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“... with magic realist euphoria, however, but have a compelling ordinariness. The phrase that J.G. Ballard uses to distinguish Dalí’s work from that of other Surrealist painters – ‘hallucinatory naturalism’ – is also apposite to Jha’s writing in this book. ‘For the most part,’ Ballard says, ‘the landscapes ...”

“... else that is going on, however sour. Appleyard also has good words for Michael Moorcock and J.G. Ballard, for Peter Greenaway’s The Draughtsman’s Contract and Denis Potter’s The Singing Detective, as well as for Richard Rogers and Will Allsop – indeed for all who demonstrate what is rather vaguely called ‘the real, unfettered play of ...”

“... As for his readers, Powell can hardly be blamed for his plummy fans any more than, say, J.G. Ballard should be blamed for the flakiness of his, or Anne Tyler for the limpness of hers. As for the books, they speak for themselves. Edmund Wilson once remarked of Powell that ‘he’s just entertaining enough to read in bed late at night in summer.’ This ...”

“... fear and corruption and many unpleasant things, but his novel remains an enchanted space. J.G. Ballard’s fiction maps a very different historical frontier. His last collection of short stories was Myths of the Near Future (1982), and in several pieces in this new collection he again takes up his favourite stance as a historian of the late 1990s and the ...”

“... Intimations of psychotic breakdown, financial and ecological catastrophe, located by J.G. Ballard in the hermetic towers of High-Rise (1975), were limned by Ackroyd, with characteristic generosity, as the first green shoots of recovery for a toxic wasteland. Ballard’s dog-eating balcony-dwellers inhabit a ...”

“... are not mutually exclusive, he said – as if to clinch the argument – ‘Look at J.G. Ballard.’ But in neither of his books has he stopped to look at Ballard, or any novelist like him. Ballard takes an original view of English society in some of his books, and could also ...”

“... Airports,’ J.G. Ballard noted, ‘seem to be almost the only form of public architecture free from the pressures of kitsch or nostalgia. As far as I know, there are no half-timbered terminal buildings or pebble-dashed control towers.’ Alan Warner isn’t a novelist you’d expect to be much interested in the departures hall, being best known for a sort of wild provincial fabulism ...”

“... of raw emotions and visionary perceptions, set in a bleak cityscape strongly reminiscent of J.G. Ballard. The city is divided between the respectable inhabitants of plate-glass tower blocks and a vengeful underclass, who live in the derelict buildings of an undeveloped valley. The middle classes’ only contact with the valley is to drive through it, at some ...”

“... delicious, steam-punky 1930s machine), went to her grave in 2010, preceded a year earlier by J.G. Ballard, the last writer I’d known personally – besides myself – who took his books all the way to typesetting as manually generated typescripts. One of the last services I performed for Jim was to obtain a ribbon for his 1970s Olympia; after his death, his ...”

“... All the elements were in meltdown: Victorian asylums as Legoland estates; the M25 muse, J.G. Ballard, in Shepperton; Dracula’s Purfleet abbey reinvented by Esso as the centre of another kind of distribution (oil for blood). I suspected that Dilworth’s project would bend away from the purity of the original vision. That’s what always happens when ...”

“... underclass of mutants. But Saunders’s writing doesn’t have much else in common with J.G. Ballard-style dystopianism; nor do you sense that he spends a lot of time reading Baudrillard. The busy satirical backgrounds of the stories don’t dominate the action, which frequently centres on a morally conflicted, low-level corporate drone. Though complicit ...”

“... any more convincing you’ve only to read the frontispiece quote, which is from an essay J.G. Ballard wrote for Blueprint in 1997: I suspect that the airport will be the true city of the 21st century. The great airports are already the suburbs of an invisible world capital, a virtual metropolis whose faubourgs are named Heathrow, Kennedy, Charles de ...”

“... clear that Gordon Burn and Fullalove aspire to the extremity represented by the best of J.G. Ballard or Derek Raymond, by a Crash or an I Was Dora Suarez. Both of these books retain some residual claim to realism, but work by isolating a lurid element in the world and expanding it almost infinitely. Fullalove tries the same trick, but there is a curious ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”