illness and employment has kept me from reacting properly to the passing of the supernaturally monumental fiction engineer.
whilst i finish up my own reaction, here are some non-linguistic fragments….
These are stills of Ballard covers by the wonderful James Marsh, one of the only artists who seem to have come close to visually representing the surreal distortions detailed on the inside. I came to Ballard later than most from my generation (in my mid-20’s) coming across a huge selection of Marsh illustrated editions in an Oxfam near Manchester where i lived at the time. Ballard, like Dick seems so woefully under served by most illustrators which seems especially bemusing in his case as painting was such a huge inspiration on his life and work.
These though are staggering, mixing hyper-reality and Rousseau-like cartoonishness. **
** and Marsh was somebody whose work i had known for a lot longer, his artwork adorning nearly everything by the synth-pop turned magisterially out-there ‘rockers’ Talk Talk whose Spirit of Eden and Laughing Stock deserve a book of their own, never mind a post here…