Jul 7, 2024 10:58 PM
Starting to read this and 🤢
I like Ballard's ideas and I like Ballard's sense of humor, but I am not sure I gel with his cold, geometric language and his alien, insectile worlds where concrete and steel intermingle with flesh and blood. Also I have no idea what is going on.
4 Comments
1 year ago
This was my first Ballard and it almost put me off him. Like you say, it's exceptionally cold and geometric — that's a great descriptor — and the super-60's iconoclasm turned me off too, I hate all that Marilyn/JFK stuff. But I've liked/loved everything else I've read by Ballard since.
1 year ago
So far, I've read Crash, Vermilion Sands, and this. I didn't much care for Crash either - don't know what's up with Ballard and his thinking that cars, crashes, and highway systems are inherently intensely erotic, but it's alienating to me - but at least Crash wasn't being deliberately cryptic. Loved Vermillion Sands though, so I'll keep trying his other stuff.
1 year ago
I've yet to read either of those (I quite liked the film of Crash though) but I love his early eco-dystopias, Drowned World, Drought, Crystal World. High-Rise has its moments. I think the Ballard thing with the affectless clinician narrator is a pretty high-risk kind of setup: it's either going to come off as idiotic or transcendant. Empire of the Sun is the outlier, pretty conventional (but also brilliant).
1 year ago
I highly recommend reading Ballard's introduction to Crash. I posted it as a quote on this site as it's a little hard to find, my copy had an intro from Zadie Smith instead. I also liked these essays from Baudrillard on both Sci-Fi and specifically Crash: https://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/55/baudrillard55art.htm Both help give context and perspective to Crash, but I found the prose of Crash hauntingly beautiful and magnetically strange. Can't speak on this novel as I haven't read it, just weighing in on your comment lol.
