“The series of weapons tests had fused the sand in layers, and the pseudo-geological strata condensed the brief epochs, micro-seconds in duration, of thermonuclear time.”
J.G. Ballard, ‘The Terminal Beach’
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Ballardian.com was a cult website that ran for sixteen years. Its aim: to document the influence of the author J.G. Ballard and the ‘Ballardian’ in everyday life. Now for the first time, the best articles, essays and interviews from Ballardian.com are collected in Thermonuclear Noon, an essential document of a thrilling era.
From the first to last entry, 670 posts (and 646,967 words) were published. The site featured exclusive interviews with Ballard himself, as well as Bruce Sterling, Iain Sinclair, Brigid Marlin, David Pelham, Troy Paiva, Ben Wheatley, Jonathan Weiss, Simon Reynolds, David Britton, Michael Butterworth, Michael Moorcock, Jeannette Baxter, Toby Litt, Geoff Manaugh, John Foxx, David Cronenberg and Solveig Nordlund. The project also excavated a number of archival interviews with Ballard, some of which found their way into Extreme Metaphors, the collection of Ballard interviews co-edited by Simon Sellars, the publisher of Ballardian.com.
In a 2008 review of Ballard’s Miracles of Life, Diane Johnson, novelist and scriptwriter for Kubrick’s The Shining, wrote that Ballard is “now the center of a cult of enthusiasts who comment in the ‘Ballardosphere,’ in books and articles, via the website ballardian.com and elsewhere”.
China Miéville, in a 2010 article on Ballard’s short stories, described how “the word ‘Ballardian’ is now commonplace, enshrined not only in the url of an extensive website of speculative cultural investigation but also the entirely mainstream and eminently respectable Collins English Dictionary.”
At its prime, Ballardian.com existed in a pre-social media era when blogs carried substantial cultural capital. Ballardian, operating in what Sellars termed the ‘Ballardosphere’, communicated and collaborated with well-known blogs including Fisher’s k-punk, Sterling’s Beyond the Beyond and Manaugh’s BLDGBLOG. However, Ballardian was more than a blog (although it began that way and continued to have a blog component). It was an online magazine with a regular publishing schedule and a stellar array of guest contributors.
Contributors to the site included Mark Fisher, Christopher Brown, Andrés Vaccari, Andrew Frost, Benjamin Noys, Amy Ireland, Brian Baker, Cat Hope, Jamie Sherry, Dominika Oramus, Mike Holliday, Damien Love, Mike Bonsall, Rick McGrath, Paul Roth, William Viney, Pippa Tandy, Matteo Pasquinelli, Tim Chapman, Andrew Bishop, Ben Austwick, James Pardey, Brian Baker, Clem Dorbeck, Dan Lockton, Nic Clear, Nicholas Cobb, David Brittain, Paul Williams, Pedro Groppo, David Cunningham, Andrea Simonis, Annik Hovak, Gwyn Richards, James Pardey, Johnny Strike, Jordi Costa, Lyle Hopwood, Umberto Rossi and Rick Poynor.
