alt.hn

7/13/2026 at 9:57:56 PM

The Estranged Worlds of J. G. Ballard

 https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/jg-ballard-illuminated-man-christopher-priest-nina-allan/

by Caiero

7/14/2026 at 11:12:27 PM

"Fantastic fiction" .... that's actually a very apt way to describe Ballard's work.

His memoir presents a vivid but not fantastic view of his life in the suburbs of southeast England, like a British Cheever. I felt surprised but shouldn't have; many of the greats of science fiction or fantasy or fantastic fiction had harrowing experiences as youths and then led lives that seem "normal" while exercising their trauma through the written word. Vonnegut, Tolkien, Wolfe ...

by ilamont

7/15/2026 at 8:32:31 AM

I find it fascinating that two of the most (if not the two most) original, inventive, and outright weird British writers of the 20th c., Ballard and Mervyn Peake, spent their early years in China.

by macleginn

7/15/2026 at 12:34:59 PM

Paul Linebarger aka Cordwainer Smith, while not British and not in China in his early years, did spend a lot time in China and wrote original, inventive, and outright weird sf.

A weird personal story: I was once in a bar (I'm virtually never in bars), was quite tipsy (I almost never am), and happened to sit next to a woman named Joan, whom I found myself speaking to (a very rare event) and, being a drunken awkward nerd I said that her name made me think of the undergirl D'Joan, a principal character in Smith's story The Dead Lady of Clowntown. When I said "Cordwainer Smith" she said "Oh, Dr. Paul Linebarger". I nearly fell off my stool. I asked her how she knew ... was she a fan of his work? Oh no ... she had lived in China where her father was a colleague of Linebarger's and the families often dined together. (I have no recollection of what we said to each other after that -- I was too flabbergasted.)

by jibal

7/14/2026 at 10:57:21 PM

He did science fiction. Among other things he was on of the British world destroyer authors.

But he also had a lot of rather experimental and even weird stories--some of which intersected SF to some degree and some of which really didn't.

by ghaff

7/15/2026 at 7:26:15 AM

Perhaps his best known work is the novels that were made into movies, “Crash” and “High-Rise”, and neither is science fiction.

There’s also “Empire of the Sun” that was adapted by Steven Spielberg, but it’s autobiographical so doesn’t really count.

by pavlov

7/14/2026 at 10:51:50 PM

I read this when it came out as a long time Ballard fan. It fleshed out a little more about his life I didn’t know, but becomes a weird read for the final third where the focus is on the co-author dying and the author switches to his wife, an originally unintended co-author. They certainly had a story of their own to tell, but it felt rather odd.

by petercooper

7/14/2026 at 11:51:04 PM

I’m okay with that. I’ve been a huge fan of Ballard and Priest for years, and got into Nina Allan’s work more recently and this book was a brilliant but heartbreaking read.

by aardvark179

7/15/2026 at 2:06:10 AM

"For instance, there is no exploration of outer space in Ballard’s fiction: there are no robots or supercomputers, and the scientist characters who continue to populate his novels are usually extremist cranks."

Ballard wrote at least four stories dealing with space and spaceflight. Most notable is his "Report on an Unidentified Space Station" which is quite haunting.

by jdkee

7/15/2026 at 4:01:54 AM

Wasn't there one called "the Message from Mars". If I remember the astronauts didn't want to come out of their capsule when they returned to Earth.

by nephihaha

7/15/2026 at 6:34:42 AM

I'm reading The Drowned World right now. Incredible book, highly recommended.

by solomonb

7/15/2026 at 4:09:43 AM

One of the greatest prophets of our times. He predicted social media and TikTok in the 1970s.

https://www.noosphe.re/post/618998121909927937/the-future-of...

"this, of course, will be more electronic wallpaper, the background to the main programme in which each of us will be both star and supporting player. Every one of our actions during the day, across the entire spectrum of domestic life, will be instantly recorded on video-tape. In the evening we will sit back to scan the rushes, selected by a computer trained to pick out only our best profiles, our wittiest dialogue, our most affecting expressions filmed through the kindest filters, and then stitch these together into a heightened re-enactment of the day. Regardless of our place in the family pecking order, each of us within the privacy of our own rooms will be the star in a continually unfolding domestic saga, with parents, husbands, wives and children demoted to an appropriate supporting role."

by nephihaha