The 85th anniversary issue of Weird Tales features our big list of “The 85 Weirdest Storytellers of the Past 85 Years.” We’re breaking it down online, too: one honoree per day, in no particular order, for 85 days!
Stuck on a traffic island, starving in a high-rise, loving in a mangled wreck of flesh and steel, and what’s not to love? J.G. BALLARD (1930– ) was raised in a prison camp and grew up to “want to fuck Ronald Reagan.” His vision is bleak and darkly realistic for all its weirdness. Though much of his fiction mines postmodern culture for satire, his roman a clef novel Empire of the Sun offers something else: a boy trapped in a new world he doesn’t know, after the old one was swept away. Hmm — maybe that’s not so different.
