Ballardian

Two years ago, Simon Sellars, Bruce Sterling and V. Vale appeared on a panel, ‘Myths of a Near Future’, to discuss the work of J.G. Ballard. Held at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB) as part of the Kosmopolis 08 literary festival, the panel was chaired by the Spanish critic Jordi Costa, the driving force behind the CCCB’s magnificent ‘JG Ballard – Autopsy of the new millennium‘ exhibition. Our friend Tim Chapman was in the audience and he has kindly transcribed the discussion. Here it is, two years late, but hopefully still of interest: ‘Myths of a Near Future’.

A review-essay of Jeremy Reed’s latest collection of poetry, West End Survival Kit. The review also discusses the long and enigmatic relationship Reed has with Ballard, who wrote the foreword to the collection, where he paid tribute to Reed’s ‘extraterrestrial talent’.

Bruce Sterling wrote: ‘For the cyberpunks … technology is visceral. It is not the bottled genie of remote Big Science boffins; it is pervasive, utterly intimate. Not outside us, but next to us. Under our skin; often, inside our minds.’ And Ballard’s influence was at the heart of it.

Over at Barnes & Noble, SF writer Paul Di Filippo tries to get America interested in Ballard.

Pedro writes: The canon of “Slipstream literature,” defined by a panel at Readercon has been posted by Paul DiFilippo. JGB is mentioned (Complete Stories as part of the “core canon” at number 10 and Empire of the Sun at 99). Kindness of Women was also suggested by one of the participants. Here is a response [...]

Mac Tonnies is a Kansas-based writer of post-cyberpunk science fiction (recently published by the redoubtable Rudy Rucker). He’s also the author of the book After the Martian Apocalypse, a speculative search for life on the Red Planet, as well as the originator of a ‘cryptoterrestrial’ philosophy that ambitiously seeks to explain (with ‘balanced skepticism’) a [...]

Something Awful is currently taking the piss out of ‘cyberia’ and the early days of the internet, looking back to a time when hyperlinks were revolutionary because ‘we don’t have to look at text as linear anymore, because it’s all connected now. Information wants to be free. It wants to rape itself and bear its [...]

Photo: Stephen Hughes. Read recently… + Via Fanny Magnate, David Chandler’s essay on the work of photographer Stephen Hughes: Over the last five years Hughes has worked all over Europe, developing an interest in what might be called ‘peripheral places’, sometimes places literally on the edge — of cities perhaps, or by the sea — [...]

Interview by Simon Sellars John Foxx live at Shrewsbury, 1998. © Extreme Voice. This is part 2 of my interview with John Foxx, former lead singer of Ultravox before the band’s Midge Ure era, and an on-and-off solo artist for the past 25 years. Foxx’s Ultravox purveyed a damned, dreamy, paranoid — and often playful [...]

RU Sirius has posted Part 2 of his mp3 interview with sometime Ballardian contributor, Chris Nakashima-Brown. They talk at greater length about the legacy of Ballard and JGB’s influence on cyberpunk and beyond. Includes Chris reading from his luminescent cyber-Ballardian works. This interview could be your only chance ever to hear a serious discussion about [...]

Writer Chris Nakashima-Brown, instigator of the glorious Bruce Sterling/JG Ballard mashup on this site, and a man who has been described by a reviewer as “JG Ballard with a Texan twang”, was interviewed by cyberpunk holdout RU Sirius about “applied Ballardianism and the cyberpunk perspective on the war on terror”. Listen to the mp3 here [...]

Here’s a review of an interesting-sounding Japanese cyberculture book, Full Metal Apache by Takayuki Tatsumi. In its analysis of Japanese popular culture — of ‘metal eaters’, ‘pink samurai and punk cats in space’ — Tatsumi brings into play Neuromancer, Blade Runner, Thomas Pynchon, JG Ballard, Burroughs, cyborg theory… Wow — it all seems so…uh…last century. [...]

from 2005: it’s old but good, it’s k-punk — where it at. Decipher at will. “Wasn’t Postpunk in many ways already cyberpunk, the ‘post’ precisely signaling a break with lumpenpunk’s dull r and r orthodoxy? But the ‘cyber’ component of postpunk was not only, or even primiarily, sonic, it was also a matter of the [...]

Bruce Sterling is a prolific science-fiction writer, futurist, social critic and design professor, best known for his bestselling novels and seminal short fiction, and as the editor of the Mirrorshades anthology that defined the ‘cyberpunk’ subgenre. His nonfiction includes works of futurism such as Tomorrow Now; a regular column and blog for Wired; and his [...]