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Post n°2299 pubblicato il 31 Luglio 2019 da blogtecaolivelli
La fantascienza in lingua italiana da Wikipedia, parte terza La protofantascienza italiana Ancora prima della nascita del termine "fantascienza", a partire dagli ultimi anni del XIX secolo appaiono in Italia racconti e romanzi brevi di contenuto fantascientifico nei supplementi domenicali dei quotidiani, nelle riviste letterarie, in collane popolari e Gli autori sono tra i protagonisti della letteratura popolare dell'epoca, come Emilio Salgari (in particolare con il romanzo Le meraviglie del duemila) e Yambo, ma anche note figure della letteratura, tra i quali Massimo Bontempelli, Luigi Capuana, Guido Gozzano, Ercole Luigi Morselli. Già prima di questi vi sono però degli interes- santi quanto poco conosciuti esempi, come la Storia filosofica dei secoli futuri di Ippolito Nievo del 1860. La nascita ufficiale (1952 L'anno ufficiale di nascita della fantascienza in Italia è considerato generalmente il 1952, con il primo numero della rivistaScienza Fantastica, avventure nello spazio, tempo e dimensione e nello stesso anno della rivista A queste prime pubblicazioni ne seguono altre, generalmente di breve vita, non tutte con storie avventurose in cui non mancano classici elementi come gli alieni dalla carnagione verde, armi a raggi, astronavi ed eroine scollate, in puro stile pulp. La rivista Oltre il cielo, diretta dall'ing. Cesare Falessi, affiancava lavori di science fiction al consueto novero di articoli sull'aviazione e l'astronautica. Poi nel 1957 si affianca alla guida della rivista Oltre il cielo l'ingegnere Armando Silvestri che nell'anteguerra, nel 1938, aveva ideato, ma senza successo concreto, il progetto per una rivista quadrimestrale, Avventure dello spazio, che però non trovò mai il favore di un editore. A testimonianza dell'aderenza del pubblico al canone da poco sviluppatosi oltreoceano, gli scrittori italiani pubblicano i loro racconti sotto pseudonimi rigorosamente anglosassoni: Gianfranco Briatore diventa John Bree; Ugo Malaguti si firma Hugh Maylon; Luigi Naviglio, Louis Navire; Roberta Rambelli è Robert Rainbell, al maschile; Carlo Bordoni, Charley B. Drums. All'inizio degli anni sessanta, con Futuro - a cura di Lino Aldani già noto sotto lo pseudonimo di N. L. Janda, Massimo Lo Jacono già conosciuto sotto lo pseudonimo di L. J. Mauritius e Megalos Diekonos, e Giulio Raiola - la science fiction italiana acquista tuttavia un respiro internazionale, che avrà però corta durata (solo otto numeri mensili, fra il maggio-giugno 1963 e il novembre 1964). Negli anni sessanta il numeroso pubblico degli appassionati diede vita a numerose fanzine, il più delle volte pubblicate a ciclostile in poche centinaia di copie, che costituirono un momento di passaggio per futuri scrittori come Vittorio Curtoni ePaolo Brera. Il ruolo di Urania Sempre nel 1952 la casa editrice Mondadori lancia una rivista e una collana di romanzi, i spirandosi alla musa dell'astronomia: Urania. Primo direttore: Giorgio Monicelli, che conia anche il termine italiano "fantascienza". La rivista chiude dopo appena un anno, mentre i suoi romanzi a cadenza quindicinale riscuotono un grande successo. Negli anni sessanta le copertine sono disegnate da Karel Thole, mentre la direzione della collana viene assunta da Fruttero & Lucentini. Il ruolo di Urania nella diffusione della letteratura fantascientifica tra gli italiani è rilevante: molti scrittori di fantascienza comeAsimov, Ballard, Dick, Le Guin e altri furono pubblicati per la prima volta in questi libri dal cerchio rosso in copertina. D'altro canto per un trentennio la collana evitò di pubblicare autori italiani, favorendo l'idea che si trattasse di una letteratura esclusivamente d'importazione, fino a che nel 1989 istituì un noto premio letterario, che ha scoperto e lanciato autori comeLuca Masali e Valerio Evangelisti. La fantascienza online Con l'eccezione di Urania, oggi la letteratura di fantascienza è praticamente scomparsa dalle edicole italiane, avendo ceduto molto terreno ai Il ruolo di riviste come Robot (tuttora pubblicata) è stato parzialmente ripreso dalle pubblicazioni sul Web (riviste e fanzine), che raggiungono migliaia di lettori. Le più popolari sono Delos e il Corriere della Fantascienza che sono parte del portale Fantascienza.com e Intercom. Le riviste online raggiungono non soltanto il tradizionale lettore della narrativa di fantascienza, ma coinvolgono anche chi è appassionato a questo genere in altre forme, come cinema, fumetti e soprattutto serie televisive. In questo senso le riviste online contribuiscono in qualche misura ad avvicinare alla letteratura chi non la conosceva, dando un impulso, anche se di proporzioni tutte da verificare, allo sviluppo di nuove generazioni di lettori. Siti web, blog, forum, newsgroup e mailing list inoltre contribuiscono in questa direzione grazie alla creazione di grandi comunità di appassionati e al conseguente scambio di esperienze e di consigli di lettura, allargando quello che prima degli anni novanta era, sebbene in misura molto minore e qualitativamente diversa, il fenomeno delfandom. |
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Post n°2298 pubblicato il 31 Luglio 2019 da blogtecaolivelli
Fonte: Wikipedia. La fantascienza cinematografica italiana Il film di Paolo Heusch La morte viene dallo spazio, del 1958, è spesso indicato come la prima pellicola fantascientifica (non farsesca) del cinema italiano; narra della minaccia al pianeta Terra portata da una pioggia di asteroidi, con precisi riferimenti al cinema americano ed effetti speciali di Mario Bava. Totò nella luna, dello stesso anno, è stato visto come la risposta comica a questo film. In precedenza c'erano stati altri film farseschi: la commedia Mille chilometri al minuto (1939) di Mario Mattoli (uno dei primi voli verso il pianeta Marte, anche se s'interrompe quasi sul nascere) e Baracca e burattini, una commedia musicale del 1954, con la regia di Sergio Di una certa rilevanza per il genere, la tetralogia della stazione spaziale Gamma 1, del 1965, diretta da Antonio Margheriti. Generi e filoni Malgrado la fantascienza sia stata un tempo incentrata anzitutto "sulla scienza", all'interno e ai confini di questo tipo di narrativa si è evoluta una grande varietà di generi e sottogeneri, con la commistione sempre più frequente della fantascienza con il fantasy e l'horror, tanto che alcuni autori e critici utilizzano di preferenza l'espressione speculative fiction (narrativa speculativa) per descrivere complessivamente il fenomeno e altri utilizzano il termine slipstream intendendo ilfantastico, cioè quella forma letteraria estremamente ampia che utilizza l'immaginario, il surreale e tutto ciò che non è mimetico della realtà, per dare maggior impatto ad un messaggio radicato nella visione politica, ideologica del reale. Vi possono essere molti modi diversi per tentare di classificare un'opera di fantascienza; non di rado un'opera o un autore utilizzano vari temi contemporanea- mente e si possono collocare all'interno di più categorie. Una prima classificazione, puramente convenzio- nale, viene spesso effettuata tra fantascienza hard o tecnologica (hard science fiction) e fantascienza soft (soft science fiction), dove la prima si occupa con verosimiglianza degli aspetti tecnologici, la seconda rivolge il suo interesse ai temi umanistici e sociologici. Un genere avventuroso molto popolare è la space opera (in particolare quella militare), a base di astronavi e battaglie spaziali, che ha avuto un notevole influsso anche nella tv e nel cinema, da Star Trek a Guerre stellari. Altre storie di forte presa sul pubblico sono quelle apocalittiche o post apocalittiche, che descrivono in termini drammatici la fine del Movimenti che hanno introdotto nuovi fermenti nel panorama fantascientifico sono stati prima la New Wave negli anni sessanta, poi il cyberpunk negli anni ottanta; quest'ultimo ha generato tutta una serie di sotto-filoni fino ai giorni nostri, e ad esso si affianca lo Le opere contemporanee di fantapolitica, le utopie e le distopie vengono a loro volta fatte rientrare nel genere fantascientifico, come pure le ucronìe, dove le vicende sono ambientate in una immaginaria linea temporale del passato, una "storia alternativa". Temi tipici Vi sono alcuni temi particolarmente sfruttati nelle storie di fantascienza. Anzitutto lospazio: la sua conquista, l'esplorazione e la sua colonizzazione, il viaggio interstellare (in genere con astronavi più veloci della luce) è stato per lungo tempo uno dei temi più popolari, ed in buona parte rimane tale. Lo spazio tuttavia può essere visto anche come un pericolo per l'umanità, un luogo ignoto e misterioso da cui possono prevenire terribili minacce, come un corpo celeste che minaccia la Terra o una invasione aliena. L'esistenza di forme di vita e di intelligenze extraterrestri (maligne o benigne), assieme alla possibilità di stabilire con esse unprimo contatto, sono soggetti ritenuti particolarmente affascinanti dagli autori e dai loro lettori, vista la mole di opere che vi sono state dedicate. Dalla fine degli anni cinquanta, con la nascita dell'ufologia, anche gli UFO sono un elemento molto presente nelle opere popolari. Dagli anni sessanta lo sono anche le facoltà paranormali e la parapsicologia. Il viaggio nel tempo è un tema classico già a partire dalla fine dell'Ottocento, con La macchina del tempo di H. G. Wells. A propria volta, la teoria sull'esistenza di dimensioni parallele offre innumerevoli spunti narrativi per le più diverse trame. La possibilità ipotetica di creare vita artificiale, presente in miti e leggende e nel Frankenstein, mantiene intatto ed accresce il suo fascino grazie all'interesse sviluppato per l'intelligenza artificiale e con la creazione di robot, cyborg e androidi ad imitazione dell'essere umano. Questo tema è spesso legato a quello della Verso la fine delNovecento, dopo la rivoluzione informatica, tra gli ambienti da esplorare si è aggiunta la realtà virtuale e in particolare ilcyberspazio. La trascendenza dalla condizione umana, così spesso trattata a livello filosofico e religioso, è divenuta a sua volta un tema fantascientifico, soprattutto in relazione alle modificazioni della genetica, come le mutazioni o la clonazione, e alle biotecnologie in generale. Cinema di fantascienza Benché il cinema di fantascienza venga spesso riconosciuto come genere autonomo solo a partire dagli anni cinquanta, l'elemento del fantastico era ben presente fin dagli esordi della settima arte. Il neonato cinema viene scoperto infatti come un mezzo che permette di portare sullo schermo non solo la realtà quotidiana, ma anche per visualizzare i sogni, le fantasie dell'essere umano, in modo da suscitare stupore e meraviglia nello spettatore. Tra i primissimi esempi Viaggio nella Luna[16]del 1902 di Georges Méliès, seguito a breve distanza da Viaggio attraverso l'impossibile; lo stesso Méliès è anche l'inventore dei primi effetti speciali. Per circa mezzo secolo sarebbero quindi uscite una serie di opere che verranno definite solo a posteriori come fantascienza, ma sono più che altro appartenenti al genere avventuroso di ambientazione esotica, venato di fantastico e condito di dettagli pseudoscientifici. Fanno eccezione poche pellicole, a cominciare dal celeberrimo Metropolis (1927), diFritz Lang o La vita futura di William Cameron Menzies del 1936. Queste opere forniranno ispirazione per le produzioni successive, quali Aelita (primo kolossal sovietico), King Kong, Frankenstein, La donna e il mostro, La maschera di Fu Manchu, L'isola delle anime perdute, per citarne alcuni tra i più noti e suggestivi. Il cinema di fantascienza ha esplorato una grande varietà di soggetti e temi, molti dei quali non potrebbero essere facilmente rappresentati in alcun altro genere. Questi film sono stati utilizzati, oltre che per intrattenere lo spettatore, per esplorare delicati temi sociali e politici. Attualmente le produzioni fantascientifiche puntano molto sull'azione e sono in prima linea riguardo all'uso degli effetti speciali. La platea si è abituata alla rappresentazione di realistiche forme di vita aliene, spettacolari battaglie spaziali, armi ad energia, viaggi più veloci della luce e paesaggi di lontani mondi. |
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Post n°2297 pubblicato il 31 Luglio 2019 da blogtecaolivelli
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
James Graham Ballard (15 November 1930 - 19 April 2009 was an English novelist, short story writer, and essayist who first became associated with the New Wave of science fiction for his post-apocalyptic novels such asThe Wind from Nowhere (1961) and The Drowned World (1962). In the late 1960s, he produced a variety of experimental short stories (or "condensed novels"), such as those collected in the controversial The Atrocity Exhibition(1970). In the mid 1970s, Ballard published several novels, among them the highly controversial Crash (1973), a story about symphorophilia and car crashfetishism, and High-Rise (1975), a depiction of a luxury apartment building's descent into violent chaos. While much of Ballard's fiction would prove thematically and stylistically provocative, he became best known for his relatively conventional war novel,Empire of the Sun (1984), a semi- autobiographical account of a young British boy's experiences in Shanghai during Described by The Guardian as "the best British novel about the Second World War", the story was adapted into a 1987 film by Steven Spielberg starring Christian Bale. In the following decades until his death in 2009, Ballard's work shifted toward the form of the traditional crime novel. Several of his earlier works have been adapted into films, including David Cronenberg's controversial 1996 adaptation ofCrash and Ben Wheatley's 2015 adaptation of High-Rise. The literary distinctiveness of Ballard's fiction has given rise to the adjective "Ballardian", defined by the Collins English Dictionary as "resembling or suggestive of the conditions described in J. G. Ballard's novels and stories, especially dystopian modernity, bleak man-made landscapes and the psychological effects of technological, social or environmental developments". The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry describes Ballard's work as being occupied with "eros, thanatos, mass media and emergent technologies" Shanghai Ballard's father was a chemist at a Manchester -based textile firm, the Calico Printers' Association, and became chairman and managing director of its subsidiary in Shanghai, the China Printing and Finishing Company His mother was Edna, néeJohnstone. Ballard was born and raised in the Shanghai International Settlement, an area under foreign control where people "lived an American style of life". He was sent to the Cathedral School, the Anglican Holy Trinity Church near the BundShanghai After the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War, Ballard's family were forced to evacuate their suburban home temporarily and rent a house in central Shanghai to avoid the shells fired by Chinese and Japanese forces. After the Japanese attack on Hong Kong, the Japanese occupied the International Settlement in Shanghai. In early 1943, they began to intern Allied civilians, and Ballard was sent to the Lunghua Civilian Assembly Center with his parents and younger sister. He spent over two years, the remainder of World War II, in the internment camp. His family lived in a small area in G block, a two -story residence for 40 families. He attended school in the camp, the teachers being camp inmates from a number of professions. As he explained later in his autobiography Miracles of Life, these experiences formed the basis of Empire of the Sun, although Ballard exercised considerable artistic licence in writing the book, such as the removal of his parents from the bulk of the story. It has been supposed that Ballard's exposure to the atrocities of war at an impressionable age explains the apocalyptic and violent nature of much of his fiction. Martin Amis wrote that Empire of the Sun "gives shape to what shaped him." However, Ballard's own account of the experience was more nuanced: "I don't think you can go through the experience of war without one's perceptions of the world being forever changed. The reassuring stage set that everyday reality in the suburban west presents to us is torn down; you see the ragged scaffolding, and then you see the truth beyond that, and it can be a frightening experience. " But also: "I have-I won't say happy-not unpleasant memories of the camp. [...] I remember a lot of the casual brutality and beatings-up that went on-but at the same time we children were playing a hundred and one games all the time!" Ballard later became an atheist. Britain and Canada In late 1945, after the end of the war, his mother returned to Britain with Ballard and his sister on the SS Arawa. They lived in the outskirts of Plymouth, and he attendedThe Leys School in Cambridge. He won an essay prize whilst at the school but did not contribute to the school magazine. After a couple of years his mother and sister returned to China, rejoining Ballard's father, l eaving Ballard to live with his grandparents when not boarding at school. In 1949 he went on to study medicine atKing's College, Cambridge, with the intention of becoming a psychiatrist. At university, Ballard was writing avant- garde fiction heavily influenced bypsycho- analysis and surrealist painters. At this time, he wanted to become a writer as well as pursue a medical career. In May 1951, when Ballard was in his second year at Cambridge, his short story "The Violent Noon", written to please the contest's jury, won a crime story competition and was published in the student newspaper Varsity. Encouraged by the publication of his story and realising that clinical medicine would not leave him time to write, Ballard abandoned his medical studies, and in October 1951 he enrolled at Queen Mary College to read English Literature. However, he was asked to leave at the end of the year. Ballard then worked as a copywriter for an advertising agency and as an encyclopaedia salesman. He kept writing short fiction but found it impos- sible to get published. In spring 1954 Ballard joined the Royal Air Force and was sent to the Royal Canadian Air Force flight-training base in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, Canada. There he discovered science fiction inAmerican While in the RAF, he also wrote his first science fiction story, "Passport to Eternity", as a pastiche and summary of the American science fiction he had read. The story did not see publication until 1962. Ballard left the RAF in 1955 after thirteen months and returned to England. In 1955 he married Helen Mary Matthews and settled in Chiswick, the first of their three children being born the following year. He made his science fiction debut in 1956 with two short stories, "Escapement" and "Prima Belladonna", published in the December 1956 issues of New Worlds andScience Fantasy respectively. The editor of New Worlds, Edward J. Carnell, would remain an important supporter of Ballard's writing and would publish nearly all of his early stories. From 1958 Ballard worked as assistant editor on the scientific journal Chemistry and Industry. His interest in art led to his involvement in the emerging Pop Art movement, and in the late fifties he exhibited a number of collages that represented his ideas for a new kind of novel. Ballard's avant-garde inclinations did not sit comfortably in the science fiction mainstream of that time, which held attitudes he considered philistine. Briefly attending the 1957 Science Fiction Convention in London, Ballard left disillusioned and demoralised and did not write another story for a year. By the late 1960s, however, he had become an editor of the avant-garde Ambit magazine, which was more in keeping with his aesthetic ideals. Full-time writing career In 1960 Ballard moved with his family to the middle-class London suburb of Shepperton in Surrey, where he lived for the rest of his life and which would later give rise to his moniker as the "Seer of Shepperton". Finding that commuting to work did not leave him time to write, Ballard decided he had to make a break and become a full-time writer. He wrote his first novel, The Wind from Nowhere, over a two-week holiday simply to gain a foothold as a professional writer, not intending it as a "serious novel"; in books published later, it is omitted from the list of his works. When it was successfully published in January 1962, he resigned from his job at Chemistry and Industry, and from then on supported himself and his family as a writer. Later that year his second novel, The Drowned World, was published, establishing Ballard as a notable figure in the fledgling New Wave movement of science fiction. Collections of his stories started getting published, and he began a period of great literary productivity, while pushing to expand the scope of acceptable material for science fiction with such stories as |
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Post n°2296 pubblicato il 31 Luglio 2019 da blogtecaolivelli
In 1964 Ballard's wife Mary died suddenly of pneumonia, leaving him to raise their three children - James, Fay and Bea Ballard - by himself. Ballard never remarried; however, a few years later his friend and fellow author Michael Moorcockintroduced him to Claire Walsh, who became his partner for the rest of his life (he died at her London residence) and is often referred to in his writings as "Claire Churchill". Walsh, who worked in publishing during the 1960s and 70s, was a sounding board for many of his story ideas, and introduced him to the expat community in the south of France which formed the basis of several novels. After the profound shock of his wife's death, Ballard began in 1965 to write the stories that became The Atrocity Exhibition, while continuing to produce stories within the science fiction genre. In 1967 Algis Budrys listed Ballard, Brian W. Aldiss,Roger Zelazny, and Samuel R. Delany as "an earthshaking new kind of" writers, and leaders of the New Wave. The Atrocity Exhibition (1969) proved controversial - it was the subject of an obscenity trial, and in the United States, publisherDoubleday destroyed almost the entire print run before it was distributed - but it gained Ballard recognition as a literary writer. It remains one of his iconic works, and was filmed in 2001. A chapter of The Atrocity Exhibition is titled "Crash!", and in 1970 Ballard organised an exhibition of crashed cars at the New Arts Laboratory, simply called "Crashed Cars". The crashed vehicles were displayed without commentary, inspiring vitriolic responses and vandalism. In both the story and the art exhibition, Ballard dealt with the sexual potential of car crashes, a preoccupation he also explored in a short film in which he appeared with Gabrielle Drake in 1971. His fascination with the topic culminated in the novel Crash in 1973. The main character of Crash is called James Ballard and lives in Shepperton, though other biographical details do not match the writer, and curiosity about the relationship between the character and his author increased when Ballard suffered a serious automobile accident shortly after completing the novel. Regardless of real-life basis, Crash, like The Atrocity Exhibition, was also controversial upon publication. In 1996, the film adaptation by David Cronenberg was met by a tabloid uproar in the UK, with the Daily Mail campaigning actively for it to be banned. In the years following the initial publication of Crash, Ballard produced two further novels: 1974's Concrete Island, about a man who becomes stranded in the waste area of a high-speed motorway, and High-Rise, about a modern luxury high rise apartment building's descent into tribal warfare. Although Ballard published several novels and short story collections throughout the seventies and eighties, his breakthrough into the mainstream came only with Empire of the Sun in 1984, based on his years in Shanghai and It became a best-seller,was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and awarded the Guardian Fiction Prize and James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction. It made Ballard known to a wider audience, although the books that followed failed to achieve the same degree of success. Empire of the Sun was filmed by Steven Spielberg in 1987, starring a young Christian Bale as Jim (Ballard). Ballard himself appears briefly in the film, and he has described the experience of seeing his childhood memories reenacted and reinterpreted as bizarre. Ballard continued to write until the end of his life, and also contributed occasional journalism and criticism to the British press. Of his later novels, Super-Cannes (2000) was particularly well received winning the regional These later novels often marked a move away from science fiction, instead engaging with elements of a traditional crime novel. Ballard was offered a CBE in 2003, but refused, calling it "a Ruritanian charade that helps to prop up our top-heavy monarchy". In June 2006, he was diagnosed with terminal prostate cancer, which metastasised to his spine and ribs. The last of his books published in his lifetime was the autobiography Miracles of Life, written after his diagnosis. His final published short story, "The Dying Fall", appeared in the 1996 issue 106 of Interzone, a British sci-fi magazine. It was reproduced in The Guardian on 25 April 2009.
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Post n°2295 pubblicato il 31 Luglio 2019 da blogtecaolivelli
In October 2008, before his death, Ballard's literary agent Margaret Hanbury brought an outline for a book by Ballard with the working title Conversations with My Physician: The Meaning, if Any, of Life to the Frankfurt Book Fair. The physician in question is oncologist Professor Jonathan Waxman of Imperial College, London, who was treating Ballard for prostate cancer. While it was to be in part a book about cancer, and Ballard's struggle with it, it reportedly was to move on to broader themes. In April 2009 The Guardian reported that HarperCollins announced that Ballard's Conversations with My Physiciancould not be finished and plans to publish it were abandoned. In 2013, a 17-page untitled typescript listed as "Vermilion Sands short story in draft" in the British Library catalogue and edited into an 8,000-word text by Bernard Sigaud appeared in a short-lived French reissue of the collection under the title "Le labyrinthe Hardoon" as the first story of the cycle, tentatively dated "late 1955/ early 1956" by Sigaud and others. Archive In June 2010 the British Library acquired Ballard's personal archives under the British government's acceptance in lieuscheme for The archive contains eighteen holograph manuscripts for Ballard's novels, including the 840-page manuscript for Empire of the Sun, plus correspondence, notebooks, and photographs from throughout his life. In addition, two typewritten manuscripts for The Unlimited Dream Company are held at the Harry Ransom Center at the University Dystopian fiction With the exception of his autobiographical novels, Ballard most commonly wrote in the post-apocalyptic dystopia genre. His most celebrated novel in this regard is Crash, in which cars symbolise the mechanisation of the world and man's capacity to destroy himself with the technology he creates. The characters (the protagonist, called Ballard, included) become increasingly obsessed with the violent psychosexuality of car crashes in general, and celebrity car crashes in particular. Ballard's disturbing novel was turned into a controversial-and likewise disturbing-cerebral film by David Cronenberg. Particularly revered among Ballard's admirers is his short story collection Vermilion Sands (1971), set in an eponymous desert resort town inhabited by forgotten starlets, insane heirs, very eccentric artists, and the merchants and bizarre servants who provide for them. Each story features peculiarly exotic technology such as cloud-carving sculptors performing for a party of eccentric onlookers, poetry- composing computers, orchids with operatic voices and egos to match, phototropicself- painting canvases, etc. In keeping with Ballard's central themes, most notably technologically- mediated masochism, these tawdry and weird technologies service the dark and hidden desires and schemes of the human castaways who occupy Vermilion Sands, typically with psychologically grotesque and physically fatal results. In his introduction to Vermilion Sands, Ballard cites this as his favourite collection. In a similar vein, his collection Memories of the Space Age explores many varieties of individual and collective psychological fallout from-and initial deep archetypal motivations for-the American space exploration boom of the 1960s and 1970s. Commentators such as Will Self have described much of his fiction as being concerned with 'idealised gated communities; the affluent, and the ennui of affluence [where] the virtualised world is concretised in the shape of these gated developments.' He added in these fictional settings 'there is no real pleasure to be gained; sex is commodified and devoid of feeling and there is no relationship with the natural world. These communities then implode into some form of violence. Budrys, however, mocked his fiction as "call[ing] for people who don't think ... to be the protagonist of a J. G. Ballard novel, or anything more than a very minor character therein, you must have cut yourself off from the entire body of scientific education".[ In addition to his novels, Ballard made extensive use of the short story form. Many of his earliest published works in the 1950s and 1960s were short stories, including influential works like Chronopolis. In an essay on Ballard, Will Wiles notes how his short stories 'have a lingering fascination with the domestic interior, with furnishing and appliances,' adding, 'it's a landscape that he distorts until it shrieks with anxiety'. He concludes that 'what Ballard saw, and what he expressed in his novels, was nothing less than the effect that the technological world, including our built environment, was having upon our minds and bodies.' Television On 13 December 1965, BBC Two screened an adaptation of the short story "Thirteen to Centaurus" directed by Peter Potter. The one-hour drama formed part of the first season of Out of the Unknown and starred Donald Houston as Dr. Francis and James Hunter as Abel Granger. In 2003, Ballard's short story "The Enormous Space" (first published in the science fiction magazine Interzone in 1989, subsequently printed in the collection of Ballard's short stories War Fever) was adapted into an hour-long television film for the BBC entitled Home by Richard Curson Smith, who also directed it. The plot follows a middle class man who chooses to abandon the outside world and restrict himself to his house, becoming a hermit. Influence Ballard is cited as an important forebear of the cyberpunk movement by Bruce Sterling in his introduction to the seminalMirrorshades anthology. Ballard's parody of American politics, the pamphlet "Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan", which was subsequently included as a chapter in his experimental novel The Atrocity Exhibition, was photocopied and distributed by pranksters at the 1980 Republican National Convention. In the early 1970s, Bill Butler, a bookseller in Brighton, was prosecuted under UK obscenity laws for selling the pamphlet. In his 2002 book Straw Dogs, the philosopher John Gray acknowledges Ballard as a major influence on his ideas. Ballard described the book as a "clear-eyed assessment of human nature and our almost unlimited gift for self- delusion." According to literary theorist Brian McHale, The Atrocity Exhibition is a "postmodernist text based on science fictiontopoi. Lee Killough directly cites Ballard's seminal Vermilion Sands short stories as the inspiration for her collection Aventine, also a backwater resort for celebrities and eccentrics where bizarre or frivolous novelty technology facilitates the expression of dark intents and drives. Terry Dowling's milieu of Twilight Beach is also influenced by the stories of Vermilion Sands and other Ballard works. In Simulacra and Simulation, Jean Baudrillard hailed Crash as the "first great novel of the universe of simulation." Ballard also had an interest in the relationship between various media. In the early 1970s, he was one of the trustees of theInstitute for Research in Art and Technology. In popular music Ballard has had a notable influence on popular music, where his work has been used as a basis for lyrical imagery, particularly amongst British post-punk and industrial groups. Examples include albums such as Metamatic by John Foxx, various songs by Joy Division (most famously "Atrocity Exhibition" from Closer), "High Rise" by Hawkwind "Miss the Girl" by The Creatures (based on Crash), "Down in the Park" by Gary Numan, "Chrome Injury" by The Church, "Drowned World" by Madonna "Warm Leatherette" by The Normal and Atrocity Exhibition by Danny Brown. SongwritersTrevor Horn and Bruce Woolley credit Ballard's story "The Sound-Sweep" with inspiring The Buggles' hit "Video Killed the Radio Star",and the Buggles' second album included a song entitled "Vermillion Sands. " The 1978 post-punk bandComsat Angels took their name from one of Ballard's short stories. An early instrumental track by British electronic musicgroup The Human League "4JG" bears Ballard's initials as a homage to the author (intended as a response to "2HB" byRoxy Music). The Manic Street Preachers include a sample from an interview with Ballard in their song "Mausoleum".Klaxons named their debut album Myths of the Near Future after one of Ballard's short story collections. The Sound of Animals Fighting took the name of the song "The Heraldic Beak of the Manufacturer's Medallion" from Crash. The song "Terminal Beach" by the American band Yacht is a tribute to his short story collection that goes by the same name. |
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