Images by Michelle Lord, from Future Ruins (inspired by JG Ballard’s ‘The Ultimate City’), 2008.
‘Pulled apart by the elders, many of the sets revealed their internal wiring. The green and yellow circuitry, the blue capacitors and modulators, mingled with the bright berries of the firethorn, rival orders of a wayward nature merging again after [...]

One of the more enduring misconceptions surrounding the work of J.G. Ballard is that it operates in the classical dystopian narrative mode, [1] supposedly mining pessimism, repression and the negativity of a post-industrial age.

Robert Bond and Jenny Bavidge, editors. City Visions: The Work of Iain Sinclair. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007. ISBN 1-84718-153-8.
Jeannette Baxter. J G Ballard’s Surrealist Imagination: Spectacular Authorship. Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2009. ISBN 978-0-7546-6267-9.
This double review was originally published in Colloquy, issue 17, August 2009, pp. 108-12.

City Visions: The Work of Iain [...]

J.G. Ballard, in 1960, posing in front of his ‘experimental billboard fiction’.
Originally published on ballardian.com, 12 January 2007.
On 5 May 2007, ‘From Shanghai to Shepperton: An International Conference on J.G. Ballard’, apparently the first-ever conference on the work of Ballard, will be held at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK. Guest speakers include the [...]

This represents the first academic article I had published, back when I was attempting my PhD for the first time. It was actually written in 1996 and delivered at the Speaking Science Fiction conference organised by the University of Liverpool, but remarkably the edited collection of conference papers wasn’t published until four years later.

Originally published [...]