JG Ballard's Apocalyptic Art

112 pointsposted 7 days ago
by thinkingemote
(newstatesman.com)

30 Comments

atombender

7 days ago

Ballard's fiction is great. I'm partial to the early novels (The Crystal World is one of my favourites) and to his short stories.

In his longer works, Ballard's ideas often wore a bit thin. In particular, his late novels (Cocaine Nights, etc.) are the longest — beautifully written, sure, but they are essentially reskinned versions of his earlier High-Rise and Running Wild, where he already perfected the motif of humans in gated communities reverting to base, animal, violent behaviour. We didn't really need those; he'd already made his point.

I do recommend getting his "The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard" (not to be confused with "The Complete Short Stories of J. G. Ballard: Volume 1" and "Volume 2", both of which it supercedes). It includes classics such as "The Concentration City", "Studio 5, The Stars", "A Question of Re-Entry", "Billenium", and "The Garden of Time".

While I've always enjoyed Ballard's coldly satirical perspective on modern life (The Atrocity Exhibition maybe being the pinnacle of this), I think he's at his best when he gets looser and a bit weird. Nature succumbing to strange mutations feature in The Drowned World, but The Crystal World is absolutely supercharged with hallucinogenic weirdness, a fever dream that turns magical-realist in the end. Later novels touch on this man/nature dichotomy, but not as strongly as his earlier work, although late short stories like "Dream Cargoes" revisit that theme.

ecliptik

6 days ago

Agree with everything here, not a day goes by that I don't think about something Ballard wrote.

I've always liked the phrase "Inner space, not outer space" when describing his particular version of science fiction.

downut

6 days ago

Don't forget "Vaughn died yesterday in his last car-crash." That's right up there with "A screaming comes across the sky." One or the other lurks in my memory, bubbling up from time to time.

0x69420

7 days ago

kingdom come, the last book written before his death, at once falls tremendously short of his reputation for prescience on the literal level, but exceeds with flying colours in prescience on the metaphorical level. the median-age HN reader would probably do well to start with it, as its zeitgeist will still be kicking around somewhere in your memory and so it will be in some sense maximally relatable of his bibliography. then work backwards to taste.

twic

6 days ago

I'd tentatively suggest The Concrete Island. It's not at all science-fictional, but it manages to wring a lot of weirdness out of a completely pedestrian (if you will) setting. It was written in 1974, but I think it works just as well today (just imagine his phone got broken in the accident).

ghaff

7 days ago

I'd actually recommend picking and choosing a number of his short stories. Quite a number are pretty experimental but lots of good ones.

nervousvarun

7 days ago

Good call. Personally I point people towards High-Rise which is an older book but has the benefit of being made into a pretty good relatively recent movie staring Tom Hiddleston. US perspective here, but it seems prescient in a weird Ballardian way as well w/ what may or may not be happening (who can tell unless it happens to you anymore) in Denver: https://www.cbsnews.com/colorado/news/colorado-law-firm-repo...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Rise_(novel)

jhbadger

7 days ago

I didn't like the movie of High-Rise because it changes the whole point of the book. In the movie it was conflict between the rich and poor people in the apartment tower (basically redoing Snowpiercer but in a building). In the book, it was clear this was a luxury building. Everyone is wealthy if they can afford to live there. The point was that these people were so bored with their comfortable lives that they started fighting each other for no reason.

andybak

6 days ago

I didn't know that and I think it's a shame in hindsight that they decided to diverge in that clunky way.

I would like to defend the movie in one important regard. It felt like a Ballard movie. Grey, concrete, very British and very 70s but also dreamlike and somewhat surreal.

I can't think of another movie that achieved that.

radarsat1

6 days ago

I thought the point was more that although everyone in the building were wealthy, some were more wealthy than others, a comment on the human nature of letting even the most miniscule differences take on adversarial meaning when isolated.

defrost

6 days ago

The novel, as I recall, didn't start out stratified by wealth etc. It begins with a new arrival to a recently completed high-rise building.

The wikipedia page, for what that's worth, appears to agree:

     Life in the high-rise begins to degenerate quickly, as minor power failures and petty grievances among neighbours and between rival floors escalate into an orgy of violence. Skirmishes become frequent throughout the building as whole floors of tenants try to claim lifts and hold them for their own. Groups gather to defend their rights to the swimming pools, and party-goers attack "enemy floors" to raid and vandalise them.
The outcome is as you recall:

    The lower, middle, and upper floors of the building gradually stratify into distinct groups.
I believe it's a thesis of Ballard's that no matter the initial state social systems evolve (for the worse) into stratified rivalries, I suspect this may have been burnt into his soul by his experieces as a young boy interned during Japanese occupation.

~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Rise_(novel)

radarsat1

6 days ago

Nice thanks for that, it's been a while since both I read the novel and saw the film. That's actually a much more nuanced and intriguing take. I might have to reread it now! This article makes me want to read the rest of his works, too.

user

6 days ago

[deleted]

twic

6 days ago

I liked the film as a film. You're right that it's not a faithful adaptation.

ghaff

7 days ago

Ballard was definitely part of the British gentle apocalypse school. Se also Wyndham etc. He also had a lot of other science fiction and experimental work in addition to Empire of the Sun.

jhbadger

7 days ago

For some value of "gentle". Typically people mean by that stories (mostly British in origin) where the apocalypse isn't too bad and even a bit of fun. I don't think the characters in The Drowned World, The Burning World, etc. are having a fun time.

ghaff

7 days ago

I forget where I took that term from. Certainly some of the stories from that era are darker than others.

ggm

6 days ago

If you liked "empire of the sun" read his biography because what happened to Jim across his life is just as interesting.

downut

6 days ago

"The Kindness of Women" was surprisingly moving to me, reading it after I spent years enjoying the ambiance of most of the rest of his works.

hermitcrab

6 days ago

I read quite a lot of Ballard and I found 'The kindness of women' provided some interesting context on the various themes of his work.

benrmatthews

6 days ago

Ballard’s Kingdom Come, written in 2006, paints a picture that came true in 2016, with Brexit and Trump.

If we want to look ahead to 2034, who is writing the novel that defines the next decade?

Or to think of it another way, what would Ballard write about today that he would see coming in 2036?

Animats

6 days ago

No pictures? What are we supposed to be looking at?