J. G. Ballard

Precisely.

The pioneer of this psychological environmental doom is J.G. Ballard.

The compilation highlights his 1962 novel, The Drowned World.

Classic Ballard.

In this scenario, massive solar radiation has melted the polar ice caps.

Europe and North America are totally submerged, transforming into these sweltering, prehistoric, neo-Triassic lagoons.

But Ballard isn't interested in the logistics of building a boat or finding canned food.

Not at all.

And as I say, he becomes a mercenary, essentially.

Yeah, I mean, the closest I can come, and now you're making me want to go read King Rad, because the closest I can come is like J.G. Ballard, right? Empire of the Sun, that kind of experience, right?

Yeah, right.

And Ballard's Empire of the Sun, although that again is a novelization.

It does draw on young J.G. Ballard's experiences in Lunghua camp just outside Shanghai.

But that is a fundamentally different camp to Changi in a sense, because it was only civilians in that camp.

It wasn't military.

But Changi was a very tough place to have ended up for a young kid or anyone.

goes.

I think one of the worst ones is I used to teach JG Ballard's High Rise and um i don't know if you're familiar with high rise but it opens with um an image of someone eating a dog on a on a spit and i sort of set my targets you know how do i how do i take this obviously awful kind of scenario and talk about it's kind of you know it's utopian impulses um but i kind of feel like i managed to do it um but yeah i don't know if students always agree with me but

It's interesting that you mentioned the postscript in Norwell, because it has become a bit of a trope.

I think there's something similar in The Unmade's Tale, in which at that point is an academic conference, which is very optimistic also in the sense of people reading proceedings of academic conferences.

Cause then you can actually have a conversation and within it, one of the things was like, if you were going to do another anthology, you know, theme or tribute to someone, who would it be? What would it be? And I took a beat to think about it.

Cause I've done obviously like a number of them and I, I, didn't have one in the bag i didn't they kind of just come to me and i get inspired i go oh fuck we're doing that i want to do that and i hadn't had one you know ready locked and loaded just because i don't know i've been a little overwhelmed with some other stuff in my life and weird punk is um it's not taking a back seat right but because it's always here it's always waiting for me uh but i've just you know had to focus on some other things and haven't had as much time to think about kind of future projects as i'd like and so i had i was like i need to come up with something what would i gun to my head what would i want to do and just following the kind of stream from the um The Ballard the JG Ballard anthology feral architecture It's like who's another kind of literary hero of mine who I would love to write a love letter to And and publish a love letter to buy other weirdo writers who love them and it was like Katherine Dunn No question.

Like how did I not think of this already? and so that like That question prompted the entire concept.

I came up with like, in my interview, answer came up with a title.

middle

is like pretty much almost all joe's stuff after that is where it starts breaking up it's where i got my james bond collection yeah J.G. Ballard, who is a science fiction, British science fiction writer, really great stuff, wrote, did a book called The Atrocity Exhibition, which is, oh, and a book called Crash about people who derive sexual gratification from automobile accidents.

I saw that movie.

The movie's awesome.

Yeah, see, because I had this idea for a while, and I'm thinking I will probably never get to, at least not in this state.

I want to do a class that focuses essentially on transgressive literature.

So this gives you things like Ballard's Crash, Nutting's Tampa, Ryu Motokami's Almost Transparent Blue, if you know that one.

Mm-hmm.

You know?

You said that you were, you've, you were reading JG Ballard and listening to Kraftwerk and sensing that an era was ending at that time.

Were you, I mean, you mentioned that, you know, like you were trying to make an Elton John, but you realised that that wasn't what you should be doing.

You should be making the weird stuff that you make sort of thing.

Thanks for watching! moving on gotta keep moving gotta keep moving moving gotta gotta keep Come on.

it's me again this is oceanic by ohm it's a really cool acid healthy track um and before that was on your way which let me just check i can't remember that was by a helicopter um it's got such a cool sample at the beginning it sounds sort of like a 80s horror film um before that was trism by the b52s which i suppose you can't think about any music that's intergalactic sci-fi-esque without probably playing a bit of the b52s and i thought that was a good example track um for this idea because they've sort of made up this fictional uh mode of transport called the trism and it reminded me I've been reading Vermilion Sands by JG Ballard recently and it kind of reminded me of that idea of creating these really strange random I suppose objects of the world sort of systems just recreating them what they could be in alternate places or in alternate realities so yeah I thought that was a good one to include and then we had sorry by Miloko and flexi disc by solvent it was the adult remix and And of course we had my favorite Brian's magic tears and their song crab kiss Which is the first out first track off of their last album, I believe So yeah, we're going quite sort of going through many a genre today but I think oh up next is the last track that isn't purely dance club moment because I had to play it it's Tox who just released an album about two days ago It's a track called Winning.

It's a really nice album.

It's very chilled but really beautiful.