but it was Jim Jones, if not necessarily B