Applied Ballardianism is no dry scholarly study of the bard of Shepperton. This brilliantly written genre mashup is ostensibly a memoir of the author’s obsession and his attempt to write a doctoral thesis on his idol.
A lifelong obsession with Ballard’s peculiar explorations of terrestrial existence lead to Simon Sellars’s imagined interdimensional connection with the author, a sacred bond that would never be formally christened save for one graceless photograph taken at a London Q&A. The first in UK publisher Urbanomic’s new series 'K-Pulp: Adventures in Theory-Fiction,' the Australian Sellars’s new genre-curious book Applied Ballardianism: Memoir from a Parallel Universe is a series of descents 'into the mirror world,' a travelogue in which all roads lead to Ballard ... Applied Ballardianism is a book about our private islands, inexplicably shored by the texts that never leave us.
Applied Ballardianism is an almost apocalyptic novel, occupied by paranoiacs, uncaring machines, technological ghosts, dream realities, micronations, and mysterious thugs. The unnamed protagonist...lives in a world haunted by the life and work of J.G. Ballard. Applied Ballardianism walks the line between theory and fiction. Sellars writes with the understanding that anything that happens to him can be understood through what Ballard has written. The author becomes the prophet, the writer of holy writ. His novels and short stories become sacred tomes, their contents divine ... Sellars’ novel reveals the strings behind the curtain, everything that they’re connected to, and all of the paths that they have taken.
Sellars is the co-editor of 2012’s Extreme Metaphors, a collection of interviews with Ballard which represents one of the most significant and useful resources for Ballard scholars and enthusiasts ... Applied Ballardianism begins, and fitfully continues, as a book about writing a PhD thesis, from first enthusiasms to ultimate failures: ‘I can trace my decline. That is one of the bittersweet benefits of survival’ ... This is a book of critical epistemology, of questioning what it is we know, what it is we can know, about and through literary texts. The refracted fluorescence of our own critical passions and compulsions visits us outlandishly, like lights in the sky.
