/// This summer, there is only one book to take to the Terminal Beach…
APPLIED BALLARDIANISM: MEMOIR FROM A PARALLEL UNIVERSE.
Dangerous Bends ahead… SPEED UP!
Fleeing the excesses of 90s cyberculture, a young researcher sets out to systematically analyse the obsessively reiterated themes of a writer who prophesied the disorienting future we now inhabit. The story of his failure is as disturbingly psychotropic as those of his magus—cult author J.G. Ballard, prophet of the post-postmodern, voluptuary of the car crash, surgeon of the pathological virtualities pulsing beneath the surface of reality.
Plagued by obsessive fears, defeated by the tedium of academia, yet still certain that everything connects to Ballard, his academic thesis collapses into a series of delirious travelogues, deranged speculations and tormented meditations on time, memory, and loss.
Abandoning literary interpretation and renouncing all scholarly distance, he finally accepts the deep assignment that has run throughout his entire life, and embarks on a rogue fieldwork project: Applied Ballardianism, a new discipline and a new ideal for living. Only the darkest impulses, the most morbid obsessions, and the most apocalyptic paranoia, can uncover the technological mutations of inner space.
HOW TO BUY
..:: Direct from the publisher
..:: From Amazon
..:: From Amazon UK
..:: From Amazon Australia
PRAISE FOR APPLIED BALLARDIANISM
Applied Ballardianism is an astonishing book, part fictionalised hallucinatory memoir, part essential Ballard primer, all written in the style of the great man himself.
Whether you’re new to JG Ballard or a lifelong fan, this is a thrilling read, cut through with equal parts black humour, cultural insight and existential horror.
– Tim Maughan, author of Paintwork and Infinite Detail
In Applied Ballardianism, Simon Sellars has invented a genre all his own. But what is it, exactly? Postmodern autopathography? Rough Guide to the Desert of the Real? Notes toward a mental breakdown? The missing link between Ballard and Virilio, psychogeography and edgeland studies, Mad Max and Videodrome?
One thing is certain: Applied Ballardianism is the only book you’ll need when you’re marooned on a concrete island, barricaded in a high rise that’s descending into anarchy, or cast away on some Enewetak of the unconscious.
– Mark Dery, author of I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts: Drive-By Essays on American Dread, American Dreams
At first, Simon Sellars appears to be a character in a JG Ballard novel. Then Ballard appears to be a character in a Simon Sellars novel. Then not just the characters but the whole setting and ambience appear to be at once Ballardian and Sellarsian. Then you finish the book and you seem to be a character in a novel the two of them conspired to write. And your perception of the world is never the same again.
– McKenzie Wark, author of A Hacker Manifesto, Gamer Theory and Telesthesia
SLOW BOOK TRAILER…
CONTENTS
Part I: Machine
1. Psychic Combat; 2. Sacrificial Weapon; 3. Still World; 4. Kick the Dog; 5. Technolust; 6. The Sign; 7. Roadkill; 8. Unfamiliar Planet; 9. Queens of the Cyber Age; 10. The War Inside Me; 11. Weird Dream; 12. Spatial Dyslexia; 13. This Alien Earth; 14. Paralipsis; 15. Mob Rule; 16. See Yourself Going By; 17. Dismal Jargon; 18. Threshold Moment; 19. Sub-Ballardian; 20. Kill the Head; 21. Pathogen
Part II: Zones
22. Deep Assignments; 23. Bending Time; 24. Tohoku Rising; 25. Disaster Zone; 26. The Man From Morioka; 27. Beset By Demons of the West; 28. Dreams of the Weak and Puny; 29. Hyper-Convenience; 30. Sync Error; 31. Bunker Logic; 32. The Virilian Gaze; 33. Maggot Brain; 34. Biomechanoid; 35. Repetition; 36. Replication; 37. Star Cult; 38. Scar Tissue; 39. Cartographies of the Infinite; 40. Cubist Dream; 41. Urban Splinters; 42. Untourism;
Part III: Mirrors
43. Frozen Time; 44. New Victims; 45. Fugue State; 46. Stress Test; 47. Black Hole; 48. Metanoia; 49. Lost in Saipan; 50. Time Wars; 51. Malign Potential; 52. Airless and Casino Black; 53. Broadcast Signal Intrusion; 54. Tripwires; 55. Synthetic Violence; 56. Secret Affinities; 57. Ballardcraft; 58. Connected to Machinery; 59. Black Shadow;
Part IV: Implants
60. Reverse Angle; 61. Inside the Skull; 62. Sick Music; 63. Stranger Danger; 64. Dangerous Bends; 65. Psychodrama; 66. Melborea Moronica; 67. Suicide by Thug; 68. Hostile Takeover; 69. Applied Ballardianism; 70. Roaring Mice; 71. Alter Vu; 72. New Gold Sunset; 73. Vat-Grown; 74. Sodium Ecstasy; 75. Hangar Three; 76. Galactic Eyes; 77. Solace in Dystopia; 78. Ballardian Seed; 79. Flyblown; 80. Stasis Without a Cause; 81. Kick Me; 82. State of Mind
Part V: Clones
83. Towards a Philosophy of Jetlag; 84. Sentient Land; 85. Purple Light; 86. Photoreality; 87. Scalar; 88. Delta Sierra Juliet; 89. Emergence; 90. Animal Kingdom; 91. Digital Tattoo; 92. Wire Music; 93. Double Exposure; 94. Deformed Machine; 95. Project Cancelled; 96. Shadowplay; 97. James and Jim; 98. Negative Space; 99. Moebius Strip; 100. Expulsion; 101. Broken Circle; 102. Sleepy Brain; 103. The Hum; 104. Memory Hacker
