While Ballard is more popularly known for Crash and Empire of the Sun, I can't recommend his earlier works enough, especially his short stories.
Many of his writings were ahead of his time [1]. A particular favorite of mine is "Studio 5, the Stars"[2] which written in 1961, brings up a lot of the feelings around GenAI and art today [3].
High Rise has one of the greatest opening paragraph I have ever read…
“Later, as he sat on his balcony eating the dog, Dr Robert Laing reflected on the unusual events that had taken place within this huge apartment building during the previous three months. Now that everything had returned to normal, he was surprised that there had been no obvious beginning, no point beyond which their lives had moved into a clearly more sinister dimension. With its forty floors and thousand apartments, its supermarket and swimming-pools, bank and junior school-all in effect abandoned in the sky-the high-rise offered more than enough opportunities for violence and confrontation. Certainly his own studio apartment on the 25th floor was the last place Laing would have chosen as an early skirmish-ground. This over-priced cell, slotted almost at random into the cliff face of the apartment building, he had bought after his divorce specifically for its peace, quiet and anonymity. Curiously enough, despite all Laing's efforts to detach himself from his two thousand neighbours and the regime of trivial disputes and irritations that provided their only corporate life, it was here if anywhere that the first significant event had taken place-on this balcony where he now squatted beside a fire of telephone directories, eating the roast hind-quarter of the alsatian before setting off to his lecture at the medical school.”
My favourite short story of Ballard's is "Report on an Unidentified Space Station" (1982) [1]. It manages to be superb sci-fi while also showing several of Ballard's favourite topics — in particular, architecture and religion.
Another favourite is "A Question of Re-Entry" (1963), set in the Amazonian rainforest, and a kind of postcolonialist retelling of Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness".
In googling a source for that story, I found that it was turned into a radio play [2] in 1988 by the Canadian CBC, along with several other stories [3].
I like his 1960s disaster novels -- The Drowned World, The Burning World. The Crystal World, about civilization ending and bands of survivors trying to get by. They definitely had an influence on later works, such as George Romero's "Living Dead" films.
Absolutely love this trilogy too. The Drowned World was my first proper introduction to Ballard.
I'd always liked the movie Empire of the Sun since I was a kid, but could never quite put my finger on why. One day in 2020 I read the films wikipedia page, started reading more about him as an author and got hooked.
To quote John Gray [1],
>Unlike many others, it wasn't his dystopian vision that gripped my imagination. For me his work was lyrical – an evocation of the beauty that can be gleaned from landscapes of desolation.
My first read was Kingdom Come (released 2006). It felt like such a great crazy tale that might have taken place in our times (even though it was absurd & fantastic); mall culture & hooliganism & factionalism. It felt like such a a snapshot of Bush II era to me. (Little did I expect what was to happen next in the world! How much we would fall!)
Drowned World was the next thing I picked up, and wow what a damned book! Nueronic time and these people slipping backwards towards it; it's such a wild psychological trip. That speaks so viscerally to the many compacted confused layers inside us, earlier forms baked deep into civilization.
Of his later stories, "War Fever" has stayed with me; it has clear conceptual connections with Will Self's "Quantity Theory of Insanity". Running Wild is also extremely taut & affecting.
When I wrote something on recommended short stories a while back, I picked Chronopolis and also wrote "Other Ballard shorts that aren't too experimental include "The Drowned Giant," "The Overloaded Man," and perhaps the most conventionally SF "Thirteen for Centaurus.""
I'm a huge fan of the Vermillion Sands anthology. A group of stories set in a future resort town populated mainly by bored celebrities, rich people, artists and other oddballs... The stories center around the dystopia that emerges when technology gives these neurotic/narcissistic humans too much power and too much free time. The games bored rich people play, the traps we fall into, etc. The day to day "leisure" aspect of the stories makes the world they live in almost mundane, while at the same time its terrifyingly familiar.
Although in many ways the "future tech" in the stories is dated, the humans in the stories haven't changed a bit. Always felt these stories are relevant to the technology enabled problems we're facing today. Humans are the problem. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Ballard wrote quite a variety of works from fairly weird, experimental stuff through books in the basically English world destroyed vein (of which Wyndham was probably the best practitioner).
Every disaffected teenager should read the Chrysalids. It captures perfectly the feeling that one is a mutant in a deranged adult society, by making it literal.
Fwiw.. High Rise does a nice job of describing a smooth, continuous, piecewise-imperceptible transition from sanity to insanity. (As does Cronenberg's film Dead Ringers. In contrast to the film Falling Down, which coughs up an insanity hairball in the encounter with the Korean shopkeeper, eliding the need for a lot of character development.)
He stresses the strong impression Treasure Island left on him: “… frightening but in a positive way.” I must have read it when I was 11 or 12 and that’s a great way to summarize the feelings it evoked. In fact, I still can feel the dread of trading Jim’s account of the blind beggar pushing the piece of paper into his hand!
On that note I also remember how much I enjoyed Haggard’s She (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/She:_A_History_of_Adventure) but the end was quite frightening, too. I still distinctly remember even the color is the couch cover (and it’s feeling on my skin) on which I read that ending.
Readit News
Many of his writings were ahead of his time [1]. A particular favorite of mine is "Studio 5, the Stars"[2] which written in 1961, brings up a lot of the feelings around GenAI and art today [3].
1. https://www.newstatesman.com/uncategorized/2020/04/why-we-ar...
2. https://readerslibrary.org/wp-content/uploads/Studio-5-The-S...
3. https://aroundscifi.us/en/studio-5-the-stars-ballards-1961-s...
“Later, as he sat on his balcony eating the dog, Dr Robert Laing reflected on the unusual events that had taken place within this huge apartment building during the previous three months. Now that everything had returned to normal, he was surprised that there had been no obvious beginning, no point beyond which their lives had moved into a clearly more sinister dimension. With its forty floors and thousand apartments, its supermarket and swimming-pools, bank and junior school-all in effect abandoned in the sky-the high-rise offered more than enough opportunities for violence and confrontation. Certainly his own studio apartment on the 25th floor was the last place Laing would have chosen as an early skirmish-ground. This over-priced cell, slotted almost at random into the cliff face of the apartment building, he had bought after his divorce specifically for its peace, quiet and anonymity. Curiously enough, despite all Laing's efforts to detach himself from his two thousand neighbours and the regime of trivial disputes and irritations that provided their only corporate life, it was here if anywhere that the first significant event had taken place-on this balcony where he now squatted beside a fire of telephone directories, eating the roast hind-quarter of the alsatian before setting off to his lecture at the medical school.”
Another favourite is "A Question of Re-Entry" (1963), set in the Amazonian rainforest, and a kind of postcolonialist retelling of Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness".
In googling a source for that story, I found that it was turned into a radio play [2] in 1988 by the Canadian CBC, along with several other stories [3].
[1] https://sseh.uchicago.edu/doc/roauss.htm
[2] https://www.jgballard.ca/vanishing_point/cbc_drama/re-entry....
[3] https://www.jgballard.ca/vanishing_point/jgb_vanishingpoint....
I'd always liked the movie Empire of the Sun since I was a kid, but could never quite put my finger on why. One day in 2020 I read the films wikipedia page, started reading more about him as an author and got hooked.
To quote John Gray [1],
>Unlike many others, it wasn't his dystopian vision that gripped my imagination. For me his work was lyrical – an evocation of the beauty that can be gleaned from landscapes of desolation.
1. https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2018/12/john-gray-on-jg...
Drowned World was the next thing I picked up, and wow what a damned book! Nueronic time and these people slipping backwards towards it; it's such a wild psychological trip. That speaks so viscerally to the many compacted confused layers inside us, earlier forms baked deep into civilization.
The film version of Vandermeer's Annihilation owes much to Crystal World, down to using names of several of the characters (Ventress is one I recall).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Rise_(novel)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concrete_Island
I find it hard to believe that
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hello_America
didn't have some impact on Fallout New Vegas.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38237862
Since then I've also really enjoyed "The Ultimate City", which is Solarpunk before it was called Solarpunk.
Although in many ways the "future tech" in the stories is dated, the humans in the stories haven't changed a bit. Always felt these stories are relevant to the technology enabled problems we're facing today. Humans are the problem. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
The number one take away? French post-modernist thinkers and authors are extremely sexually deranged[3][4]. Perfect for Cronenberg
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crash_(Ballard_novel) [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulacra_and_Simulation [3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_petitions_against_age_o... [4] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oedipus_complex
https://sseh.uchicago.edu/doc/roauss.htm
On that note I also remember how much I enjoyed Haggard’s She (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/She:_A_History_of_Adventure) but the end was quite frightening, too. I still distinctly remember even the color is the couch cover (and it’s feeling on my skin) on which I read that ending.
I didn't read it though, just know about its existence from following Simon Sellars (of ballardian.com fame) on Twitter.