"Twenty years ago no one could have imagined the effects the internet would have - entire relationships flourish, friendships prosper on the e-mail screen, there's a vast new intimacy and accidental poetry (from the osprey-tracking site to tours round old nuclear silos and the extraordinary aerial trip down the California coastline and a thousand others), not to mention the weirdest porn. The entire human experience seems to unveil itself like the surface of a new planet."

This is an excerpt from an interview with JG Ballard that appeared in the Guardian a few weeks ago. It is always rewarding to read someone who can so deftly and succinctly articulate modern-day truisms such as he does in this interview.

Ballard has shown an amazing prescience for predicting societal trends and even specific events in his writing over the years--this is something I gleaned mainly from this interview as admittedly I have only read one of his novels. My earliest attempts at his books left me cold...he has written a few experimental novels and those being my first choices I didn't make it past the first few chapters.

One book by Ballard that I did finish was High Rise, a darkly humorous dystopian tale laden with indirect metaphors and analogies that apply to the larger world. A story of London high-rise dwellers whose microcosmic and myopic existence in the building they inhabit turns into a literal battle of classes as those at the bottom try to usurp the arrogant snobs who inhabit the upper floors. The passage where anarchy has taken hold and a tenant barbecues an Alsatian on a balcony is particularly memorable.

Originally appeared on Pistonhips