A review by kateofmind
Applied Ballardianism: Memoir from a Parallel Universe by Simon Sellars

5.0

I'll have a full review up at Skiffy and Fanty, but in brief, this fictionalized autobiography is part meditation on how our everyday world has become indistinguishable from science fiction and part cautionary tale against letting one writer -- especially one as pathologically fascinating, prescient and disturbing as J.G. Ballard -- so completely colonize your imagination that you find yourself transformed into one of that writer's protagonists without the benefit of the writer's guiding hand on the "plot" of your life. A passage at the end offers the reader a chance to interpret all that came before -- encounters with telepaths, UFO sightings, muggings and random violence on many continents and not one but two failed attempts at a PhD -- as symptoms of a disease we don't yet know or side effects of a treatment we haven't yet developed, and that might make this book More Ballard Than Ballard.

I'd be very, very interested to see what people who are unfamiliar with J.G. Ballard make of this book, and how it might color their experience of reading Ballard afterward -- which anyone who does take this up will surely want to do!