Mindless Ones

Knew it was coming of course, but still quite a blow. Throw a pink gin at an empty swimming pool to honour the greatest British writer of the post-War world.

A more interesting question to me is - 'why aren't we telepathic?'

Ballardian

Channel Ballard

Guardian obit

Random excerpt, selected from Triad/Panther 1979 edition of The Atrocity Exhibition (1969) at 2308 Lat.: 50° 49′ 60 N / Long.: 0° -9′ 0 E.

Locus Solus. Through the dust-covered windscreen she watched him walk along the beach. Despite the heat he had been wandering about by himself for half an hour, as if following an invisible contour inside his head. After their long drive he had stopped for some reason on this isthmusof clinker only a few hundred yards from their apartment. She closed the novel lying on her knees, took out her compact and examined the small ulcer on her lower lip. Exhausted by the sun, the resort was almost deserted – beaches of white pumice, a few bars, apartment blocks in ice-cream colours. She looked up at the shutters, thinking of the sun-blackened bodies sprawled together in the darkness, as inert as the joints of meat on supermarket counters. She closed the compact. At last he was walking back to the car, an odd-shaped stone in one hand. A fine ash like milled bone covered his suit. She placed her arm on the window-sill. Before she could move the hot cellulose stung her skin.