Hacker News Reader

Comment by jhbadger | Hacker News Reader

I like his 1960s disaster novels -- The Drowned World, The Burning World. The Crystal World, about civilization ending and bands of survivors trying to get by. They definitely had an influence on later works, such as George Romero's "Living Dead" films.

View on HN

Absolutely love this trilogy too. The Drowned World was my first proper introduction to Ballard.

I'd always liked the movie Empire of the Sun since I was a kid, but could never quite put my finger on why. One day in 2020 I read the films wikipedia page, started reading more about him as an author and got hooked.

To quote John Gray [1],

>Unlike many others, it wasn't his dystopian vision that gripped my imagination. For me his work was lyrical – an evocation of the beauty that can be gleaned from landscapes of desolation.

1. https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2018/12/john-gray-on-jg...

His book 'The kindness of women' helps to fill in a lot of the biographical context behind 'Empire of the Sun' and many of his other works.

My first read was Kingdom Come (released 2006). It felt like such a great crazy tale that might have taken place in our times (even though it was absurd & fantastic); mall culture & hooliganism & factionalism. It felt like such a a snapshot of Bush II era to me. (Little did I expect what was to happen next in the world! How much we would fall!)

Drowned World was the next thing I picked up, and wow what a damned book! Nueronic time and these people slipping backwards towards it; it's such a wild psychological trip. That speaks so viscerally to the many compacted confused layers inside us, earlier forms baked deep into civilization.

Love The Crystal World.

The film version of Vandermeer's Annihilation owes much to Crystal World, down to using names of several of the characters (Ventress is one I recall).

Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle wrote some great global disaster novels as well. Footfall and Lucifer's Hammer.

I wish Niven had been able to keep writing books on his own. I loved the Known Space books but something happened to him after 1970 that was worse than what happened to Heinlein around then. I don't think the books he wrote w/ Pournelle where anywhere near as good as Neutron Star, World of Ptavvs, etc. His great disaster short story Inconstant Moon dates from that period.

Yeah but Niven's best stories were mostly shorter. (Even Inconstant Moon is a novella.) IMO, Niven and Pournelle were really great complements. Niven wasn't really a great novel writer and Pournelle ended up doing militarist fiction--some of which was OK but not as good as their joint work.

My favorites from this writer

Reply on news.ycombinator.com