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Hollywood at Night (2006).
Alexis Rockman’s paintings of swamped or ruined American landmarks present views which are a novelty in contemporary art galleries whilst being very familiar to science fiction readers. Many of these could well be illustrations for JG Ballard’s 1981 novel, Hello America, which imagined a depopulated United States reclaimed by flora and fauna. [...]

Impossible to avoid thoughts of either JG Ballard or various apocalyptic horror and science fiction scenarios when looking at these photos of Sydney, Australia, taken a few hours ago. A cloud of red dust passed over the city in the early morning and the depopulated views only add to the eerie atmosphere. These are from [...]

Paris au XXieme Siecle by Jules Verne (1994).
Following a comment I made last week in the post about the Temples of Future Religions by François Garas, I’ve decided it’s time to give some proper attention to one of my favourite comic artists, François Schuiten, a Belgian whose obsession with imaginary architecture resembles the earlier endeavours [...]

Detail from the cover of Ambit # 40, 1969.
A teenage enthusiasm for Pop Art meant I was familiar with the paintings and collages of Eduardo Paolozzi (1924–2005) long before I became aware of his association with sf magazine New Worlds, and his friendship with JG Ballard. Paolozzi was famously credited on the masthead of New [...]

Dream House #3 (2009).
Many of Michael Dotson’s vivid acrylic paintings would make good illustrations for JG Ballard books or for some of his more hallucinatory short stories. Not all of these stylised urban landscapes and empty sports arenas have the requisite latent menace to be truly Ballardian but the anomalous black pyramid in Dream House [...]

Le Phallus phénoménal (1793–1794).
This blurred and discoloured picture arrives following a discussion with Paul Rumsey in the comments for an earlier post about engravings of monstrous whales. The pictures there were by engraver Hieronymus Cock whose surname gives us an additional resonance when discussing Moby Dick and sperm whales. The picture I posted of [...]

The Drought, 1968; design by Richard Hollis, photography by Dr. J Comroe.
James Pardey contacted me earlier this week announcing his site devoted to Penguin Books’ science fiction covers. I posted some of my own dishevelled copies a while back and this news gives me an excuse to throw up another Ballard cover. Pardey’s site is [...]

The cosmic clock with Ballard at its core | JGB, Tacita Dean and Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty.

Jours de Lenteur (1937) by Yves Tanguy.
Behind it, the ark of his covenant, stood two photographs in a hinged blackwood frame. On the left was a snapshot of himself at the age of four, sitting on a lawn between his parents before their divorce. On the right, exorcizing this memory, was a faded reproduction of [...]

Panther Books paperback edition, 1968; cover painting: The Eye of Silence by Max Ernst.
If I can’t remember when I first encountered JG Ballard’s work, it’s not because I was reading him at a very early age, more that a childhood enthusiasm for science fiction made his books as omnipresent in my early life as any [...]

Like the creations of the late Oliver Postgate, Edward Judd haunts my childhood imagination via the handful of very British science fiction and sf/horror movies he starred in during the 1960s. He did a great deal of acting before and after this—in the Seventies he was a very ubiquitous TV character actor—but it’s his run [...]

A curious short film over at Ubuweb by Chris Marker, John Chapman and Frank Simeone, depicting driftwood sculptures at the shore of San Francisco Bay which resemble the remnants of some Ballardian cargo cult. The film was made in 1981 and the sculptures look weathered and dated enough (rainbow stripes; what appears to be a [...]

Island Universe (2008).
Island Universe is a new work by American artist Josiah McElheny at London’s White Cube gallery. McElheny’s recurrent use of glass and mirrors would be enough to capture my attention anyway—I particularly like the Modernity piece below—but Island Universe also features a specially-commissioned sound accompaniment by one of my favourite musicians, Paul Schütze.

Modernity [...]

A visitor examining Seizure. Photograph by Sarah Lee.
I’d love to see this installation work which opened on Wednesday at 157 Harper Road, Southwark, London. British artist Roger Hiorns has transformed a flat awaiting demolition by growing thick mats of copper sulphate crystals on all the interior surfaces, a work he calls Seizure. Copper sulphate always [...]

JG Ballard. Autòpsia del nou mil·lenni is an exhibition at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona which takes the work of everyone’s favourite Shepperton resident as its theme. The exhibition runs to November 2nd, 2008 and the website includes a blog where Spanish readers can explore the “Univers Ballard”. For Anglophones, curator Jordi Costa [...]

Strange fiction
| Another big JG Ballard feature.

Retroactive I (1964).
My youthful enthusiasm for art acquainted me with the name of Robert Rauschenberg (who died two days ago) earlier than most. Surrealism and Pop Art held an appeal that was immediate, if rather superficially appreciated at the time, and it was seeing works from both those movements which were the most memorable aspect [...]

Via Ballardian:
In 1984 J.G. Ballard called for a ‘Festival of Home Movies’ and 24 years on we’re happy to oblige: announcing our latest competition, to promote JGB’s forthcoming autobiography, Miracles of Life. Presented by ballardian.com and HarperCollins UK, the competition will utilise ‘modern electronics’ as specified above, of an especial type that Ballard with [...]

Previous posts about book covers or cover design.

• March of the Penguins

• Science fiction and fantasy covers

• The art of Ed Emshwiller, 1925–1990

• The King in Yellow

• Samuel Beckett and Russell Mills

• Penguin science fiction

• Ma Petite Ville

• Groovy book covers

• Bugger Boy

• Rockwell Kent’s Moby Dick

• Alan Aldridge: The Man With Kaleidoscope Eyes

• Ronald [...]

Detail from La Havane by René Portocarrero; photo by C. Marker.
This week’s book finds are a pair of titles I hadn’t come across before in these particular editions, another haul from the vast continent that is the Penguin Books back catalogue. Labyrinths I’ve had for years in a later edition (see below) but the [...]