Memories of the Space Age by J. G. Ballard. Sauk City. 1988. Arkham House. 0870541579. Art Work by Jeffrey K. Potter. . 216 pages. hardcover. Cover art by MAX ERNST (1891-1976), one of the twentieth century's preeminent surrealists, is represented on the jacket by an apocalyptic landscape from his decalcomania period, Europe After the Rain (L'Europe apres la pluie II), 1940-42; oil on canvas, 5.
DESCRIPTION - The Space Age has passed into history. In the shadow of the derelict gantries at Cape Canaveral repose the abandoned motels, the empty swimming pools, the desolate launching grounds, the crashed space capsules, all the rusting remnants of a vanished technological civilization. A crime had been committed here, a violation of the evolutionary order embodied in man's attempt to conquer the tideways of space, to breach the boundaries of his own humanity. Over the years, beginning with ‘The Cage of Sand' in 1962, J. G. Ballard has probed the psychological implications of man's exploration of outer space, and during this period the author has written a series of mesmerizing stories set within the forsaken Space Center at Cape Canaveral, involving moribund astronauts encircling the Earth, and depicting a world in retreat from the ravages of time, All of the Cape Canaveral and related fiction is preserved in the present volume, which includes several of the most haunting images in contemporary literature, as Ballard's obsessed men and women stumble through the archetypes of a declining technological landscape. The collected Cape Canaveral stories establish indisputably what partisans of this author have recognized for many years: J. G. Ballard is one of the supreme visionary prophets of our age, possibly the most significant writer of speculative fiction since H. G. Wells. In his melding of science and surrealism to create a phantasmagorical milieu worthy of Max Ernst, Ballard is exploring the uneasy interface between technology and humanity, dramatizing the neuroses and paranoias of our age, presenting with hallucinogenic intensity the existential plight of modern man.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - J. G. BALLARD was born in 1930 of British parents in Shanghai, China, but has lived in England since the age of fifteen. In 1956 Ballard's first imaginative stories began to appear in conventional genre periodicals, but with publication of a series of disaster novels in the early 1960s, he emerged as the most powerful and original talent in British science fiction. Later, as high priest of the New Wave movement Ballard wrote a series of experimental ‘condensed novels,' collected in THE ATROCITY EXHIBITION (1970); more recently, the semiautobiographical EMPIRE OF THE SUN (1984). filmed by Steven Spielberg, has brought J. G. Ballard to a vast new audience. JEFFREY K. POTTER was born in 1956 at March Air Force Base in southern California and is largely self-taught though the artist-photographer acknowledges Clarence John Laughlin, Jerry N. Uelsmann, John Heartfield, and Man Ray as major creative influences, Potter has illustrated numerous hardcover and paperbound books as well as magazine covers for such disparate publications as Night Cry, American Politics, and Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine. Like some mighty Dadaist demiurge, Potter is able to juxtapose images in quest of his own imaginative counterpart to reality, enabling us to perceive the world through his unique artistic vision.
See if zenosbooks.com has any books for sale by this author
