“Can’t everyone just chill out? This is not fun.”
Dubai, to me, has always sounded like what would happen if people took the works of J.G. Ballard as an instruction manual – all high rise buildings, roads and surface glamour.
www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/03...
a photo of JG Ballard
“I think we are moving into extremely volatile and dangerous times, as modern electronic technologies give mankind almost unlimited powers to play with its own psychopathology as a game.”
—JG Ballard
JG Ballard would’ve had something to say about this, I reckon
From Nina Allan's excellent review of Will Self's latest novel:
'With each new iteration comes a ratcheting up of tension and an underhum of violence that is unmistakably Ballardian. “I’m fairly confident when I say one of you is going to die,” Busner warns ...'
www.theguardian.com/books/2026/m...
There's always a Don't Invent The Torment Nexus.
In the early 60s JG Ballard wrote a story called Studio 5, The Stars, in which creatives put prompts into the "Verse Transcriber" to get a tickertape of poetry or other writings. They live in a very comfortable dystopia: privileged but bored.
Bad news for the one guy who has a JG Ballard "Crash" like interest in his sport.
JG Ballard
‘The cameras were long a feature of neighbourhoods where the worst crimes were committed in finished cellars and carriage houses. But after the government published a private white paper on their utility in identifying undesirable aliens, they were sold to the public as a tool to locate lost pets.’
Copy of the 1979 Pan paperback pollcollection ‘Decades: The 1960s’ (edited by Brian Aldiss and Harry Harrison). Cover image displays a spaceship against a backdrop of stars
Latest vintage acquisition. So many great stories (Disch, Moorcock, Spinrad, etc.) and I’m really pleased to acquire a 70s ‘Pan Lozenge’ in such good condition.
I confess that a long dormant ‘collector gene’ in me is close to being ignited & I’m sorely tempted to seek out the rest in the range… 😀
Because of national image shortages the realm of the skull will be dreamless for a while. Instead, here are some old black-and-white movies.
Bourgeois life is crushing the imagination from this planet.
Valentine's Day. An extract from Marc Garrett's book, Feral Class.
"It was drawn and painted with deep passion, perhaps too much." shorturl.at/pxARn
#ValentinesDay #writerscommunity #blueskywriters
from the shardcore.org archives >> Lucky Jim (2021) https://www.shardcore.org/spx/2022/08/15/lucky-jim-2021/ Published: 2022-08-15 13:29:50
from the shardcore.org archives >>
Lucky Jim (2021)
https://www.shardcore.org/spx/2022/08/15/lucky-jim-2021/
Published: 2022-08-15 13:29:50
there's a new found footage doc about J. G. Ballard out this month by B.J.A. Samuel, and it's free to watch on YouTube here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lj0V...
At least five or six had to die, to make the kind of splash that would reach the evening news and stay there.
J.G. Ballard’s story ‘Chronopolis’, in which clocks are banned, was echoed in a competition to design a new time-of-day indicator for UK railways: ‘Network Rail has purposefully elected to use the generic term “timepiece” rather than “clock”'
via news.ansible.uk/a463.html
A light green magazine cover with a photograph of a baby's face emerging out of the background. Cover art is credited to Gabi Nasemann. Text reads: NEW WORLDS -- 5'- or one dollar Salvador Dali by JG Ballard Thomas Pynchon: Entropy -- Mervyn Peake: The Adventures of Foot-fruit -- Plus Computer Fiction / Norman Spinrad / John Sladek and more -- Jeremiad by James Sallis
The cover of New Worlds magazine for February, 1969, edited by Michael Moorcock. On the cover, "Jeremiad", a Jerry Cornelius story by the late James Sallis; inside there's one of Thomas Pynchon's earliest short stories plus JG Ballard on Salvador Dalí, and Moorcock's obituary for Mervyn Peake.
She continued to urge me to see Helen Remington, and fought for his cameras climbed into the rear compartment.
My appetite is not lessened and work seems quite horrid in prospect.
screenshot of my digital mini-game made from J G Ballard's short story 'Notes Towards a Mental Breakdown'. Players must drag and drop words from top of screen into the target area in the right order to reveal the original short story one paragraph at a time. If you want to cheat, the correct order is: A discharged Broadmoor patient compiles Notes Towards a Mental Breakdown, recalling his wife's murder, his trial and exoneration.
JG Ballard - Notes Towards a Mental Breakdown
This is the latest of my attempts using digital media to engage with Ballard's work
You have to guess the sentence that starts this 1976 Ballard story to reveal the text, one para at a time
Let me know what you think
fentonville.co.uk/notes-towards
The same calm but curious gaze, right hand moving above my knees steering Helen through the crowd of mechanics and hangers-on.
Cover of the August 1966 edition of the UK SF magazine New Worlds - showing a stylised representation of three human figures with complex patterns on their torsos and limbs, drawn by Keith Roberts. Figures represent the ‘immortals’ in the Brian Aldiss story ‘Amen and Out’.
Today’s story was Aldiss’s 1966 tale ‘Amen and Out’, which I forever associate with this striking New Worlds cover by Keith Roberts.
Always enjoy Aldiss‘s satirical eye, in this instance focused on the cultural impact in a future society of a failed Immortality initiative. Economically told & smart.
I watched I visualized her as a glamorous but overworked medical student, as if we were all waiting to embark on a voyage into the night.
At least UFOs have made driving the edge of Barrowcross more interesting. Used to be you'd turn a corner and only find a spectral Saxon or corpse cart. Now you might be bothered by spaceship from the Planet Skareg full of silver-suited wankers. – #DICallaghan talking with #DSNokes
A black-and-white ink drawing featuring a man with a forehead dissolving into a galactic swirl; another man flying upwards through space; a crack in the spacefield revealing alien architecture (?); a star shape at the centre of which is an alien creature holding a small box; a vast planet in the background.
"He had known that his mind was going, yet had been unable to draw back." Uncredited cosmic weirdness for a 1960 reprint of The Challenge from Beyond, a round-robin story featuring contributions from Robert E. Howard, Frank Belknap Long, HP Lovecraft, A. Merritt and CL Moore.
a room-sized cold war bunker, seen from the side and exposed by collapse of cliff into the sea, is about to fall away. Inset is a photo of two local historians who have studied it.
www.instagram.com/p/DTdFENnEd0B/
Of course, there should be no parking or traffic restrictions of any kind.
In the 1970s, Blackpool's Louis Tussaud's Waxworks had a Chamber of Horrors, which included such delights as the Moors Murderers, a scalping scene, a torture chamber, and this horrendous traffic accident.
Fun for all the family!
Image from the June 1962 issue of the SF magazine ‘Amazing Stories’ (illustration credited to ‘Adkins’), on the title page of J.G. Ballard’s story ‘Passport to Eternity’. The illustration shows a man whose head is covered by a cap to which various cables are attached - he is staring out towards a set of porthole type windows through which stars are visible. An ‘alien’ onlooker is visible in the foreground.
Now up to Ballard’s ‘Passport to Eternity‘ in the ‘Complete Stories‘ tome, something of a playful pastiche of the more florid elements of ‘Pulp SF‘ (with various descriptive tropes gleefully lampooned).
Arguably ‘untypical‘ Ballard, but I’m enjoying the light & shade as I move through his work…
