The Ballard of a Thin Man

In case anyone hasn't got their tickets yet for From Shanghai to Shepperton at UEA this weekend, I'll be giving a short paper on the 'Ballard's Imaginary Communities' panel entitled something like 'Vermilion Sands, Paul Scheerbart and the Ballardian Ideal Suburb'. The gist for this is, to the surprise of nobody, Ballard and Architecture - specifically, on how this works in his Vermilion Sands stories, a series from 1957 to 1970 set in the titular resort, a linear city in the desert populated by the elegantly idle rich, relating this to the work of Scheerbart, a German Wilhelmine proto-SF author and theorist of Glasarchitektur, as well as to Brasilia, Oscar Niemeyer and Lucio Costa's radiant city in the desert, planned and built while Ballard was writing the Vermilion Sands stories. The interesting question being how unlike the High Rise, or Estrella de Mar, Eden-Olympia or the other quintessentially Ballardian tainted utopias, Vermilion Sands actually works. Nobody eats their neighbour's dog, there are no pogroms into the banlieue, civilisation doesn't regress into horrifying atavism: as Ballard himself remarks, 'it is a place I would be happy to live'...

Incidentally: here's Ballard on Michael Powell, from a couple of years ago. I knew it was more important to see T-Men and White Heat than listen to FR Leavis lecturing on Virginia Woolf.