Simon Sellars, BALLARDISMO APPLICATO, 2019

A young researcher obsessed with J.G. Ballard looks for all the signs capable of explaining the world through the work of his spiritual master. The result will be a hallucinated epic that will lead the protagonist to travel from Australia to Europe to the Pacific islands, confronting each time with the ghosts of our iconography of the disaster: Mad Max, cyber culture, the crazy experiments of independent micronations, the dystopian science fiction, the Ufos, the legacy of the nuclear age, the urban violence, without of course saying masterpieces of the same Ballard as Crash, Condominium and The exhibition of atrocities.

Straddling personal memoir and travel literature, critical theory and speculative fiction, Ballardismo applied is a book as much out of the box as exciting: widely hailed as one of the most original works of recent years, The book by Simon Sellars is an unparalleled masterpiece of theory fiction, the metagenre that most of all challenged categorizations, producing one of the freshest and most enlightening looks on the world in which we live.

Simon Sellars is a writer and editor. A native of Melbourne, Australia, he is the founder of ballardian.com and editor of the anthology Extreme Metaphors: Interviews with J.G. Ballard, 1967-2008.