Ballard, about a cloud sculpture and the men who fly small planes, about love and about murder. Delany and Kit Reed, Carol Emshwiller and Fritz Leiber, Brian Aldiss and Tuli Kupferberg and a host of authors and ideas, including a story called The Cloud Sculpters of Coral D, by J. Lafferty and William Burroughs, Samuel R. Ballard, a strange apocalypse I barely understood, and to which I was attracted by the cover, showing a beautiful, glassy landscape, and the back cover blurb, telling me that this about people exploring the Amazonian rainforest, trying to find out why the world was becoming crystal, and SF 12 edited by Judith Merrill, the book in which I discovered R.A. Which meant that, growing up, two of my favourite books were The Crystal World by J. Also, I knew we were all headed for the future, and I wanted to know what things would be like there, surrounded by robots, with our hand-held communications devices. I was awed, and he always seemed too near and too far away.Ĭhildren, the kind who read, read everything that they find in the house they read their parents’ books (the ones the parents had as children, the ones they had as adults) they read Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe alongside Isaac Asimov’s Caves of Steel Coral Island then Dune Messiah The Island of Adventure beside Conan the Adventurer: they read all the books they can because they are there, and because they offer information and escape. I did not talk to him, then or any of the times I could have done.

He was standing beside William Burroughs at an art opening, affable and dry and avuncular, in a suburban way, as he observed the 80s artistic freakshow that surrounded him and somehow managed at the same time to be both part of it and not. Ballard, Jim to his friends-and I was never one of them, I was too young when I arrived in the world of writers, and too new, but still, he’s Jim Ballard, which was how I was introduced to him, like the boy in Empire of the Sun.

Interesting and thought provoking as most Ballard novels, but with the same sense of lack of realism as many of them - are we really to believe no-one saw or heard the crash in the first place? Read more I didn't like a lot of this interaction and I thought the novel might have worked better as a short story or novella without it. In the second half of the novel, he meets two other strange characters on this island, and the struggles between them become a metaphor for Maitland's lack of control over his life and, like a long term prisoner, he becomes almost reluctant to leave the seductively welcoming isolation of his surroundings. A motorway driver, Robert Maitland, crashes his car over an embankment into an overgrown island of weeds and rusted metal between three motorways where, trapped and unable to climb out he is stuck and has to resort to ingenious attempts to try to attract the attention of the outside world and to survive in this isolated micro-world.

Ballard concrete island