JG Ballard’s Crash: an exercise in controlled surrealism – archive, 1973
28 June 1973: The novel centres around a ‘hoodlum scientist’ who has lots of nasty theories connecting the internal combustion engine with sadism
March 2022
The Voids by Ryan O’Connor review – Irn-Bru and benders
This luminous debut novel, set in a squalid, hyper-hedonistic Glasgow, is a wild and gratifying literary ride
February 2022
Top 10s
Top 10 buildings in fiction
It may only rarely get built, but imaginary architecture is a crucial support for many stories, from Jane Austen’s Pemberley to Kafka’s Castle and Ballard’s High-Rise
November 2020
Crash review – Cronenberg's auto eroticism still has impact
The controversy surrounding the original release of this dark exploration of sexy car accidents now seems quaintly outdated – but the film holds up well
September 2020
From the Guardian archive
JG Ballard: 'science fiction celebrates the possibilities of life' – archive, 1970
11 September 1970: Ballard discusses his new book The Atrocity Exhibition, as well as a recent exhibition of crashed cars
March 2020
Come on in, the water's dystopian! JG Ballard's Drowned World hits an Essex pool
A Chelmsford swimming baths has turned Ballard’s prescient apocalyptic novel into a truly immersive performance. Our writer pulls on his trunks and dives in
February 2020
Top 10s
Top 10 books of eco-fiction
As the climate crisis grows ever clearer, the best fiction can help realign our conception of nature
January 2020
William Gibson: ‘I was losing a sense of how weird the real world was'
The writer who invented ‘cyberspace’ – and possibly the most influential living sci-fi author – on the challenges of keeping up with a reality even stranger than fiction
May 2019
Top 10s
Top 10 end-of-the-world novels – from Ballard to Pratchett
Fresh from writing his own first sci fi thriller, physicist and broadcaster Jim Al-Khalili chooses favourite books that tackle the Earth in peril
January 2019
Back pages
The Drowned World by JG Ballard – archive, 27 January 1963
In the third of a new series of reviews from the Observer archive, Kingsley Amis hails the second novel by the brilliantly imaginative science-fiction author
September 2018
Top 10s
Top 10 books about Old Shanghai
From JG Ballard to Eileen Chang, these books capture some of the extraordinary spirit of a truly international city between the wars
August 2018
Applied Ballardianism by Simon Sellars – under the spell of JG Ballard
From close encounters with UFOs to island-hopping with a gonzo travel writer, this is a brilliantly written genre mashup
Top 10s
Top 10 books about strange towns
From JG Ballard’s corporate towns of the near future to Richard Scarry’s animal society in Busytown … Shaun Prescott picks his favourite civilisations in miniature
Top 10s
Top 10 novels about riots
From Victor Hugo to JG Ballard, these incendiary books make readers co-conspirators in the insurrection they depict
March 2018
Debate over NME’s heyday
Letters: Readers respond to the closing of Britain’s most iconic music weekly
September 2017
First books, second thoughts: embarrassing debuts - quiz
Book of the week
The Rub of Time by Martin Amis – brilliant, except when it’s not
January 2017
Were JG Ballard's billboards actually coded Salvador Dalí paintings?
Books of defiance
Herman Melville's Bartleby and the steely strength of mild rebellion
December 2016
Books blog
JG Ballard’s house – the perfect place to crash
JG Ballard’s Shepperton home is up for sale or you can rent Ted Hughes’s Bloomsbury love nest. How do the prices compare with other authors’ homes?
