I'll be making a guest appearance at the Sci-Fi Short Story Club, discussing "The Sound-Sweep" - one of a couple of acutely imaginative tales involving music of the future dreamed up by J.G. Ballard.
The event, hosted by Los Angeles Public Library, is loosely tied to Futuromania - which features a extended essay about the ways in which science fiction writers have grappled with the challenge of imagining the future forms and functions of music. So in addition to "The Sound-Sweep" and Ballard's work, the discussion will encompass the broader subject of the interface between s.f. + music
The book club meets by Zoom, so I can see no reason why - beyond issues of time zone differences - someone who doesn't live in LA could attend, if they fancied.
This free event takes place at 6 pm PDT, on Wednesday July 17th.
Reading J.G.'s 1960 story in advance is helpful if you wish to participate in the discussion, but not essential.
I really enjoyed writing the companion essay to Sandro Moiso's vintage interview with J.G. Ballard, as reproduced in All That Mattered Was Sensation, out now on Krisis Publishing. This attractive and portably petite volume contains the text in both Italian and English.
"Prophet of the Present," the title of my essay, comes out as "Profeta del presente" in Italian - nicely preserving the alliteration.
If you are wondering about the "James Ballard" bit - it seems that J.G.'s books were published under that name in Italy, or even as James G. Ballard. When I saw that, I thought I'd possibly stumbled upon a national quirk of Italian publishing - an aversion to the old-school Anglo-American style of impersonal initials in literary nomenclature, as in E.M. Forster or G.K. Chesterton. But as far as I can tell, D.H. Lawrence is D.H. Lawrence in Italy, not David Herbert Lawrence or Dave Lawrence.
Something else in Italy - out in May, on Minimum Fax, a collection of my electronic music writings:
"Sogni Elettronici," in case you were wondering, means "Electronic Dreams"
German and Japanese editions - slightly different contents - due 2021.
Anglosphere versions - probably not. I have other plans for some of the material. But who knows...
Now I think about it, there's a third thing in Italy happening on the books front. Minimum Fax are publishing the massive Mark Fisher K-Punk anthology in translation. Because texts typically get longer in Italian, they are breaking up the colossus into two volumes. The first installment, Il nostro desiderio è senza nome - which translates as Our Desire is Nameless - has just come out. This first chunk of the collection also contains my prefazione from the Repeater edition - and this foreword is shortly to be extracted in the newspaper Il Tascabile.
How cool - and circular - that the subtitle of Il Nostro Desiderio is Scritti Polittici.
"Something in Italy" indeed... in this case it's helping keep Mark's ideas alive
