"I am interested in the technology of the present of this world. I am not interested in imagining alien planets....[T]he only alien planet is Earth. It is this world that is the strange one."
"People have accused me of being pessimistic as a writer. But actually all these early novels of mine--and all my fiction, right to the present--they're all stories of psychological fulfillment. My heroes all find themselves in a disintegrating world, and they construct a personal mythology which will give meaning to their lives..."
"I think Burroughs was very much aware of the way in which language could be manipulated to mean absolutely the opposite of what it seems to mean....He was always trying to go through the screen of language to find some sort of truth that lay on the other side....[H]e's one of the greatest humorists who ever lived. His books, particularly 'Naked Lunch,' are hilarious from the word go. They never let up."
"The bourgeois novel is the greatest enemy of truth and honesty that was ever invented. It's a vast, sentimentalizing structure that reassures the reader, and, at every point, offers the comfort of secure moral frameworks and recognizable characters."
"I read this little book with a green cover, and I remember I read about four or five paragraphs and I quite involuntarily leapt from my chair and cheered out loud because I knew a great writer had appeared amidst us....I knew that this man was the most important writer in the English language to have appeared since the Second World War, and that's an opinion I haven't changed since."
"Telling the truth. It's very difficult to do that in fiction because the whole process of writing fiction is a process of sidestepping the truth. I think [Burroughs] got very close to it, in his way, and I hope I've done the same in mine."
James Graham Ballard was born in Shanghai to English parents; when he was 11, the family was interned in a civilian prison camp nearby, an experience that formed the basis for his most widely known book, the semi-autobiographical novel, EMPIRE OF THE SUN (1984). Moving to England after the war, he studied medicine at King's College, Cambridge but left without a degree to join the Royal Air Force, where he served as a pilot from 1954 to 1957. He began his writing career with short stories--mainly more...
James Graham Ballard was born in Shanghai to English parents; when he was 11, the family was interned in a civilian prison camp nearby, an experience that formed the basis for his most widely known book, the semi-autobiographical novel, EMPIRE OF THE SUN (1984). Moving to England after the war, he studied medicine at King's College, Cambridge but left without a degree to join the Royal Air Force, where he served as a pilot from 1954 to 1957. He began his writing career with short stories--mainly science fiction--in the 1950s; his first novel, THE WIND FROM NOWHERE appeared in 1961. He was married in the mid-1950s but, 11 years later, his wife died suddenly of pneumonia, an event he found deeply disturbing. In the few years between 1960 and the death of his wife, Ballard had published four novels and four short story collections, but in order to raise the couple's three children, he had to drastically scale back the pace of his writing. With THE ATROCITY EXHIBITION collection (1970)--which contained such stories as "Notes Towards a Mental Breakdown," "The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race," and "Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan"--Ballard's short fiction writing became wildly experimental; he called the stories "compressed novels," most dispensing with traditional notions of plots and character. His novels from this period--the notorious CRASH and its companion pieces, HIGH-RISE and CONCRETE ISLAND--move away from the science fiction tropes of his earlier work (though they were never "conventional" science fiction by any means) and into a kind of social criticism punctuated by extreme violence and sexual imagery that has tended to brand these books as pornography among those prone to branding things. In the 1980s, Ballard reached his widest audience with EMPIRE OF THE SUN (and its 1987 filmed adaptation). With subsequent titles like RUNNING WILD (1988) and SUPER-CANNES (2001), his writing has continued to perform the literary equivalent of a living autopsy on the prevalent social conventions of the consumer age, all the while retaining the kind of imagery that has become known as typically "Ballardian"-- wind-swept escarpments, drained swimming pools, and downed aircraft skeletons.less...
Only became a fan of Ballard because Greg foisted a copy of High-Rise onto me and I really enjoyed it. Wasnt a fan of Cocaine Nights but I guess you get a dud in every cult writers back catalogue!
Great premise, -ish execution.