Aldiss, John Brunner and several other brilliant autodidact harbingers of the revolution. Ballard was launched in an unlikely venue: the venerable, dull pages of John Carnell’s British magazines New Worlds and Science Fantasy, which against the odds were also responsible for Brian W. The first begetter of this heretical tradition, or at least most prominent, is often held to be James Ballard, whose account of an uprooted childhood in wartime Singapore, brought to a close by the distant science-fictional flash of a nuclear weapon bursting over Japan, would be filmed by Steven Spielberg in 1987 as the movie Empire of the Sun. Manythings preoccupied him during this time in the sun: the plasticity of forms, the image maze, the catatonic plateau, the need to re-score the C.N.S., pre-uterine claims, the absurd – i.e., the phenomenology of the universe. Or in his pungent, nonlinear ‘condensed novels’: ‘Later Powers often thought of Whitby, and the strange grooves the biologist had cut, apparently at random, all over the floor of the empty swimming pool.’ …from the outset, it was impossible to mistake Ballard’s dry voice and curious obsessions:
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
May 2023
Categories |