He was so prophetic about violence. Man is the most violent, dangerous animal on earth - with a death wish that overrides all rationality. One of the few people to explore this.
Inimmitable. His interview is downright priceless at almost every point...its tone and postulates form the perfect explanatory commentary to certain ambiguities in his best books. His 1960s and 1970s work (though you can toss Drowned World and Concrete Island straight in the bin), is more profound and carefully written than it first seems. Highrise, for example, has a ton of overlapping Freudian and Marxian spoofs that are turned in on themselves and the way Ballard, tackles projection and transference, where Laing/Royal/Wilder are the Ego/Superego/Id of a single imagination and where Laing is not conscious of the rapes and murders he commits on the middle floors are so masterfully articulated that only a few reads reveals that that is indeed what is transpiring. The very careful use of floor numbers as codes in helping solve the single identity of Laing/Royal/Wilder and his crimes and in forming the metaphor of a literal body from head to groin to toe, all mashed over by an intentionally vulgar Marxist division (one Marx would scrap, and Ballard knows this) into 3 class estates.
I feel like he started writing, his words buried themselves into the ground, and they popped up in front of me the second I opened his collected short stories.
"... a map in search of a territory...' Brilliant! That territory turned out to be the web. Jim's had 20/20 future vision. Another glimpse into a fast approaching future are his shot fictions: Motel Architecture and The Intensive Care Unit.
It's a RU-vid comment, not a letter to the New Yorker. What am I supposed to say? "One of the greatest novelist of the 20th century"? That's even worse.
