J. G. Ballard topic

Also known as

James Graham Ballard,
J.G. Ballard

James Graham Ballard (born 15 November 1930 in the International Settlement in Shanghai, China) is a British novelist and short story writer. He was a prominent member of the New Wave in science fiction. His best known books are the controversial Crash, and the autobiographical novel Empire of the Sun, both of which have been adapted to film. The adjective "Ballardian", defined as "resembling or suggestive of the conditions described in J. G. Ballard's novels and stories, especially dystopian... full article at wikipedia

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Nov 15, 1930

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Shanghai

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England

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King's College, Cambridge
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Quotations

Given that external reality is a fiction, the writer's role is almost superfluous. He does not need to invent the fiction because it is already there.

Perhaps violence, like pornography, is some kind of an evolutionary standby system, a last-resort device for throwing a wild joker into the game?

Pop artists deal with the lowly trivia of possessions and equipment that the present generation is lugging along with it on its safari into the future.

Hell is out of fashion -- institutional hells at any rate. The populated infernos of the 20th century are more private affairs, the gaps between the bars are the sutures of one's own skull. A valid hell is one from which there is a possibility of redemption, even if this is never achieved, the dungeons of an architecture of grace whose spires point to some kind of heaven. The institutional hells of the present century are reached with one-way tickets, marked Nagasaki and Buchenwald, worlds of terminal horror even more final than the grave.

I believe that organic sex, body against body, skin area against skin area, is becoming no longer possible, simply because if anything is to have any meaning for us it must take place in terms of the values and experiences of the media landscape. What we're getting is a whole new order of sexual fantasies, involving a different order of experiences, like car crashes, like travelling in jet aircraft, the whole overlay of new technologies, architecture, interior design, communications, transport, merchandising. These things are beginning to reach into our lives and change the interior design of our sexual fantasies. We've got to recognize that what one sees through the window of the TV screen is as important as what one sees through a window on the street.

People nowadays like to be together not in the old-fashioned way of, say, mingling on the piazza of an Italian Renaissance city, but, instead, huddled together in traffic jams, bus queues, on escalators and so on. It's a new kind of togetherness which may seem totally alien, but it's the togetherness of modern technology.

Science and technology multiply around us. To an increasing extent they dictate the languages in which we speak and think. Either we use those languages, or we remain mute.

I thought it was a wonderfully conceptual act actually, to fire a replica pistol at a figurehead -- the guy could have been working for Andy Warhol!

The car as we know it is on the way out. To a large extent, I deplore its passing, for as a basically old-fashioned machine, it enshrines a basically old-fashioned idea: freedom. In terms of pollution, noise and human life, the price of that freedom may be high, but perhaps the car, by the very muddle and confusion it causes, may be holding back the remorseless spread of the regimented, electronic society.

Everything is becoming science fiction. From the margins of an almost invisible literature has sprung the intact reality of the 20th century.

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Film writing credits

film	initial release date
Crash	May 17, 1996
Empire of the Sun	Dec 9, 1987
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Works written

Concrete Island

The Wind from Nowhere

Empire of the Sun

Hello America

Memories of the Space Age

The Drowned World

Passport to Eternity

Vermilion Sands

The Disaster Area

The Day of Forever

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Book editions published

book edition	publication date	isbn
Concrete Island	1974	0224009702
Memories of the Space Age	1988	0870541579
Empire of the Sun		0575035595
Hello America		0881845477
Empire of the Sun		9780006547006
Running Wild		9780006548195
Vermilion Sands		9780099273585
The Kindness of Women	1993	0156471140
The Crystal World	1988	9780374520960
Super-Cannes	2000	0002258471, 0007109288
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Award Nominations

year	award	nominated for (e.g. a book or performace)
1982	Nebula Award for Best Novelette	Myths of the Near Future
1965	Nebula Award for Best Short Story	Souvenir
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