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BALLARD'S LONDONS
From The Drowned World, via High-Rise to Kingdom Come
with Roger Luckhurst at The Century Club, Soho
Tuesday 28th June 2022
Doors open at 6:30 pm, Talk commences at 7:00 pm
Disaster zones, warped modernity, fetishised sex - J. G. Ballard has both been declared one of Britain's most important novelists of the twentieth century and dismissed as a marginal figure "beyond psychiatric help." He has earned praise and condemnation, written bestsellers and obscure avant-garde works, gained coveted prizes and prosecutions for obscenity. For forty years, his extraordinary work has moved between science fiction, apocalyptic visions, autobiography and fictions of the contemporary urban landscape.
In this talk, Roger Luckhurst will explore the maverick author’s perverse relationship to London, from his early fascination with apocalyptic visions of the capital, his interest in the new landscape of motorways and high-rises in the 1970s, to his perverse revels of white-collar crime in the affluent gated communities of Chelsea and edgeland shopping malls.
Tickets £12. Please click here to buy.
Roger Luckhurst
Roger Luckhurst has written lots of books on science fiction, horror film and the Gothic. He recently edited for the British Library *Science Fiction: A Literary History* and wrote the BFI Classics book on the film *Alien*. His book on J. G. Ballard, 'The Angle Between Two Walls' is recognised as the first theoretically informed book on Ballard, reading his work not only within the science fiction genre, but also connecting it to issues of popular culture and legitimisation, postmodernism and the legacy of the avant-garde.
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