ZNAK SAGITE — više od fantastike — edicija, časopis, knjižara...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/8007331.stm

RIP

ogroman gubitak, ne samo za SF, nego još više, za svetsku književnost.
na svu sreću, ne može se reći da je otišao u cvetu mladosti niti nezavršena posla, jer ostavio je iza sebe zaista OGROMAN trag, ali ipak...

za moj groš, umro je najveći od (do juče) živih SF pisaca.
od ovih što su preostali čak i ne znam ko bi sada bio 'prvi do njega'. veliki je ponor između balarda i sledećeg, to sasvim sigurno.
(eh, čekaj: bredberi je još živ? hm, ali cijenim da već neko vreme ne objavljuje nove stvari?)

u svakom slučaju, mislim da ballard zaslužuje malo više od jednog golog RIP, pa ću zato ovde izdvojiti neke delove intervjua s njim u kojima se osvrće na SF i svoj rad, a koji bi trebalo da nas podsete koliko je on bio iznad žanra:

People within the science fiction world never regarded me as one of them in the first place. They saw me as the enemy. I was the one who wanted to subvert everything they believed. I wanted to kill outer space stone dead. I wanted to kill the far future and focus on inner space and the next five minutes. And sci-fiers to this day don't regard me as one of them. I'm some sort of virus who got aboard and penetrated the virtue of science fiction and began to pervert its DNA.


I was unusual in that I came, unlike most SF enthusiasts, very late to science fiction. I don't suppose I picked up a copy of Galaxy or Astounding or what-have-you until I was about 22 or 23.


- Which authors impressed you?
BALLARD: A lot of American writers were very good. Bradbury above all I thought he was head and shoulders above everybody else. He had that wider dimension to his writing which the others, however good, didn't really achieve. I liked Sheckley very much - very droll and witty. Pohl, too I liked. Matheson, I liked - very much, actually, because he showed you why SF wasn't about outer space, wasn't about the future. So many of his stories were psychological twist stories. I liked those.


-John Campbell.
BALLARD: I thought he was a baleful influence. He consolidated all the worst tendencies of American SF. He introduced a lot of bogus respectability, all that hard sociology thing. You know: 'I was up at MIT last week, talking about the future of...' something or other, and it all sounded very serious. He allied SF to the applied engineering, social engineering, and so forth, of somewhere like MIT. He gave SF a serious, real dimension which was all wrong because that isn't what SF is about


The Americans collaborated very easily, partly because they all produced this very standardized fiction. It's not all that easy to tell if you're given a paragraph of Pohl that it's not by Sheckley or Matheson or Kuttner. Particularly with all the pseudonyms they used, there are very few writers you can identify stylistically.



-The Marxist critic of SF, Darko Suvin...
BALLARD: Never heard of him. Go on.

-... suggests that the fall of the British Empire is a 'hidden theme' in your work. What do you say to that?
BALLARD: I'd say that my stuff is about the fall of the American empire, because this is what I was brought up in. I wasn't brought up in a British zone of influence. The area was dominated by Americans, by American cars, by American styles and consumer goods.

O...... baš... užasno. Ballard je jedan od retkih pisaca SF-a koji je bio pre svega PISAC. Ono, čovek koji je imao šta da kaže, sirovo, surovo, jako, pomerajuće. RIP.

Jutros se i Trent Reznor oglasio, rekao je da mu je otišao omiljeni pisac, a neupućenima je preporučio CRASH, dodavši da mu je Cronenberg omiljeni reditelj...

Quote from: "Meho Krljic"O...... baš... užasno. Ballard je jedan od retkih pisaca SF-a koji je bio pre svega PISAC.

Vala bas. Al' dobro, obican smrtnik moze samo da prizeljkuje da dozivi te godine sa onakvim delom iza sebe.


Ave atque vale

I would sum up my fear about the future in one word: boring. And that's my one fear: that everything has happened; nothing exciting or new or interesting is ever going to happen again... the future is just going to be a vast, conforming suburb of the soul.

RIP

Quote from: "crippled_avenger"a neupućenima je preporučio CRASH, dodavši da mu je Cronenberg omiljeni reditelj...

Šta to tnači? Da je Cronenbergov sledeći na redu?

moj omaž balardu:

http://popboks.com/tekst.php?ID=7317

osvrt na meni najprijatniji i najlepši balardov roman:

http://ljudska_splacina.com/2009/12/crystal-world-1966-j-g-ballard.html

nisam čitao, ali zvuči kao proširena verzija priče o iluminisanom čoveku

koja ima nekoliko divnih opisa sveta koji obuhvata taj kristalno-midin dodir ali mi nije među favoritima.