Show Notes
This week we’ll see yet another man dragged backward through time, just like those in the Drowned & Crystal Worlds, into a violent subtropical dream, into landscapes so baroque and savage as to defy belief. The man this time, though, is Ballard himself, and the world is our own. The real world of his un-imagined past, transformed by war, is every bit as outlandish, every bit as science-fictional as his invented futures. In the literature of the uncanny, Weird War has a long and extr...
More from Uncanny Canon
Once there was a bright, adventurous young English boy who lived in an exotic, garish land with his wealthy, inattentive parents. Though he saw marvels & terrors through the windows of his father’s sleek black car, he lived an ordered & untroubled life. Then one day war came to Shanghai, and he was taken abruptly from the world of the familiar and dropped into a dark mirror realm of strange marvels and fearsome horrors: Lunghua Internment Camp. For three years he lived an indisputably...
“House Taken Over” is the bare skeleton of a haunted house story, every scrap of irrelevant detail flensed away. Like Ballard’s “Garden of Time” it’s a tale of class struggle & the terrifying rise of the proletariat as seen by the comfortable rich. Like Camus’s “La Peste”, it’s a fable about the insidious approach of fascism and the plight of millions of war refugees. But most of all it’s completely and terrifyingly uncanny, sharing DNA with Borges and Lovecraft, with Kafka’s “The Burrow”...