[HN Gopher] J.G. Ballard: My Favorite Books
___________________________________________________________________
J.G. Ballard: My Favorite Books
Author : anarbadalov
Score : 98 points
Date : 2024-02-08 17:18 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (thereader.mitpress.mit.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (thereader.mitpress.mit.edu)
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| I read "Crash"[1] by J.G. Ballard because I was forced to read a
| review of it in Jean Baudrillard's "Simulation and Simulacra"[2].
|
| 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
| ghaff wrote:
| 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).
| dang wrote:
| 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.
| zabzonk wrote:
| perhaps indication of a slight sense of humor failure? of the 10,
| not all of which i have read, only "naked lunch" is really funny.
| cgh wrote:
| He does mention the thrilling surreality of the LA Yellow
| Pages.
| ecliptik wrote:
| 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].
|
| 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...
| PaulHoule wrote:
| My evil twin checked out a lot of Ballard books from the
| library, some of which I read and some of which I still have. I
| really like
|
| 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.
| busfahrer wrote:
| I literally started reading his short stories yesterday. Can
| you recommend some favorites? So far, I've read Terminal Beach
| and The Drowned Giant.
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.""
| ecliptik wrote:
| I put a few of my favorites in a comment a couple of months
| ago,
|
| 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.
| meheleventyone wrote:
| A huge collection of them have been released as an audiobook.
| Highly recommended!
| flenserboy wrote:
| 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.
| lordfrito wrote:
| 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.
| scandox wrote:
| The Vermilion Sands stories are definitely an acquired
| taste and I think Ballard did have a genuine and perverse
| attraction to high society (admittedly one of his own
| creation).
|
| I find them difficult to love.
| hermitcrab wrote:
| 'The Drowned Giant' is beautiful and sad.
| jhbadger wrote:
| 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.
| ecliptik wrote:
| 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.
|
| 1. https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2018/12/john-gray-on-
| jg...
| hermitcrab wrote:
| His book 'The kindness of women' helps to fill in a lot of
| the biographical context behind 'Empire of the Sun' and
| many of his other works.
| louky wrote:
| Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle wrote some great global
| disaster novels as well. _Footfall_ and _Lucifer 's Hammer_.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I wish Niven had been able to keep writing books on his
| own. I loved the _Known Space_ books but something happened
| to him after 1970 that was worse than what happened to
| Heinlein around then. I don 't think the books he wrote w/
| Pournelle where anywhere near as good as _Neutron Star_ ,
| _World of Ptavvs_ , etc. His great disaster short story
| _Inconstant Moon_ dates from that period.
| ghaff wrote:
| Yeah but Niven's best stories were mostly shorter. (Even
| Inconstant Moon is a novella.) IMO, Niven and Pournelle
| were really great complements. Niven wasn't really a
| great novel writer and Pournelle ended up doing
| militarist fiction--some of which was OK but not as good
| as their joint work.
| FpUser wrote:
| My favorites from this writer
| jauntywundrkind wrote:
| 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.
| jahnu wrote:
| 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."
| bookofjoe wrote:
| The movie made from "High-Rise" is completely off the hook.
| So bizarre. I liked it. Trailer:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKPghZ5cc_E
| shrx wrote:
| _" The music from the balconies nearby was overlaid by the
| noise of sporadic acts of violence."_
| atombender wrote:
| 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].
|
| [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....
| jgrahamc wrote:
| _The Atrocity Exhibition_ is a strange book: I both found it very
| hard to read and utterly enthralling and fascinating.
| Isamu wrote:
| Wish I could upvote more
| kleiba wrote:
| Jeez, for a split second, I thought this was about Fabrice
| Bellard's list of his favorite books. Been in this business for
| too long...
| vmilner wrote:
| Christopher Priest was working on a biography of Ballard when he
| died this week.
| gerikson wrote:
| That's sad and interesting to hear. Hopefully there's enough
| material to be published.
| method_capital wrote:
| Naked Lunch? Unsubscribe. Burroughs, the degenerate murderer --
| literally -- is the most overrated writer of all time.
| senthil_rajasek wrote:
| 'My copy of the Los Angeles "Yellow Pages" I stole from the
| Beverly Hilton Hotel three years ago; ....'
|
| Hah. This man gets a kick out of reading the phone book.
| Jun8 wrote:
| 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.
| euroderf wrote:
| 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.)
| wly_cdgr wrote:
| Good taste. Day Of The Locust is goated.
| _rpxpx wrote:
| Great article - thanks for posting. Recommend checking out The
| Unlimited Dream Company. Must be the greatest ever work of
| psychedelic literature.
| optimalsolver wrote:
| I always recommend his short story "Report On An Unidentified
| Space Station":
|
| https://sseh.uchicago.edu/doc/roauss.htm
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-02-08 23:00 UTC)