Halfway between Julio Verne y Kim stanley robinsonWe find this English writer who epitomizes the imaginative alternative to our world of the first cited genius and the dystopian intention of the current second writer. Because read to Ballard is to enjoy a proposal with the aroma of the fantastic nineteenth century, but which ends up sometimes turning to dystopias that start from classic science fiction, adapted to the present day by Stanley Robinson.
Thus, in each of the ballard books we enjoy the exercise of imagination and fantasy but in turn we soak up that critical review of our place in the world as a civilization.
On the other hand, it is normal to discover a critical intentionality in a guy like Ballard who was confined in his childhood in a prison camp.
They were the hard years of the Second World War and the distant Shanghai where the author lived with his parents based on the International Concession that seemed to distribute the land between English, American, Chinese sovereignty or even other countries that were participating on the basis to commercial negotiations or other types of interests.
I am upset about this concession because based on Ballard's final confinement in 1941 by the Japanese army, it resulted in one of his most interesting books due to the biography part it contains: "The Empire of the Sun."
But beyond the detail about the author's particular circumstances, the rest of his work is diverse in that immense channel that always overflows the imaginative part of the fantastic and science fiction.
And in the end, Ballard makes everyone happy, the most purists of the genre and those who come to it to try to discover new stories of our world transformed into something else, in another time, in other lives ...
Top 3 Recommended Books by JG Ballard
The Sun's empire
Perhaps it is not the best novel in terms of plot. But the component of experience also serves to provoke that reading mimicry that ends up provoking the intense empathy of what is practically photographed extracted from reality.
And since the one who here is free to set criteria to evaluate works, I consider that this occupies the top of the Ballard bibliography. In fact, this book is the most widely read and the best valued by the author in England, precisely because of that aspect of a more or less faithful chronicle of other days in remote Shanghai.
This time the Ballard child is called Jim and we thus discover that ultimate tendency towards human survival. Jim is left alone in a hostile world. Japan has entered the Second World War after Pearl Harbor and does not respect anything that was agreed for the multiple administration of Shanghai.
Jim wanders through the streets of the monstrous city and eventually ends up imprisoned in Lunghua. With this desire to sublimate the worst experiences, the author presents a little superhero boy in the sense that he is capable of blending in with his painful situation to end up surviving his sadness and violence.
Skyscraper
The Spanish version of this novel would be "La Comunidad" by Alex de la Iglesia. Under a prism transferred to a more modernist setting in locations where the towers house the residences and the entire social environment within their giant walls.
Written in 1975, this work points to that classic capable of approaching the dystopia of our XNUMXth century society. Closed spaces, classism and an open final confrontation as a sinister and stark class struggle carried out by individuals immersed in a psychological drift caused by the most sinister setting of a society of appearances in which the lack of escape valves and release of The individual fosters a war with an unpredictable ending.
Claustrophobic and at times a direct reflection of each building on the limitations of our lifestyle.
Cocaine nights
The stimulation drug par excellence, the search for a fit in a frenetic world from chemical alteration.
A novel towards the diagnosis of the frenzy of a 20th century so current in this 21st century. From the effects of this drug on the protagonists, Ballard addresses that intention of preponderance of the self, of success, of achieving immediate success, of everything that marks the patterns of prosperity for every business person.
The secondary effects of that unleashed self are approached by the author as a debauchery of drives that promote sex and violence, annulment of pain and that finally locks the individual in his darkest fears and disappointments. A story that tightens on the limits lost by all unbridled ambition.
