Status Updates From Selected Nonfiction, 1962-2007

Have gotten to the reviews. Not so thrilled with them. Most of them review works I've not read, and after the reviews, I'm not likely to pick them up. The glossary before them was much more fun.

I am genuinely enjoying this book!

Requires my stopping frequently along the line to look up who or what he's writing about. Some names I recognized but not their work. Lots of ideas chased. Loving it!!

Surprisingly interesting reading. A bit coarse from time to time, but not crazy obscene stuff. I had no idea that Ballard had written so widely. So carry on.

Football crowds rocking stadiums and bellowing anthems are taking part in political rallies without realising it, as would-be fascist leaders will have noted.

I’m sure Blair took us into Iraq because he was flattered to be summoned from the lower school and invited into the senior prefect’s study.

Portillo, on the other hand, has the TV-honed skills to become a real threat. He smiles to camera like a basking shark sliding through a sea of warm plankton.

We spend our happiest moments in hyper-markets and shopping malls, where everything is designed to make us feel better, while often making us worse off.

Elections are now held as a public information service, like the VD and drink-driving campaigns of old, to maintain the necessary illusion that politics matters.

Aldous Huxley was uncannily prophetic, a more astute guide to the future than any other 20th-century novelist. Even his casual asides have a surprising relevance to our own times. During the first world war, after America’s entry, he warned: “I dread the inevitable acceleration of American world domination which will be the result of it all . . . Europe will no longer be Europe.”

I remain blown away by this. Maybe the best collection of essays I've ever read. Ballard is also revealing himself as the most versatile writers certainly in my library. He could do anything.

One interesting observation Ballard had was that the reputation of SF's new wave was that they had delusions of literary grandeur and were too self-serious when in reality the opposite was true-- the people who were running the fanzines, policing the genre's fences, and writing trite genre slop were the ones who were fanatics and overall unpleasant to be around at conventions.

Bringing this up for no reason!

In the Voyeur's Gaze - One of the best essays I've ever read about an artist (and one of my favorites, Edward Hopper) that connects brilliantly to the present day of our great American loneliness.

Fuck. IS Ballard my new favorite writer of all time???

"It is the inflexibility of this huge reductive machine we call reality that provokes infant and madman alike, and in the cataclysm story the science fiction writer joins company with them, using his imagination to describe the infinite alternatives to reality which nature itself has provided incapable of inventing. This celebration of life is at the heart of science fiction."

"I believe" is as tremendous a piece of writing as it was billed as but I don't think it's right to call it an essay at all. It's pretty obviously a poem. Maybe the most important poem in all of Science Fiction.

A wonderful collection thus far