“... Reading Self is often reminiscent not of William Burroughs, as Self himself might wish, or of J.G. Ballard, whom Self obviously admires and seeks to emulate (clear echoes in The Book of Dave of The Drowned World), but rather of Norman Mailer, particularly the vainglorious, dick-swinging Mailer of ‘The White Negro’ (1956): there is the same priapism, the ...”

“... life – but in France this artsy, edgy quality, whose English equivalent is so well loved by J.G. Ballard and Hanif Kureishi, is rapidly giving way to a vision of despair, incivility and lawlessness on housing estates. Sarkozy needs to point these elements up in order to strengthen his appeal, but a man who needs the banlieues, where so many of France’s ...”

“... the Cold War fear that emerged from them – Stanley Kubrick, Philip K. Dick, Rod Serling, J.G. Ballard. Yet unlike Kubrick, Serling, Dick, Ballard, or my grandmother, Lem was trapped on the far side of the Iron Curtain, submitting drafts to Soviet censor boards, seeing himself promoted for the Nobel Prize by KGB ...”

“... crazy-enough-to-be-true projections of Thomas Pynchon, Philip K. Dick, William Burroughs and J.G. Ballard (who wrote incisively about Surrealism). The afterlife of Surrealism is more active in poetry, as in the New York School of Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery and others: ‘We all “grew up Surrealist”,’ Ashbery once remarked, ‘without even being aware ...”

“... influence of Burroughs’s heterotopic vision is certainly present, as is the minatory one of J.G. Ballard, another writer whose work Cronenberg has adapted for the screen, but this is very much the director’s cut – and probably the better for it. Has Cronenberg, with a recent film adaptation of a Don DeLillo novel to his credit as well, become that most ...”

“... bullies and prigs. If France turned into wall-to-wall suburbia one day, like something out of J.G. Ballard, there might still be a place for his politics, but there’s an awful lot of space to fill. Where, I wonder, would he fit into my current, bumpkin fantasy: that of a post-national future, with a few dozen vast, well-run cities, bastions of wealth and ...”

“... between the language of science and the language of fiction’, but that a writer like J.G. Ballard is able to perform a kind of ‘alchemy’ by amalgamating ‘sonorous, emotive words with categorical terms from the sciences’. Lem also possesses this superlative skill. The pyrotechnic parade of specialised terms and unfamiliar sensations is never ...”

“... adventure flick. Letters from Hollywood, written mainly between 1979 and 1982 to his chum J.G. Ballard and presented here with a touch of editorial licence, is the record of that sojourn. Moorcock is perhaps best-known as the bearded midwife of brave new worlds for a generation of dreamily disaffected and drug-stunned bikers. He certainly knows his ...”

“... James Gordon Farrell – Jim to his friends – turns out to have had more in common with J.G. Ballard than with Paul Scott, George MacDonald Fraser, M.M. Kaye and other writers of 1970s bestsellers with imperial themes. Like the empty swimming-pools and weed-choked concrete landscapes that appear again and again in JGB’s imagined futures, the collapsing ...”

“... projected as being essentially onside – agreeing it’s ‘a little disappointing’ that J.G. Ballard wasn’t fully down with the programme, or ‘snickering’ along with the speaker at ‘the words “Slack”, “erect” and “Cox”’ in a passage from Ford Madox Ford – but also as sufficiently new to the world to need telling with some firmness ...”

“... certain props and images reappear throughout her work: cherries, caged birds, swimming pools. J.G. Ballard talked about how his obsessional emblems (which also included swimming pools) structured his work, but sometimes in Levy’s stories they have to do too much work; standing in for the interiority of a character, or a psychic shift in the drama, or ...”

“... rain on one window showing the wind’s direction Raworth is as precise, as graphic, as J.G. Ballard. ‘Ash fills the fingerprints,’ he writes. Or: ‘the noise of a ring sliding onto a finger.’ Like Ballard, he’s fond of the comforting narcolepsy of cinema (being dead but alert) and of films on television ...”

“... black beret was twitching on his scalp.’ Behind Kingsley Amis and ‘ice-cream suited’ J.G. Ballard are Alan Brien, Maeve Peake, Dave Britton and legions of the erased and discontinued: Notting Hill colons, grafters, bullshitters, pharmaceutical casualties and Fleet Street drain-rats. Moorcock grants us more than any novelist is required to ...”

“... Chabon, Kazuo Ishiguro. Authors who began inside the SF ghetto have found success outside it: J.G. Ballard as an author of realist novels, Samuel Delany in academia, William Gibson, Lethem himself (whose first books owed a lot to Dick). The sciences – biomedical sciences, climatology, ecology, information technology – seem omnipresent now. It should ...”

“... profits of his sword and sorcery writings, was edited for a time by Sallis. Writers such as J.G. Ballard and (later) M. John Harrison, as well as Sallis himself, were proving that it was possible to operate a communality of the imagination that drew on Burroughs and Borges as well as Ray Bradbury and Alfred Bester. Now the only way for the veterans of that ...”