Book description
Vermilion Sands is a fully automated desert-resort designed to
fulfil the most exotic whims of the idle rich, but now languishes in
uneasy decay, populated only by forgotten movie queens, solitary
impresarios and the remittance men of the artistic and literary world.
It is a lair for beachcombers, hangers-on and malignant obsessions -
a place where sensitive pigments paint portraits of their mistresses
in a grotesque parody of art; where prima donna plants are programmed
to sing operatic arias; where dial-a-poem computers have replaced
poets; where psychosensitive houses are driven to murder by their
owners' neuroses; and where love and lust, in the hands of jewel-eyed
Jezebels, pall before the stronger pull of evil.
J. G. Ballard was born in 1930 in Shanghai, China. After the attack
on Pearl Harbour his family were interned in a civilian camp. They
returned to England in 1946. In 1956 Ballard's first story was published
in
New Worlds
. His first novel,
The Drowned World
, was published in 1963.
Empire of the Sun
, a novel based on his own experiences in China, was published in 1984
and won the Guardian Fiction Prize, the James Tait Black Award and was
filmed by Steven Spielberg. His novel
Crash
was made into a film by David Cronenberg. J. G. Ballard died in 2009.
