![]() ![]() Lower income tenants occupied the ground floors, the middle class lived above them, the rich inhabited plush skylight condos. Here the gated estate of the future was reimagined as a 40-floor monolith fitted with swimming pools, supermarkets, banks, schools, high speed lifts and rooftop gardens. Then, only a year later, Ballard completed the trilogy with High Rise. Concrete Island (1974), a sequel of sorts, was Robinson Crusoe relocated to London’s Westway. ![]() 1969s’s Atrocity Exhibition, a series of “condensed” novels, (including the infamous Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan and The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race), read like quasi-psychotic police reports or autopsies, owing far more to William S than Edgar Rice Burroughs.īallard’s work reached a new level of transgression with Crash (1973), a carnival of auto-erotic celebrity car-wrecks and snuff voyeurism rendered in almost baroque prose. Earlier novels such as The Drowned World, The Drought and The Crystal World dramatised ecological doomsday scenarios – 40 years before the decay of Detroit, Ballard had perfected ruin porn – but following the sudden death of his wife Mary in 1964, his work became tougher and more experimental. ![]() JG Ballard’s High Rise, published in 1975, was the culmination of a triptych of near-future shockers. ![]()
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