The Unlimited Dream Company (20 page)
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Authors: J. G. Ballard
1. Moby Dick
Herman Melville
2. The Loved One
Evelyn Waugh
3. The Big Sleep
Raymond Chandler
4. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
Lewis Carroll
5. The Trial
Franz Kafka
6. The Tempest
William Shakespeare
7. Catch 22
Joseph Heller
8. Our Man in Havana
Graham Greene
9. 1984
George Orwell
10. Brave New World
Aldous Huxley
Have You Read?
The Drought
Water. Man’s most precious commodity is a luxury of the past in this compelling early novel from Ballard. Radioactive waste from years of industrial dumping has caused the sea to form a protective skin strong enough to devastate the earth it once sustained. And while the remorseless sun beats down on Dr Charles Ransom and the remaining inhabitants of Mount Royal, civilization begins to crack …
Crash
Ballard’s controversial cult novel, subsequently made into an equally controversial film by David Cronenberg, was originally published in 1973 but it has lost none of its potency. Vaughan, a TV scientist turned nightmare angel of the highways, craves the ultimate erotic atrocity: a union of blood, semen and engine fluid in a head-on smash with Elizabeth Taylor.
Empire of the Sun
Rooted in Ballard’s own wartime experiences in an internment camp in Shanghai,
Empire of the Sun
is a story of starvation and survival which blends honesty with a unique vision of a world thrown utterly out of joint. Winner of the
Guardian
Fiction Prize, it was also filmed to the author’s satisfaction by Steven Spielberg.
Millennium People
While searching for the truth behind the Heathrow bomb that killed his ex-wife,
psychologist David Markham infiltrates a shadowy protest group based in the comfortable enclave of Chelsea Marina. He finds that these middle-class revolutionaries are intent on destroying everything they’ve worked so hard for: blowing up the National Film Theatre, no less, burning their books, defaulting on their maintenance charges and staging a great Bonfire of the Volvos. Part cultural analysis and part surreal social prediction, this gripping late novel finds Ballard still at the height of his creative powers.
Kingdom Come
Richard Pearson, unemployed advertising executive, arrives in Brooklands, a motorway town on the M25. A few weeks earlier his father was fatally wounded at the Metro-Centre, a vast shopping mall in the centre of this apparently peaceful town. But as Richard delves into events he begins to suspect that there is a more sinister element lurking behind the pristine facades of the labyrinthine mall.
Miracles of Life
Beginning with his early childhood spent exploring the vibrant surroundings of pre-war Shanghai,
Miracles of Life
reveals the events of J. G. Ballard’s fascinating, disorientating and singular life; from the deprivations and unexpected freedoms of a Japanese prison camp to his return to a Britain physically and psychologically
crippled by war, from the social changes of the 1960s to the adjustment to life after the premature loss of his wife.
Miracles of Life
is both a captivating narrative of the experiences that have shaped this extraordinary writer’s works, his distinctive outlook and his original visions of the future, and is also an account of an entirely remarkable life.
Galapagos
Kurt Vonnegut
Metamorphosis and other stories
Franz Kafka
The Lord of the Flies
William Golding
Oryx and Crake
Margaret Atwood
www.ballardian.com
A comprehensive website for all things Ballardian, including links to interviews, reviews and much more.
www.jgballard.com
An excellent site for those harder to find articles and features of J.G. Ballard.
J.G. BALLARD
was born in 1930 in Shanghai, where his father was a businessman. He and his family were interned in a civilian prison camp, following their release they returned to England in 1946. After reading medicine at Cambridge for two years, he worked as a copywriter and Covent Garden porter before going to Canada with the RAF.
The Drowned World,
published in 1962, was his first major novel. His acclaimed novels include
The Crystal World, The Atrocity Exhibition, Crash
(filmed by David Cronenberg),
High-Rise, Empire of the Sun
(filmed by Steven Spielberg),
The Kindness of Women, Cocaine Nights, Super-Cannes, Millennium People
and
Kingdom Come.
Ballard’s most recent work is his autobiography
Miracles of Life,
published in 2008.
From the reviews of
The Unlimited Dream Company:
‘A remarkable piece of invention, a flight from the world of the familiar and the real into the exotic universe of dream and desire … dense and erotic and magical, a pleasure to read’
MALCOLM BRADBURY,
New York Times Book Review
‘A remarkable fantasist … rich, seductive … Ballard’s eloquence is as lush as the flowering vines he hangs from his multi-storey garages’
Observer
‘I was completely beguiled … Worked out with Ballard’s mastery, it is the most cunning evocation of a dream world’
Daily Telegraph
‘The idea is blindingly original and yet as basic as a dream of the whole human race. Moving, thrilling, exquisitely written’
ANTHONY BURGESS
‘Ballard is one of the few genuine surrealists in business … At its most heightened, Ballard’s prose is an impacted mass of images, dense and iridescent as mercury, stranger, you might say, than fiction’
Guardian
‘An extraordinary and touching piece of surrealism … [a] strange and beautiful extravaganza’
Glasgow Herald
‘Extraordinary … there is no doubt of the intensity and originality of the imagination that conceived the scenes of Shepperton transformed into a paradise … far beyond the scope of most novelists’
Spectator
‘One of the most startling and original novelists. Extremely witty, Ballard’s most optimistic book contains some of his strongest, most vivid prose … exuberant fantasy’
Time Out
The Drowned World
The Voices of Time
The Terminal Beach
The Drought
The Crystal World
The Day of Forever
The Disaster Area
The Atrocity Exhibition
Vermilion Sands
Crash
Concrete Island
High-Rise
Low-Flying Aircraft
The Venus Hunters
Hello America
Myths of the Near Future
Empire of the Sun
The Day of Creation
Running Wild
War Fever
The Kindness of Women
Rushing to Paradise
A User’s Guide to the Millennium
(non-fiction)
Cocaine Nights
Super-Cannes
The Complete Short Stories
Kingdom Come
Miracles of Life
Fourth Estate
An imprint of HarperCollins
Publishers
77–85 Fulham Palace Road, Hammersmith, London W6 8JB
www.harpercollins.co.uk
Previously published in paperback by Flamingo 1992, and as a Flamingo Modern Classic 2000
First published in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape Ltd 1979
Copyright © J. G. Ballard 1979
PS Section interview copyright © Vanora Bennett 2004
PS™ is a trademark of HarperCollins
Publishers
Ltd
J. G. Ballard asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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EPub Edition © SEPTEMBER 2012 ISBN: 9780007374885
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