DOCSLIB.ORG

The Best Short Stories of JG Ballard Ebook Free Download

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
The Best Short Stories of JG Ballard Ebook Free Download THE BEST SHORT STORIES OF J. G. BALLARD PDF, EPUB, EBOOK J G Ballard | 320 pages | 06 Jul 2001 | St. Martins Press-3pl | 9780312278441 | English | New York, United States The Best Short Stories of J. G. Ballard PDF Book Also, this volume gives you a great perspective on Ballard's evolution as a writer, from his early sci-fi pieces to his more stylistically distinct later works, as well as a bunch of odd experimental one-offs, some of which are amazing. It's about technology, which is indeed antithetical to architecture. He is represented by the Transatlantic Literary Agency in Toronto. Aug 21, Laura Leaney rated it it was amazing. His stories aren't really hopeful but definitely make you think. Chronopolis is the ruin of a once great city that was overthrown in a revolution against the tyranny of precisely-scripted efficiency. Be careful of what you listen to; it may consume you. Yes, the book is long as hell and certainly is a daunting challenge For me J. Welcome back. His sparing use of descriptions of the human body here, 'gaunt' and 'scar' add a eerie poignancy to the mostly dry, engineer terms like 'riveted steel mesh' that make the billboards into mind controlling monsters. Buy, borrow, beg if need be. Still, the story is hardly one of his best. G Ballard by J. It's an understatement to say he was a fantastic writer, though of course he was. He essentially becomes trapped in his own living room, alone in a four-dimensional world that is rapidly shrinking and collapsing in upon itself. In a way, this may be the ultimate Ballard story in this collection. Shelves: kool-imports. I've read most of Ballard's novels but not many of the short stories before. However, during his long career he was also a prolific writer of short stories, many of which show the germination of ideas he used in his longer fiction. A prescient story about a man who can no longer face the demands of society and starts deconstructing and "turning off" his perception of every day objects. It's all in these short stories. Ballard , read it, read a few more at random, and then decided to start at the beginning. To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up. It's a huge book with surprisingly few duds. Next read "Billennium," an original take on the problem of overpopulation. Let's not binge. Lists with This Book. John Ward is a young man who works at the library and has rented a cubicle on the staircase of an old rooming house. This is about the point in the collection where I started to wonder if I would finish. Until, of course, the main character finds one last solitary patch… Great commentary on complete human disregard for the impact we have on the natural world. Ballard does this again and again His weakest stories are too closely linked to things like spies, beautiful women, exotic conspiracies that have the scent of reality about them, but even then he writes with a scalpel, his prose is sharp, sneering, commanding. The only reason I give this book 4 stars instead of 5 is because the stories in the second half are more hit-and-miss, and somewhat less intense, than those in the first half. But the good stories are so good that they made up for the ones that fell flat. Of course you can. He's too interested in ideas to let individuality prevail. Some truly phenomenal material; on the strength of the stories here I went and got more Ballard books with varying degrees of success. They're saturated with loneliness — or more correctly, aloneness — following one or two or three characters separated from the remnants of a civilization in the last throes of expiring, its population decimated by worldwide ennui. Yet his work, now stripped of their shock value, lacks the genuinely imaginative leaps of great fabulists like Borges and Calvino. The two men spend most of the story playing chess together in the villa, with Constantin dreaming up new ways of squeezing Malek for information about his looming fate. Starts in a back street in some ordinary dollar neighbourhood; a bottleneck in the sewage disposal system, not enough ash cans, and before you know it a million cubic miles have gone back to jungle. Franz looked out over the railing for a couple of hours and then bought a postcard from one of the vendors and walked back thoughtfully to the elevator. Feb 21, Howard Cincotta rated it it was ok Shelves: short-stories , fiction , science-fiction. It's a pity, because Mr. The Stanford Prison Experiment, fraudulent from the start , was in His tales of the human psyche and its relationship to nature and technology, as viewed through a strong microscope, were eerily prescient and now provide greater perspective on our computer-dominated culture. Other editions. His tales of the human psyche and its relationship to nature and technology, as viewed through a strong microscope, were eerily prescient and now provide greater perspective on our computer-dominated culture. No trivia or quizzes yet. In the late s and early s Ballard focused on an eclectic variety of short stories or "condensed novels" such as The Atrocity Exhibition , which drew closer comparison with the work of postmodernist writers such as William S. The Best Short Stories of J. G. Ballard Writer He is hardly a forgotten figure in SF fandom, but his reputation in the larger literary community is overshadowed by that of Ballard. Ballard at times is a kid playing with a train set, though his settings are enormous in scale-- Gotham cities. Chronopolis is the ruin of a once great city that was overthrown in a revolution against the tyranny of precisely-scripted efficiency. Science-fiction short stories are not for me. All day this strange pilot had flown his antique aeroplane over the abandoned space centre, a frantic machine lost in the silence of Florida. It became gradually clear - to JG and to the reader - that he wasn't really able to do the hard-sf thing extrapolation with a lot of wires and diagrams , but instead, he was developing, slowly, a genuine voice, a way of seeing the present in the guise of the future, and a unique form of poetry. One of its best practitioners, J. Perhaps nowhere was he closer to predicting how the future might unfold than in these hedonistic forays into art and decrepitude both mental and physical. Deep Time: 10,,, mega—years. There are also some truly bizarre ones, that seem to lack the kind of enduring value that might excuse their sins against propriety. An uncanny simulation of what popular literature might be like in an alternate future not ours, unfortunately. Also, this volume gives you a great perspective on Ballard's evolution as a writer, from his early sci-fi pieces to his more stylistically distinct later works, as well as a bun It took a while while for Ballard to really hit his stride, and he was much better as a conceptualist than as a storyteller. Ballard's 16th book. But show me a collection of anything, and I'll show you variat Dear Unassuming Reader. Ballard has used his senses of technology to fashion his stories, empower them with the ability to frighten and amuse. Powered by Squarespace. Ballard, whose massive volume of complete stories was recently published. Bibliografische Informationen. Want to Read saving…. Trade Paperback , pages. It's a pity, because Mr. The Thousand Dreams of Stellavista. What happens to the people inside I hate to think. No, what I like is JGB at his most elegiac, which is to say, at his most lethal. Most of these stories are narrated by solitary men inhabiting ruined worlds. Additional Product Features Dewey Edition. Those guys could tell a story. Brand new: Lowest price The lowest-priced brand-new, unused, unopened, undamaged item in its original packaging where packaging is applicable. Still, the story is hardly one of his best. In the opening story of the collection "Concentration City," Franz M. Uncomfortable with ordinary definitions of time and space, they try to escape the maddening scrim that holds the world together -- find scattered bits of psychic truth for themselves and puzzle out the meaning of their existence. However, during his long career he was also a prolific writer of short stories, many of which show the germination of ideas he used in his longer fiction. In the stories, Ballard sets up scenarios where the mere act of going into space somehow alters humanity and the orderly flow of time. In "Say Goodbye to the Wind," we have: "The villa was silent. Ballard, in each tale, immerses you into foreign but not altogether alien atmospheres where everything is authentic. I believe that the true domain of science fiction is that zone I have termed inner space, rather than outer space and that the present rather than the future is now the period of greatest moral urgency for the writer. The Best Short Stories of J. G. Ballard Reviews There were no aliens. Ballard in fiction. His latest book is Super-Cannes. Ballard already had a distinct setting in mind to play out his future- nowisms. And you can mine it for brilliant, brilliant things. Ballard strives to do too much in the story—he wants to criticize public attitudes about art, sculpture, music, etc. Of the earliest stories my favorites overall , two in particular have lived with me since I first read them some 50 years ago: "Sound Sweep" and "The Terminal Beach.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Near Vermilion Sands: the Context and Date of Composition of an Abandoned Literary Draft by J. G. Ballard
    Near Vermilion Sands: The Context and Date of Composition of an Abandoned Literary Draft by J. G. Ballard Chris Beckett ‘We had entered an inflamed landscape’1 When Raine Channing – ‘sometime international model and epitome of eternal youthfulness’2 – wanders into ‘Topless in Gaza’, a bio-fabric boutique in Vermilion Sands, and remarks that ‘Nothing in Vermilion Sands ever changes’, she is uttering a general truth about the fantastic dystopian world that J. G. Ballard draws and re-draws in his collection of stories set in and around the tired, flamboyant desert resort, a resort where traumas flower and sonic sculptures run to seed.3 ‘It’s a good place to come back to,’4 she casually continues. But, like many of the female protagonists in these stories – each a femme fatale – she is a captive of her past: ‘She had come back to Lagoon West to make a beginning, and instead found that events repeated themselves.’5 Raine has murdered her ‘confidant and impresario, the brilliant couturier and designer of the first bio-fabric fashions, Gavin Kaiser’.6 Kaiser has been killed – with grim, pantomime karma – by a constricting gold lamé shirt of his own design: ‘Justice in a way, the tailor killed by his own cloth.’7 But Kaiser’s death has not resolved her trauma. Raine is a victim herself, a victim of serial plastic surgery, caught as a teenager in Kaiser’s doomed search for perpetual gamin youth: ‘he kept me at fifteen,’ she says, ‘but not because of the fashion-modelling. He wanted me for ever when I first loved him.’8 She hopes to find in Vermilion Sands, in its localized curvature of time and space, the parts of herself she has lost on a succession of operating tables.
    [Show full text]
  • JUDITH MERRIL-PDF-Sep23-07.Pdf (368.7Kb)
    JUDITH MERRIL: AN ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY AND GUIDE Compiled by Elizabeth Cummins Department of English and Technical Communication University of Missouri-Rolla Rolla, MO 65409-0560 College Station, TX The Center for the Bibliography of Science Fiction and Fantasy December 2006 Table of Contents Preface Judith Merril Chronology A. Books B. Short Fiction C. Nonfiction D. Poetry E. Other Media F. Editorial Credits G. Secondary Sources About Elizabeth Cummins PREFACE Scope and Purpose This Judith Merril bibliography includes both primary and secondary works, arranged in categories that are suitable for her career and that are, generally, common to the other bibliographies in the Center for Bibliographic Studies in Science Fiction. Works by Merril include a variety of types and modes—pieces she wrote at Morris High School in the Bronx, newsletters and fanzines she edited; sports, westerns, and detective fiction and non-fiction published in pulp magazines up to 1950; science fiction stories, novellas, and novels; book reviews; critical essays; edited anthologies; and both audio and video recordings of her fiction and non-fiction. Works about Merill cover over six decades, beginning shortly after her first science fiction story appeared (1948) and continuing after her death (1997), and in several modes— biography, news, critical commentary, tribute, visual and audio records. This new online bibliography updates and expands the primary bibliography I published in 2001 (Elizabeth Cummins, “Bibliography of Works by Judith Merril,” Extrapolation, vol. 42, 2001). It also adds a secondary bibliography. However, the reasons for producing a research- based Merril bibliography have been the same for both publications. Published bibliographies of Merril’s work have been incomplete and often inaccurate.
    [Show full text]
  • Contents PROOF
    PROOF Contents Acknowledgements vii Notes on Contributors viii Introduction 1 Jeannette Baxter and Rowland Wymer Part I ‘Fictions of Every Kind’: Form and Narrative 1 Ballard’s Story of O: ‘The Voices of Time’ and the Quest for (Non)Identity 19 Rowland Wymer 2 Ballard/Atrocity/Conner/Exhibition/Assemblage 35 Roger Luckhurst 3 Uncanny Forms: Reading Ballard’s ‘Non-Fiction’ 50 Jeannette Baxter Part II ‘The Angle Between Two Walls’: Sex, Geometry and the Body 4 Pornographic Geometries: The Spectacle as Pathology and as Therapy in The Atrocity Exhibition 71 Jen Hui Bon Hoa 5 Disaffection and Abjection in J. G. Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition and Crash 88 Emma Whiting 6 Reading Posture and Gesture in Ballard’s Novels 105 Dan O’Hara Part III ‘Babylon Revisited’: Ballard’s Londons 7 The Texture of Modernity in J. G. Ballard’s Crash, Concrete Island and High-Rise 123 Sebastian Groes v September 30, 2011 17:22 MAC/BAXI Page-v 9780230_278127_01_prex PROOF vi Contents 8 J. G. Ballard and William Blake: Historicizing the Reprobate Imagination 142 Alistair Cormack 9 Late Ballard 160 David James Part IV ‘The Personal is Political’: Psychology and Sociopathology 10 Empires of the Mind: Autobiography and Anti-imperialism in the Work of J. G. Ballard 179 David Ian Paddy 11 ‘Going mad is their only way of staying sane’: Norbert Elias and the Civilized Violence of J. G. Ballard 198 J. Carter Wood 12 The Madness of Crowds: Ballard’s Experimental Communities 215 Jake Huntley 13 ‘Zones of Transition’: Micronationalism in the Work of J. G.
    [Show full text]
  • Body and Space in J. G. Ballard's Concrete Island and High-Rise
    Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais Faculdade de Letras Pedro Henrique dos Santos Groppo Body and Space in J. G. Ballard’s Concrete Island and High-Rise Minas Gerais – Brasil Abril – 2009 Groppo 2 Acknowledgments I would like to thank Prof. Julio Jeha for the encouragement and support. He was always open and willing to make sense of my fragmentary and often chaotic ideas. Also, thanks to CNPq for the financial support. And big thanks to the J. G. Ballard online community, whose creativity and enthusiasm towards all things related to Ballard were captivating. Groppo 3 Abstract The fiction of J. G. Ballard is unusually concerned with spaces, both internal and exterior. Influenced by Surrealism and Freudian psychoanalysis, Ballard’s texts explore the thin divide between mind and body. Two of his novels of the 1970s, namely Concrete Island (1974) and High-Rise (1975) depict with detail his preoccupation with how the modern, urban world pushes man to the point where an escape to inner world is the solution to the tacit and oppressive forces of the external world. This escape is characterized by a suspension of conventional morality, with characters expressing atavistic tendencies, an effective return of the repressed. The present thesis poses a reading of these two novels, aided by analyses of some of Ballard’s short stories, with a focus on the relation between bodies and spaces and how they project and introject into one another. Such a reading is grounded on theories of the uncanny as described by Freud and highlights Ballard’s kinship to Gothic fiction.
    [Show full text]
  • J. G. Ballard's Inner Space: the Juxtaposition of Time, Space and Body
    J. G. BALLARD’S INNER SPACE: THE JUXTAPOSITION OF TIME, SPACE AND BODY Pedro Groppo Doutorando em Estudos Literários ABSTRACT The fiction of J. G. Ballard is unusually concerned with spaces, both internal and external. Influenced by Surrealism and Freudian psychoanalysis, Ballard’s texts explore the thin divide between mind and body. This analysis of the story “The terminal beach” illustrates well some of the concepts present throughout his fiction. KEYWORDS Body, space, the uncanny The fiction of J. G. Ballard is concerned with psychology, both by way of characters and their relationships, and an exploration of the real, outer world in terms of the mind. In reading Ballard, one should be attentive of spaces, how they inform and are informed by the characters’ psyches – be these spaces imagined or real. In 1962, writing for New Worlds, the avant-garde science fiction (SF) magazine of the sixties, Ballard advocated a separation between “inner” and “outer” spaces. He believed that, taking his cues from Sigmund Freud and the surrealists, “outer space” was no longer that important, and that writers should turn their attention to “inner space,” meaning mind exploration rather than the space travel often depicted in the more generic flavor of SF. It was a true manifesto, and many took heed, turning Ballard into the champion of the “New Wave” of British SF. For him, “outer space” could only have any kind of interest if it were to mirror “inner space”: “The biggest developments of the intermediate future will take place, not on the Moon or Mars, but on Earth, and its inner space, not outer, that needs to be explored.
    [Show full text]
  • Is Dead: JG Ballard's Post-Humanist Myths of the Near Future
    ”Sex(ual identity) Is Dead : J.G. Ballard’s Post-Humanist Myths of the Near Future,” Didier Girard To cite this version: Didier Girard. ”Sex(ual identity) Is Dead : J.G. Ballard’s Post-Humanist Myths of the Near Future,”. ESSE 6, Aug 2002, starsbourg, France. halshs-02568862 HAL Id: halshs-02568862 https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-02568862 Submitted on 10 May 2020 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. Out of nowhere, To Jovan Kostov, Topsy-turvy. Sex (ual identity) is Dead : J. G. Ballard’s Post-Humanist Myths of the Near Future Didier Girard Je marchais fier parmi les héros, Le ciel brillait d’étoiles, Et une étoile, comme un héros du ciel d’Anou Est tombée vers moi. J’ai voulu la porter, elle était trop lourde. J’ai voulu la pousser, je n’ai pu la bouger. Autour d’elle, les gens du pays s’assemblaient Et lui baisaient les pieds. Je l’ai aimée et je me suis penchée sur elle Comme on se penche sur une femme Je l’ai soulevée et déposée à tes pieds Et toi tu l’as rendue égale à moi.
    [Show full text]
  • Iterative Architecture: a Ballardian Text Brian Baker
    21: A Journal of Contemporary and Innovative Fiction Iterative Architecture: a Ballardian Text Brian Baker Instructions/ Introduction Readers hoping to solve the mystery of J.G. Ballard’s ‘The Beach Murders’ may care to approach it in the form of a card game. Some of the principal clues have been alphabetized, some left as they were found, scrawled on to the backs of a deck of cards. Readers are invited to recombine the order of the cards to arrive at a solution.* Obviously any number of solutions is possible, and the final answer to the mystery lies forever hidden. * You may find scissors a useful accessory ♣♠♥♦ Clubs ♣ Architecture (A♣). Physical space is crucial to the Ballardian imaginary, from the eponymous tower block in High­Rise (1975) to the ‘gated communities’ and science parks of Super­Cannes (2000) and Millennium People (2003). Counterposed to images of flight and transcendence found in many of his stories, the urban environment is often an imprisoning space. In his online article ‘J.G. Ballard and the Architectures of Control’ Ballardian » J.G. Ballard & Architectures of Control, Dan Lockton argues that ‘One of the many ‘obsessions’ running through Ballard’s work is what we might characterise as the effect of architecture on the individual’, while complicating his argument by acknowledging the mutual implication of inner and outer, psychological and environment: this blurring being Ballard’s method of ‘reflecting the participants’ mental state in the environment itself’. 1 Lockton also suggests that ‘[t]he architecture […] acts as a structure for the story’ in locating the protagonist and ‘plot’ firmly in an ‘obsessively explained and expounded’ architecture.
    [Show full text]
  • The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard Free
    FREE THE COMPLETE STORIES OF J. G. BALLARD PDF J. G. Ballard,Martin Amis | 1216 pages | 21 Sep 2009 | WW Norton & Co | 9780393072624 | English | New York, United States The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard (Hardcover) | Porter Square Books Back to the "Collecting J. Ballard" Home Page. I have The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard the same approach to collections of Ballard's short stories as for his novels. That is, I have listed both U. I have also listed a small number of other editions that are of particular interest. Where a collection was first published in paperback format, it may well have been re- printed by the same publisher at a later date. Usually, the re- print will be recognizable because the artwork on the front cover will be completely different from the first printing. For details of which stories were included in each collection, see here. The first collection of Ballard's short stories, whose only publication was in a U. There was a later reprintwhich had a completely different cover. Note that the title The Voices of Time was used for an entirely different U. A second collection from Berkley inagain only ever issued as a U. The first collection published in the U. The first edition was a hardback from Gollancz inand contained eight stories, of which two including 'The Voices of Time' had appeared in the U. A second edition appeared from Gollancz in with two stories being changed; this later version now contained three stories in common with The Voices of Time and Other Stories.
    [Show full text]
  • Posthuman Geographies in Twentieth Century Literature and Film Alex
    View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Carolina Digital Repository Surfing the Interzones: Posthuman Geographies in Twentieth Century Literature and Film Alex McAulay A dissertation submitted to the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English. Chapel Hill 2008 Approved by: Pamela Cooper María DeGuzmán Kimball King Julius Raper Linda Wagner-Martin © 2008 Alex McAulay ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii ABSTRACT ALEX MCAULAY: Surfing the Interzones: Posthuman Geographies in Twentieth Century Literature and Film (Under the direction of Pamela Cooper) This dissertation presents an analysis of posthuman texts through a discussion of posthuman landscapes, bodies, and communities in literature and film. In the introduction, I explore and situate the relatively recent term "posthuman" in relation to definitions proposed by other theorists, including N. Katherine Hayles, Donna Haraway, Judith Halberstam and Ira Livingston, Hans Moravec, Max More, and Francis Fukuyama. I position the posthuman as being primarily celebratory about the collapse of restrictive human boundaries such as gender and race, yet also containing within it more disturbing elements of the uncanny and apocalyptic. My project deals primarily with hybrid texts, in which the posthuman intersects and overlaps with other posts, including postmodernism and postcolonialism. In the first chapter, I examine the novels comprising J.G. Ballard's disaster series, and apply Bakhtin's theories of hybridization, and Deleuze and Guattari's notions of voyagings, becomings, and bodies without organs to delineate the elements that constitute a posthuman landscape.
    [Show full text]
  • Dottorato Di Ricerca the Only Truly Alien Planet Is
    View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Archivio istituzionale della ricerca - Università di Cagliari Università degli Studi di Cagliari DOTTORATO DI RICERCA IN STUDI FILOLOGICI E LETTERARI Ciclo XXIII THE ONLY TRULY ALIEN PLANET IS EARTH J. G. BALLARD, DALLA FANTASCIENZA AL MAINSTREAM TRA ROMANTICISMO E SURREALISMO L-FIL-LET/14 CRITICA LETTERARIA E LETTERATURE COMPARATE Presentata da: Ignazio Sanna Coordinatore Dottorato Prof. Cristina Lavinio Tutor/Relatore Prof. Mauro Pala Esame finale anno accademico 2010 ‐ 2011 A mio padre e mia madre Un ringraziamento particolare alla Dott.ssa Jeannette Baxter, docente di Letteratura Inglese presso la Anglia Ruskin University di Cambridge, per l’incoraggiamento e i preziosi consigli, e alla comunità on line dei cultori dell’opera ballardiana INDICE Introduzione: L’unico pianeta veramente alieno è la Terra p. 1 I. SURREALISMO, ATROCITA’, SCONTRI p. 7 1. Bello come l’incontro fra il tavolo per le autopsie e la pornografia p. 7 2. Violenza e morte dell’affetto p. 23 3. Baudrillard legge Crash p. 31 II. SURREALISMO, CONTROCULTURA, ‘CONSIGLI PER GLI ACQUISTI’ p. 35 1. Politica e mass media p. 35 2. Controcultura e stati alterati di coscienza p. 40 3. Immagini e pubblicità p. 49 III. SURREALISMO, PITTURA, INCONSCIO p. 54 1. Inner space e disaster story p. 54 2. Surrealismo e pittura nella cosiddetta ‘tetralogia del disastro’ p. 59 3. Il sogno p. 77 4. Mandala p. 86 IV. ROMANTICISMO, PSICHE, ARTE p. 91 1. Romanticismo: Il doppio p. 91 2. The Man-Machine p. 101 3.
    [Show full text]
  • Nagasaki, Eniwetok, Mururoa, and JG Ballard
    Open Cultural Studies 2019; 3: 553-562 Research article Dominika Oramus* The Art of Un-Making: Nagasaki, Eniwetok, Mururoa, and J.G. Ballard https://doi.org/10.1515/culture-2019-0049 Received May 13, 2019; accepted September 25, 2019 Abstract: This paper analyzes one kind of Ballardian landscape, wastelands created by nuclear explosions, and aims at interpreting them as a study of the un-making of the human-made world. Cityscapes of ruins, crumbling concrete concourses and parking lots, abandoned barracks and military stations, radiation and mutations make Nagasaki, Eniwetok and Mururoa wasteland snap-shots of the future. In the minds of the protagonists, the un-made landscape is strangely soothing; they are attracted by the post-nuclear imagery and gladly embrace the upcoming catastrophe. Nagasaki, Eniwetok and Mururoa are the harbingers of a future where one can experience the nirvana of non-being. In this paper, I discuss the Ballardian un-making of the world and, hopefully, point to the subliminal meaning of atomic explosions in his works. To do this, I first discuss the references to the atomic bomb in Ballard's non-fiction (A User's Guide to the Millennium, J.G.Ballard Conversations). Then, I isolate and describe the subsequent stages of the un-making of the world using his depictions of Nagasaki (Empire of the Sun, The Atrocity Exhibition); Eniwetok (The Atrocity Exhibition, The Terminal Beach), and Mururoa (Rushing to Paradise). Finally, I suggest a hypothesis explaining the subliminal meaning of nuclear bombs with reference to Freud's theories. Keywords: Nuclear explosions, wastelands, Nagasaki J.G.
    [Show full text]
  • J. G. Ballard and Making: an Experiment in Collaborative Practice
    Open Cultural Studies 2019; 3: 579-590 Introduction Beth White, Thomas Knowles* J. G. Ballard and Making: An Experiment in Collaborative Practice https://doi.org/10.1515/culture-2019-0051 Received September 27, 2019; accepted Outline of project “J. G. Ballard and Making” was an eight-week collaborative project that ran in the second semester of 2017 at Birmingham City University. It brought together students and lecturers from the schools of English and Fashion & Textiles with the open brief of responding creatively to Ballard’s collection of short stories Vermilion Sands (1971). The students collaborated on a series of creative responses to Ballard’s work including collage images and sculptures that they presented at “J. G. Ballard Day” (JGB Day) in June 2017. The students also designed and printed a programme to showcase their work and to introduce the conference speakers. In this introductory essay, we explore the concept of making in some of Ballard’s key texts; we sketch some of the pedagogical methods and techniques employed on the project, such as the exquisite corpse; we discuss some of the challenges and rewards encountered in responding creatively to Vermilion Sands; and finally introduce the essays that make up this collection. Throughout this essay, and in-between the articles that follow, you will find images of the collages, sculptures and designs that the students produced for the project. Why J. G. Ballard? The works of the post-war British author J. G. Ballard might seem an odd fulcrum for a collaborative project; the erstwhile science fiction (sf) writer and literary provocateur famously populates his works with eccentrics and loners, Byronic heroes, decadents, dreamers, and false prophets.
    [Show full text]