The cover to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, February 1962, illustrating JG Ballard's "The Garden of Time”

The cover to Science Fiction Adventures, No. 24 (1962), illustrating JG Ballard's "The Drowned World"

The cover to If, March 1963, illustrating JG Ballard's "The Time Tombs"

The cover to Fantastic Stories of Imagination, October 1963, illustrating JG Ballard's "The Screen Game"

JG Ballard sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/ballar... died on this day, so here are some magazine covers from 1962/1963 illustrating his stories (Artist: Ed Emshwiller, Brian Lewis, Virgil Finlay and Ed Emshwiller):

The Illuminated Man by Christopher Priest and Nina Allan review: 'a remarkable document' Although saturated in loss and marbled with death, this biography of JG Ballard is life writing in every sense, writes Stuart Kelly

www.scotsman.com/arts-and-cul...

archive.is/RJyNS

... sorry, not Millhouses, Meersbrook, more like ...

it is indeed, ex-boozer, now flats

That's not the Waggon & Horses at Millhouses, I guess?

There's a bit of a campaign to not help them at pedestrian crossings in the US, they need you to press the button for them

I don't feel angry anymore, just disappointed. No jetpacks, just robots that take jobs, struggle to cross the road and break down constantly...

I've not seen one yet! Did you want to kick it over?

an Uber Eats food delivery robot stranded outside block of flats that used to be the Coach and Horses pub in Sheffield UK

Tragic scene outside the old boozer ...

The Illuminated Man by Christopher Priest and Nina Allan review – an unconventional portrait of JG Ballard The biographer’s terminal illness and death is woven into this original and moving account of Ballard and his work

www.theguardian.com/books/2026/a...

screenshot of review of biography of JG Ballard The Illuminated Man, with headline "He is beyond psychiatric help" -- the traumatic origins of JG Ballard. Illustrated with collage of Ballard portrait and still from the film Empire of the Sun, with Christian Bale playing schoolboy 'Jim Ballard' in war-torn Shanghai

archive.is/KfKoa

The highly controlled, limited environment; the time distortion; the intense subjectivity -- it's an asexual and antisocial environment -- all these together may make Space Travel not a dream of the future, but a half-remembered nightmare from the past.

screenshot of Times Literary Supplement. Title: Labour of Love, a biography of J. G. Ballard becomes a much more personal project, by Norma Clarke. Photo of Ballard at his writing desk looking serious

archive.is/hlBBf

It may seem naïve to suggest that the visitors to Epstein’s island committed a range of criminal or near-criminal acts simply because they were bored. But Ballard does pose some fundamental questions about the nature of lives where work is everything, from waking to sleeping every day of the year. How do such people find personal fulfilment or cultivate a sense of morality? When you can pay someone else to manage almost every aspect of your life, what is there left for yourself? What is life for? Historically, the elite institutions of the Global North – universities, churches, and the high temples of literature and arts – encouraged their members to seek answers to these questions. In the modern world their influence has waned as elites have become more open and disruption valued as an end in itself. Contemporary universities transmit skills rather than morals. Civic republicanism has yielded to MAGA, among the rich as much as among their foot soldiers. Epstein’s island may be less a pathology than a dystopian vision of a future that may be hard to resist. photo of Robert Dingwall Robert Dingwall is an emeritus professor of sociology at Nottingham Trent University. He also serves as a consulting sociologist, providing research and advisory services particularly in relation to organizational strategy, public engagement and knowledge transfer. He is co-editor of the SAGE Handbook of Research Management.

Prof. Robert Dingwall on JG Ballard and the Epstein Files

The grudging disclosure of the Epstein files by the US government has rightly attracted a great deal of commentary...There has been much less discussion of the motivations of the men involved

www.socialsciencespace.com/2026/04/jg-b...

Cover of the July 1962 issue of ‘Fantastic’ magazine, which references the J,G, Ballard story ‘The Singing Statues’ - image shows a close-up of a woman with her eyes closed, her face framed by her long blonde hair. Behind her is one of the singing statues of the title, a large metallic column, curiously ornamented, and with curved struts forming a shape like two metallic wings at the top.

Back to J.G. Ballard’s Vermillions Sands series today & the 1962 story ‘The Singing Statues’. A darkly surreal love story involving the mesmeric effects of ‘sonic sculptures’, offset with moments of playful humour.
A rather wonderful cover here from the tale’s original publication in ‘Fantastic’.

"I can't think of anybody who's had the same impact on me that Ian Watson has. I found The Embedding tremendously exciting to read, particularly as it begins in a very quiet way and then suddenly--wham. I'd read a marvellous article by him, about Japan, which was brilliantly written" JG Ballard

Deborah Levy: ‘CS Lewis’s White Witch terrified me – but I wanted to meet her’ The South African author on discovering Colette, being inspired by JG Ballard, and the subversive joys of Asako Yuzuki

Deborah Levy: ‘CS Lewis’s White Witch terrified me – but I wanted to meet her’

"Around my 40s it seemed to me that the late great JG Ballard had found an intellectually entertaining way to air his preoccupations and obsessions in his later fiction."

www.theguardian.com/books/2026/a...

🖤 and yes, I've thought about "Kingdom Come" often in recent times, flags everywhere. As Toby Litt says, revising his previous opinion of KC:
"...as he’d so often been before, Ballard was embarrassingly, terrifyingly on the money. He never disdained the obvious and so always discerned the imminent.”

“How the World Declared War on America”

In the wilderness of America, JG Ballard foresaw the gangster imperialism of Donald Trump

By Mark Blacklock ( @drblacklock.bsky.social )

archive.ph/8T8qc

Will NASA one day evolve into a religious organization?

Maybe we're going to live in an eventless future.

The Most Moving Science Fiction Book Ever: 'The Illuminated Man' J G Ballard Christopher Priest Bio YouTube video by Outlaw Bookseller

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Olh3...

This video review is dedicated at the end to David Pringle, master archivist.

There's more to Science Fiction than Star Trek and Star Wars.

Uber Eats delivery robots vandalised in Sheffield suburb Spray paint is daubed over robots used by food delivery company Uber Eats in Meersbrook.

BBC News - Uber Eats delivery robots vandalised in Sheffield suburb - BBC News
www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Blue Velvet was, for me, the best film of the Eighties -- a surreal, voyeuristic and subversive masterpiece of cinema that has lost none of its power to startle, and still ensnares the audience into complicity with its masochistic weirdness.

UnHerd Academy: J. G. Ballard masterclass - UnHerd Club J. G. Ballard possessed one of the most astonishing imaginations of our age. His turbulent personal history, including internment in a Japanese prison camp as a teenager during the Second World War, l...

club.unherd.com/event/nina-a...

Been there, done that.

My most useful JG Ballard creation is this alphabetic concordance of keywords in his published work:
bonsall-books.co.uk/concordance

My most recent work is this interactive Ballard short story:
fentonville.co.uk/notes-towards

More here:
fentonville.co.uk/digital-ball...

New #ebook at Project Gutenberg: Four-billion dollar door by Michael Shaara https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/78281

The clouds of Hiroshima A look at what few photographs we have of the mushroom and smoke clouds from the first atomic bombing

I had meant to post this yesterday, but ended up running out of time. This is an attempt to round up most of the photos that exist of the mushroom and smoke clouds from Hiroshima, from above and below, and to give them some context and commentary. doomsdaymachines.net/p/the-clouds...