I’m excited to announce that my book, Applied Ballardianism: A Theory of Nothing, will be forthcoming from Urbanomic in late 2017. The publisher’s page for the book is here, and Urbanomic’s blurb is below, as is the first book trailer. I’ll have more news about the back as we inch closer to the pub date.

Excerpts are available at the Applied Ballardianism website, Facebook page and Instagram account.

‘Kick the Dog’: the first book trailer for Applied Ballardianism: A Theory of Nothing.

Applied Ballardianism: A Theory of Nothing

The mediascapes of late capitalism reconfigure erotic responses and trigger primal aggression; under constant surveillance, we occupy simulations of ourselves, private estates on a hyperconnected globe; fictions reprogram reality, memories are rewritten by the future.

Fleeing the excesses of 90s cyberculture, a young researcher sets out to systematically analyse the obsessively reiterated themes of a writer who prophesied the disorienting future we now inhabit. The story of his failure is as disturbingly psychotropic as those of his magus—J.G. Ballard, prophet of the post-postmodern, voluptuary of the car crash, surgeon of the pathological virtualities pulsing beneath the surface of reality.

Plagued by obsessive fears, defeated by the tedium of academia, yet still certain that everything connects to Ballard, his academic thesis collapses into a series of delirious travelogues, deranged speculations and tormented meditations on time, memory, and loss. Abandoning literary interpretation and renouncing all scholarly distance, he finally accepts the deep assignment that has run throughout his entire life, and embarks on a rogue fieldwork project: Applied Ballardianism, a new discipline and a new ideal for living. Only the darkest impulses, the most morbid obsessions, and the most apocalyptic paranoia, can uncover the technological mutations of inner space.

An existential odyssey inextricably weaving together lived experience and theoretical insight, this startling autobiographical hyperfiction surveys and dissects a world where everything connects and global technological delirium is the norm—a world become unmistakably Ballardian.

ORIGINAL EDITION
Paperback
197×130mm

CONTENTS

Part One

1. Kick the Dog
2. Roadkill
3. Purple Skin
4. Unfamiliar Planet
5. Queens of the Cyber Age
6. The War Inside Me
7. Spatial Disorder
8. This Alien Earth
9. Paralipsis
10. See Yourself Going By
11. Threshold Moment
12. Kill the Head and the Body Will Die
13. Tohoku Rising
14. The Man from Morioka
15. Beset by Demons from the West
16. Deep Assignments
17. Dreams of the Weak and Puny
18. Bunker Logic
19. The Virilian Gaze
20. Biomechanoid
21. Replication
22. Time Controller
23. Scar Tissue
24. Cartographies of the Infinite
25. Cubist Dream
26. Untourism

Part Two

27. Reverse Angle
28. New Victims
29. Fugue State
30. Stress Test
31. Time Wars
32. Metanoia
33. Malign Potential
34. Airless and Casino Black
35. Signal Glitch
36. Trip Wires
37. Ballardcraft
38. Black Shadow

Part Three

39. Rocket Fuel
40. Sick Music
41. Dangerous Bends
42. Suicide by Thug
43. Hostile Takeover
44. Applied Ballardianism
45. Roaring Mice
46. Alter Vu
47. Vat-grown
48. Sodium Ecstasy
49. Hangar Three
50. Monoslab
51. Solace in Dystopia
52. Ballardian Seed
53. Fly-blown
54. Kick Me
55. State of Mind

Part Four

56. Towards a Philosophy of Jet Lag
57. Purple Light
58. Photoreality
59. Scalar
60. Emergence
61. Wire Music
62. Memory Hole
63. Project Cancelled
64. Shadowplay
65. James et Jim
66. Negative Space
67. Moebius Strip
68. Sleepy Brain
69. ‘…’
70. Memory Hacker