Concrete Island Book
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Concrete Island
A chilling novel about our modern world, from the author of Empire of the Sun and Crash.
Concrete Island
A wealthy architect becomes a modern-day Robinson Crusoe in this chilling, twisted novel by the author of Empire of the Sun and High-Rise. Robert Maitland, a thirty-five-year-old architect, is driving home from his London offices when a blowout sends his speeding Jaguar hurtling out of control. After smashing through a temporary barrier, he finds himself dazed and disoriented on a traffic island below three converging motorways. But when he tries to climb the embankment or flag down a passing car for help, it proves impossible—and he finds himself imprisoned on the concrete island. Maitland must survive using only what he can find in his crashed car. As in all J.G. Ballard's best work, Concrete Island provides an unnerving study of our modern lives and world. With his alienating, "Ballardian" view of normal events, this is a unique novel from one of the twentieth century's finest writers. Praise for Concrete Island "A vision in both style and substance. The literary equivalent of Salvador Dalí or Max Ernst." — The Washington Post Book World "This is the excellent stuff of classic castaway adventure, stiffened here by contemporary overtones that call into question social values." — San Francisco Chronicle
Dangerous Visions and New Worlds
Much has been written about the “long Sixties,” the era of the late 1950s through the early 1970s. It was a period of major social change, most graphically illustrated by the emergence of liberatory and resistance movements focused on inequalities of class, race, gender, sexuality, and beyond, whose challenge represented a major shock to the political and social status quo. With its focus on speculation, alternate worlds and the future, science fiction became an ideal vessel for this upsurge of radical protest. Dangerous Visions and New Worlds: Radical Science Fiction, 1950 to 1985 details, celebrates, and evaluates how science fiction novels and authors depicted, interacted with, and were inspired by these cultural and political movements in America and Great Britain. It starts with progressive authors who rose to prominence in the conservative 1950s, challenging the so-called Golden Age of science fiction and its linear narratives of technological breakthroughs and space-conquering male heroes. The book then moves through the 1960s, when writers, including those in what has been termed the New Wave, shattered existing writing conventions and incorporated contemporary themes such as modern mass media culture, corporate control, growing state surveillance, the Vietnam War, and rising currents of counterculture, ecological awareness, feminism, sexual liberation, and Black Power. The 1970s, when the genre reflected the end of various dreams of the long Sixties and the faltering of the postwar boom, is also explored along with the first half of the 1980s, which gave rise to new subgenres, such as cyberpunk. Dangerous Visions and New Worlds contains over twenty chapters written by contemporary authors and critics, and hundreds of full-color cover images, including thirteen thematically organised cover selections. New perspectives on key novels and authors, such as Octavia Butler, Ursula K. Le Guin, Philip K. Dick, John Wyndham, Samuel Delany, J.G. Ballard, John Brunner, Judith Merril, Barry Malzberg, Joanna Russ, and many others are presented alongside excavations of topics, works, and writers who have been largely forgotten or undeservedly ignored.