Lovebitesandeveryfing
Well-Known Member
Something that's always bothered me.
I am a huge fan of J.G. Ballard. I think he's an endlessly provocative and inventive writer. He was also something of a seer. He mainly writes about dystopian futures that are not very far away, i.e. The Drowned World, or that are already on us. But he also wrote interesting novels such as Cocaine Nights and Supercannes about the right-here, right-now: closed communities that live according to their own social laws, more or less. He was a brilliant short story writer, and some of his best work is to be found there: try “Thirteen to Centaurus”, or “The Garden of Time”. It'll only take you about fifteen minutes. In those fifteen minutes he'll manage to say more than most full-scale novels. They are marvels of the art.
He tends to be dismissed because he is pigeonholed as a “science fiction” writer. I'm not a big fan of science fiction as such, any more than I'm a fan of “fantasy” literature, but the best “science fiction” writers are of course using the future to write a critique of the present. As in Orwell's 1984.
Ballard was one of the treasures of post-war British writing — there haven't been that many — but he has been dismissed as somehow not serious. It's the kind of snobbery that gets up my nose.
Anybody else got writers like that?
I am a huge fan of J.G. Ballard. I think he's an endlessly provocative and inventive writer. He was also something of a seer. He mainly writes about dystopian futures that are not very far away, i.e. The Drowned World, or that are already on us. But he also wrote interesting novels such as Cocaine Nights and Supercannes about the right-here, right-now: closed communities that live according to their own social laws, more or less. He was a brilliant short story writer, and some of his best work is to be found there: try “Thirteen to Centaurus”, or “The Garden of Time”. It'll only take you about fifteen minutes. In those fifteen minutes he'll manage to say more than most full-scale novels. They are marvels of the art.
He tends to be dismissed because he is pigeonholed as a “science fiction” writer. I'm not a big fan of science fiction as such, any more than I'm a fan of “fantasy” literature, but the best “science fiction” writers are of course using the future to write a critique of the present. As in Orwell's 1984.
Ballard was one of the treasures of post-war British writing — there haven't been that many — but he has been dismissed as somehow not serious. It's the kind of snobbery that gets up my nose.
Anybody else got writers like that?