Автор - James Ballard

Billennium

La forêt de cristal

Des arbres entièrement cristallisés, des feuilles transformées en joyaux, des oiseaux sculptés dans du quartz, des hommes recouverts de pierres précieuses… et heureux dans la mort… C’est ce que recèle la forêt de cristal où l’unité du temps et de l’espace sont la signature de chaque feuille et de chaque fleur. Une « science-fiction » d’une beauté fantastique, qui nous révèle un univers où le temps a une dimension inversée et où la mort semble plus séduisante que la vie.

Le monde englouti

Au III° millénaire, le Terre n’est plus peuplée que de cinq millions d’habitants. Le Soleil a changé de forme et s’est rapproché de notre planète, entraînant une formidable diminution des terres émergées, envahies désormais par la jungle où des reptiles colossaux ont remplacé les mammifères. Comment survivre dans ces conditions, surtout quand des bandes de pirates recherchent sans relâche les trésors engloutis ? Un classique de la science-fiction écologique.

Crash

This powerful and often terrifying novel, the fruit of J.G. Ballard’s obsession with the motor-car, will shock and disturb many readers. Few products of modern technology excite as much fascination and interest as the automobile, but each year hundreds of thousands of people die in car crashes throughout the world, millions are injured. Yet attempts to regulate the motor-car and reduce this slaughter constantly meet with strong and almost unthinking resistance. Ballard believes that the key to this paradox is to be found in the car crash itself, which contains an image of all our fantasies of speed, power, violence and sexuality. ‘Three years ago, I held an exhibition of crashed cars at the New Arts Laboratory in London,’ he says. ‘People were fascinated by the cars but I was surprised that these damaged vehicles were continually attacked and abused during the month they were on show—watching this, I decided to write Crash.’ The novel opens with the narrator recovering in hospital after a serious car crash in which he has killed the husband of a young woman doctor. In his pain-filled dreams he finds himself dominated by strange sexual fantasies, and he determines to find the real meaning of this horrific experience. When he leaves hospital he revisits the scene of the crash, and meets the woman doctor. During their affair they begin an exploration of the motor-car in all its forms, attending stock-car races, watching test vehicles being crashed, conducting a variety of sexual experiments on London motorways. They meet a violent and aggressive figure called Vaughan, a ‘hoodlum scientist’ who seems determined to die in a car crash with a famous film actress. Terrified of Vaughan, and yet under his spell, the narrator is carried closer to the sinister climax of the novel, a disquieting vision of the future in which sex and technology form a nightmare marriage. Violent and frightening, but always true to its subject, Crash is above all a cautionary tale, a warning against the brutal, erotic and overlit future that beckons us, ever more powerfully, from the margins of the technological landscape. The book was filmed by Canadian director David Cronenberg in 1996; the movie Crash provoked fierce debates over censorship and obscenity. Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2006

Dream Cargoes

A poor seaman forgets his past, and finds a bizarre new life on a polluted Caribbean Isle.

Prima Belladonna

The Cloud-Sculptors of Coral D

The Dead Astronaut

The Garden Of Time

The Subliminal Man

J. G. Ballard is a British writer who has been called a “poet of death.” But Ballard, especially in the early part of his career, also wrote excellent extrapolative science fiction on social themes, and this haunting story is one of his finest. Here Ballard speaks of the enslavement of the unconscious, of an economic system that forces people to consume against their will through the use of technology. Ballard makes an important assumption-the belief (at least implicitly) that people would not want to consume at high rates if they were not “forced” to do so. In a profound sense, “The Subliminal Man” is a basic critique of the underlying dichotomy that pervades the concept of advertising-that of needs versus wants. We all have basic needs like food, sex, clothing, and shelter. Almost everything else (including the book you are now reading) is wants, often artificially created by the culture in which we live. Think how much more difficult resistance would become if the technology of subliminal advertising were forced upon us. This threat goes beyond the financial difficulties that families would be in. We would also be threatened with dehumanization, for it is the ability to think and chose that separates us from the rest of the animal world. Ballard’s story also assumes that industry will continue to manufacture products that will easily and quickly wear out, or if this is not the case, then it will find ways to make us dissatisfied with the products we now have. There is little evidence that things will change for the better.

The Terminal Beach