Published in Happy Hypocrite 8: Fresh Hell. Edited by Sophia Al-Maria. Featuring William Gibson, Mckenzie Wark, Abdullah Al-Mutairi, Monira Al Qadiri, Stephanie Bailey, Alex Borkowski, Judy Darragh, Navine G. Khan-Dossos, Simon Sellars, Malak Helmy, Raja’a Khalid, Omar Kholeif, …
Journey to the Centre of Google Earth
This essay was commissioned by Anne Hilde Neset for Only Connect Festival Of Sound 2014: J.G. Ballard. It was published in the Only Connect catalogue, May 2014, edited by Anne Hilde Neset and Audun Vinger. …
Red-dirt Voodoo: Rebuilding Australia’s Northwest
Originally published in Architectural Review Asia-Pacific magazine #128: New Civic Realms. All photography by Simon Sellars unless stated otherwise. In my time as AR editor, I never imagined the job would take me to Australia’s remote northwest …
“Extreme Possibilities”: Mapping “the sea of time and space” in J.G. Ballard’s Pacific fictions
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.
Tohoku Dreaming
‘Tohoku Dreaming’, originally published in Flightless, Footscray: Lonely Planet Publications, 2008. The last job they gave me was book-ended by madness. It began somewhere in the labyrinthine insanity of Tokyo. I was trying to sleep …
Kosmopolis 08: Landing Gear
Photo: Simon Sellars. Originally published on ballardian.com, 11 November 2008. Sorry for the long absence — I promised ‘daily updates’, well, that didn’t happen. It’s taken me ages to get my thoughts down about Barcelona …
‘Paradigm of nowhere’: Shepperton, a Photo Essay
All photography by Simon Sellars. Originally published on ballardian.com, 26 April 2008. In May 2007 I found myself in England for the J.G. Ballard conference at the University of East Anglia. With that out of …
Sealand: On the Heap
Originally published in The Australian, 10 November 2007. All photography by Simon Sellars. I THE room has no windows. It’s dank, pitch-black and deathly still. I’ve lost all spatial co-ordinates. I hear a distant, dull …
Lonely Planet: Micronations
Here’s a subject dear to my heart: micronations. I co-wrote this book with John Ryan and George Dunford, and between us we managed to drum up quite a bit of publicity for a subject that …
Akhzivland
Akhzivland is a peaceful anomaly surrounded by the state of Israel. It was formerly the historical village of Akhziv, abandoned after the 1948 War of Independence and later claimed by Eli Avivi, a charismatic ex-sailor who, with his sandals and flowing beard and robes, comes on like a cross between a fit Demis Roussos and the Groovy Guru. Like Prince Roy of Sealand, President Avivi proved the micronational adage that if you look hard enough, you’re bound to find a piece of ‘turf’ nobody wants. Roy and Avivi also suffered the inverse equation: namely, that once you’ve got your hands on some idle territory, the bully boys will always try and take it away from you, even if they have no practical use for it.
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