To celebrate the release of Chronosis, Keith Tilford and Reza Negarestani join Robin Mackay to talk about their collaboration and the ideas that fuelled the time-twisting plot of the comic. Creative tension and backchannel bickering, cat monks, Boltzmann brains, cosmic body horror, Bertrand Russell the armchair stoner, the Harold Lloyd theory of time-reversal, psychopaths, AGI monkeys, and The Mortiloquist all make an appearance. Music: ‘Dionysus’, by Herman Polsus aka Drew Flieder, and ‘Timeshift’ by Eschaton.

Drawing on his book Alternate Histories and Nineteenth-Century Literature, Ben Carver examines the figures and functions of evolution, isolation, and entanglement in the imaginary Utopias and Uchronias of speculative fiction, and plots some unsuspected paths between early counterfactual histories and the dark underworlds of contemporary conspiracy theory.

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 ...

Channeller of digital contagions Kenji Siratori brings us a Lemurian upload for Schizo Season 2021

This week, we had the great pleasure of being joined by Elvia Wilk, writer and editor, author of Oval (2019) and Death by Landscape, a collection of essays forthcoming this July from Soft Skull Press. We talked about her new book, the pandemic, plants, the weird, LARP, the Web 3.0 and post-nuclear religious fiction!!! Errata corrige: 29:30 Yes, plants do release more oxygen than carbon dioxide.

Compiled by Philip Sanderson and mixed by DJ Huysmans, a mix made to accompany the Ballardian Breakfast Briefing virtual launch event for Applied Ballardianism.

We had the great pleasure of being joined by majuscule music journalist and author Simon Reynolds. In times of “Shock and Awe” we discuss the legacy of CCRU and Mark Fisher (and its neo-reactionary co-option), depressive hedonism and the attention economy, if there are any subversive attributes left to be found in subcultures… and among many other things, we share what still gives us a kick in music nowadays!

Kristen Alvanson’s XYZT is a genre-busting collection of tales probing the complex relationship and cultural differences between the US and Iran, threaded along a speculative science fiction thriller plotline. Much of the novel is based on Alvanson’s years living in Iran, but in XYZT she reworks her experiences into myriad different styles, perspectives and genres ranging from the quotidian to the fabulous. In this interview with the author we talk to her about her time in Iran, the unconventional structure of XYZT, and the common threads between the novel and her work as a visual artist.

Egress is the first book to consider the legacy and work of the writer, cultural critic and cult academic Mark Fisher. Narrated in orbit of his death as experienced by a community of friends and students in 2017, it analyses Fisher’s philosophical trajectory, from his days as a PhD student at the University of Warwick to the development of his unfinished book on Acid Communism. Taking the word “egress” as its starting point — a word used by Fisher in his book The Weird and the Eerie to describe an escape from present circumstances as experiences by the characters in countless examples ...

Omitted from the first printing of Applied Ballardianism for legal reasons, this foreword by Dr. Ricardo Battista sheds some light upon the genesis of this peculiar ‘memoir’ and the fate of its sadly afflicted author.

Jalal Toufic is a thinker whose influence in the Beirut artistic community over the past two decades has been immense—notwithstanding that, as he put it, many, if not all of his books, most of which were published by Forthcoming Books, “continue to be forthcoming even after their publication.” In relation to one of these books, he wondered: “Does not a book titled Forthcoming suggest, ostensibly paradoxically, a second edition?” Here’s the revised edition of Forthcoming, a book first published nearly a decade and a half ago by Atelos press. —Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Anton Vidokle

Headless, an exhilarating murder-mystery by the elusive K. D., probes the sordid secrets and sinister deeds of powerful financiers who use Caribbean firms to conceal their fortunes. The novel begins with workaday author John Barlow agreeing to ghostwrite a novel about secretive tax havens. Barlow assumes the job will be a no-brainer. But then his eccentric employers, Swedish conceptualist artist duo Goldin+Senneby, ask him to investigate Headless Ltd., a shadowy company with possible links to the French philosopher Georges Bataille, known for his obsession with human sacrifice. Barlow travels to Nassau, Bahamas, the glitzy mecca of offshore finance, and begins ...