This powerful and often terrifying novel, the fruit of J.G. Ballard’s obsession with the motor-car, will shock and disturb many readers. Few products of modern technology excite as much fascination and interest as the automobile, but each year hundreds of thousands of people die in car crashes throughout the world, millions are injured. Yet attempts to regulate the motor-car and reduce this slaughter constantly meet with strong and almost unthinking resistance. Ballard believes that the key to this paradox is to be found in the car crash itself, which contains an image of all our fantasies of ...
A violent novel filled with insidious twists, Kingdom Come follows the exploits of Richard Pearson, a rebellious, unemployed advertising executive, whose father is gunned down by a deranged mental patient in a vast shopping mall outside Heathrow Airport. When the prime suspect is released without charge, Richard’s suspicions are aroused. Investigating the mystery, Richard uncovers at the Metro-Centre mall a neo-fascist world whose charismatic spokesperson is whipping up the masses into a state of unsustainable frenzy. Riots frequently terrorize the complex, immigrant communities are attacked by hooligans, and sports events mushroom into jingoistic political rallies. In this gripping, dystopian tour de force, J.G. Ballard holds up a mirror to suburban mind rot, revealing the darker forces at work beneath the gloss of consumerism and flag-waving patriotism.
Des arbres enti?rement cristallis?s, des feuilles transform?es en joyaux, des oiseaux sculpt?s dans du quartz, des hommes recouverts de pierres pr?cieuses… et heureux dans la mort…C’est ce que rec?le la for?t de cristal o? l’unit? du temps et de l’espace sont la signature de chaque feuille et de chaque fleur.Une « science-fiction » d’une beaut? fantastique, qui nous r?v?le un univers o? le temps a une dimension invers?e et o? la mort semble plus s?duisante que la vie.
Au III° mill?naire, le Terre n’est plus peupl?e que de cinq millions d’habitants. Le Soleil a chang? de forme et s’est rapproch? de notre plan?te, entra?nant une formidable diminution des terres ?merg?es, envahies d?sormais par la jungle o? des reptiles colossaux ont remplac? les mammif?res. Comment survivre dans ces conditions, surtout quand des bandes de pirates recherchent sans rel?che les tr?sors engloutis ?Un classique de la science-fiction ?cologique.
'Miracles of Life' opens and closes in Shanghai, the city where J.G.Ballard was born, and where he spent the most of the Second World War interned with his family in a Japanese concentration camp. In the intervening chapters Ballard creates a memoir that is both an enthralling narrative and a detailed examination of the events which would profoundly influence his work. Beginning with his early childhood spent exploring the vibrant surroundings of pre-war Shanghai, Ballard charts the course of his remarkable life from the deprivations and unexpected freedoms of the Lunghua Camp to his return to a ...
J. G. Ballard is a British writer who has been called a “poet of death.” But Ballard, especially in the early part of his career, also wrote excellent extrapolative science fiction on social themes, and this haunting story is one of his finest. Here Ballard speaks of the enslavement of the unconscious, of an economic system that forces people to consume against their will through the use of technology. Ballard makes an important assumption-the belief (at least implicitly) that people would not want to consume at high rates if they were not “forced” to do so. In a ...
Ballard's genius for imagining exotic places appears again in Vermilion Sands where he creates a fantasy landscape of the future. These stories feature forgotten movie queens and guilt-ridden femmes fatales who exercise their every whim in a culture of unlimited technology.
