I'm reading The Drowned World right now. Incredible book, highly recommended.
The Estranged Worlds of J. G. Ballard
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Re: The Estranged Worlds of J. G. Ballard
#12"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.
I highly recommend "Memories of the Space Age".
>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memories_of_the_Space_Age
>> https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/jg-ballard/memori...
Re: The Estranged Worlds of J. G. Ballard
#13He 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.
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.
Re: The Estranged Worlds of J. G. Ballard
#14I 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.
Re: The Estranged Worlds of J. G. Ballard
#15"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.
> Most notable is his "Report on an Unidentified Space Station" which is quite haunting.
See also last month's thread:
Re: The Estranged Worlds of J. G. Ballard
#16I must have read hundreds of mostly sci-fi and horror short stories. "Billennium" is probably not my favorite, but it's the one that haunted me the most.
https://cultureinjection.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/20...
Re: The Estranged Worlds of J. G. Ballard
#17I 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.
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.)