His Jaguar goes flying over the guardrail of the high-speed highway he was driving on and crashes on the titular concrete island below. It's the shortest and most difficult book in the series.Ĭoncrete Island is the story of Robert Maitland (Ballard loved naming his protagonists 'Robert' for some reason), a wealthy architect that crashes his car in the opening paragraph. Immortal British author J.G Ballard explored those almost fifty years ago in his urban disaster trilogy, which Concrete Island is a part of. Long before Facebook and iPhones invented (maybe long before you were born), the great minds of the twentieth century were anticipating the perils of modern living. I'm sure you've heard those a thousand times. Mental health gurus (and click-bait websites) are lamenting the end of privacy of our increasingly connected world, the happiness-obsessed corporate culture encouraging us to forsake our personal lives, yadda, yadda. Ballard's novels and stories, especially dystopian modernity, bleak man-made landscapes and the psychological effects of technological, social or environmental developments.' The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry describes Ballard's work as being occupied with 'eros, thanatos, mass media and emergent technologies'.The idea that modern existence is making us miserable is very popular nowadays. The literary distinctiveness of Ballard's work has given rise to the adjective 'Ballardian', defined by the Collins English Dictionary as 'resembling or suggestive of the conditions described in J. Described as 'The best British novel about the Second World War' by The Guardian, the story was adapted into a 1987 film by Steven Spielberg. While many of Ballard's stories are thematically and narratively unusual, he is perhaps best known for his relatively conventional war novel, Empire of the Sun (1984), a semi-autobiographical account of a young boy's experiences in Shanghai during the Second Sino-Japanese War as it came to be occupied by the Japanese Imperial Army.

The story was later adapted into a film of the same name by Canadian director David Cronenberg. In 1973 the highly controversial novel Crash was published, a story about symphorophilia and car crash fetishism the protagonist becomes sexually aroused by staging and participating in real car crashes. In the late 1960s and early 1970s Ballard focused on an eclectic variety of short stories (or 'condensed novels') such as The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), which drew closer comparison with the work of postmodernist writers such as William S. Ballard came to be associated with the New Wave of science fiction early in his career with apocalyptic (or post-apocalyptic) novels such as The Drowned World (1962), The Burning World (1964), and The Crystal World (1966). G.' Ballard (15 November 1930 – 19 April 2009) was an English novelist, short story writer, and essayist.

Ballard concrete island