J. G. Ballard's decomposition Of course I came to Ballard through science fiction, but I could never finish his books. I started them well enough and ploughed on. But the subtext said to me. No. This isn't it really. Not yet. The Drowned World The Wind from Nowhere The Drought The Crystal World And then came: Crash , which was an artificial and stellar conjunction of his obsessions. And I read it when it came out in 1973 and I read: The Terminal Beach The Day of Forever The Best Short Stories of J G Ballard And Empire of the Sun much later, (after the movie) What do you think of books when you are 13? What do you think of the "textures" of Hal Clements, John Wyndham, Arthur C. Clark, Ray Bradbury, Brian Aldiss, Aldous Huxley and J. G. Ballard? And then what do you think of books like Crash . Or when you inadvertantly pick up the biography of Frank Harris or after having heard Suzanne try to read Leonard Cohen's Beautiful losers or scan through John Updike'
Left wing commentary from the heart and the head