My Virtual Dream of Flying to Marker Island: An Interview with Simon Sellars by Brendan C. Byrne
SIMON SELLARS: In June 2018, Urbanomic published my work of ‘theory-fiction’, Applied Ballardianism: Memoir from a Parallel Universe. This so-called ‘novel’ is about a failed academic, a paranoid, conspiratorial and suicidal junior scholar obsessed with the work of the English novelist J.G. Ballard. The publication marked the end of my own decades-long obsession with Ballard. Applied Ballardianism is sort of a novel, sort of a memoir, sort of a biography of Ballard, sort of a thesis on Ballardian themes (some passages are lifted directly from my unpublished PhD on Ballard). I don’t really know what it is, but as I have recounted elsewhere, I feel that with the publication of Applied Ballardianism, I can now put that stage of my life to rest and write about something else. Old age. Retirement. Gardening. Anything.
I have been very pleased with the spread of reviews Applied Ballardianism has received, including this landmark writeup in The Guardian. I’ve also done a few interviews to promote the book, but there was always one that got away, and that was the review/interview conducted with me by a writer I admire, the New York-based Brendan C. Byrne. In fact, Brendan’s interview was the very first I did for the book, and was supposed to be published on Rhizome, but for some reason it never appeared. Anyway, almost a year and a half on (can it really be that long since my book was published?), and with still no sign of it appearing on Rhizome, I pleaded with Brendan to let me publish the raw interview transcript here. He relented, and the transcript is below, alongside Brendan’s original notes.
But first, some backstory. In Applied Ballardianism, there is a chapter that takes place in the virtual reality sim, Second Life. It’s all part of the narrator’s fixation on sampling various aspects of unreality. So I cajoled Brendan into doing the actual interview in Second Life, using the chat function for questions and answers. Hilarity ensued.
We have retained the transcript as is, with mistakes left in, to highlight the spontaneous weirdness of Second Life and also to increase the laffs.
Thanks very much, Brendan C. Byrne, for permission to publish the transcript. Over to you…
BRENDAN C. BYRNE: I had hopes to do a wide-ranging interview with the Melbourne-based author Simon Sellars on the English novelist J.G. Ballard’s concept of “psychotic culture” becoming the norm post-2016. Sellars is the proprietor of Ballardian.com, a repository for Ballard disjecta and touchstone for theory/SFheads especially during the late aughts and early 2010s, and extruded his latest book Applied Ballardianism in the summer of 2018. (He is also the co-editor of Extreme Metaphors: Interviews with J.G. Ballard 1967–2008, published by Fourth Estate). Applied Ballardianism was published by the Cornwall-based Urbanomic, also the home of Yuk Hui, Reza Negarestani and Nick Land.
Applied Ballardianism is an admixture both smooth and scouring, neither falling into the un-neat categories of auto- or theory-fiction. It contains personal history, detailed explication of Ballardian texts and themes, French theory as fever dream and detours into the archives of psychotic culture, including David Cronenberg, Mad Max and Michel Houellebecq. In 2016, I read a draft in manuscript.
Sellars responded to my interview request by suggesting we meet in Second Life, the once-popular online world, now mostly abandoned. Sellars describes Second Life’s creators’ aims in Applied Ballardianism as “to develop a cyberpunk-style ‘metaverse’ where users could interact, build worlds, conduct business, communicate and socialise without the attendant hassle of ‘meatspace’. Alas, he writes, “Second Life…[replicated] the same political schisms, the same slavery to consumer goods, the same bad blood and intolerance between people who would never see eye to eye.”
All of which sounded quite appropriate, so I agreed. However, the strange environs and the time delays of the chat function led to my extremely specific, worked-to-death questions falling flat and being left mostly unanswered. The interview, however, took on a strange life of its own.
After some newbie fumblings with Second Life, I managed to create an avatar that didn’t look like it was pulled from the cover of a forgotten mid-aughts urban fantasy novel. It did, however, look like a bad caricature of a Brooklyn huppie and came with the embarrassing habit of crossing its arms and staring into the distance as if horribly bored. I named it “BrendanBrendanThing”, after an Applied Ballardianism dream scene in which Oprah “referred to her televisual persona as the ‘Oprah-Oprah Thing’ and marked it as distinct from her real self, asking the audience, ‘Why would you confuse it with me?’”
Sellars and I had arranged to meet at Ouvroir, the digital archipelago built by Chris Marker, the French filmmaker known for La Jetée, Sans Soleil and A Grin Without A Cat. Marker is another touchstone for Sellars, mainly for what he calls Ballard and Marker’s shared “question of how to escape or cheat time”. I found Sellars operating under the moniker “markerian” (the name of his narrator’s Second Life guide) and holding a staff shaped like a snake. As in Applied Ballardianism, “We were deposited on a mountain made from pictures of Guillaume, Marker’s cat and muse….We followed the signs to a film museum that housed artefacts and ephemera from Maker and other directors…”
BrendanBrendanThing: what the fuck is that staff?
markerian: hahah, some snake i found
markerian: some weird avatar took over my body and i dont know how to get rid of it
BrendanBrendanThing: hahaha
markerian: but it let me keep my chris marker t shirt
markerian: how weird is second life though? why does it still exist? everywhere i go there is no one around… except in the sex dungeons
BrendanBrendanThing: okay, so should we call the narrator of APPLIED BALLARDIANISM Simon-Simon Thing?
markerian: he doesnt have a name… he cant be named
markerian: haha i just started walking for no reason!
markerian: i think its this ghost avatar
BrendanBrendanThing: i think it’s interesting how much you write about marker, since he’s extremely different, politically and aesthetically, than Ballard. although I guess a Ballardian Second Life planet would be untenable.
BrendanBrendanThing: carcrash world
markerian: for me the key marker touchstones are sans soleil and la jetee… and they are pure inner space
markerian: early ballard is all about time, memory and inner space
markerian: tarkovsky! i love this big photo of tarkovsky
BCB: Already my questions weren’t landing. In Applied Ballardianism, Sellars describes himself as a “casuality of the information age” and self-diagnoses himself with some kind of terminal digital-ADD, but I began to wonder if choosing this moment to point out the Giant Tarkovsky that appears in Ouvroir wasn’t an intentional attempt to distract from the task at hand.
I remembered what Sellars had written in Applied Ballardianism: “In many of [Ballard]’s early stories… clock time is advanced as an arbitrary, manmade construct that imposes order and control on the liberating chaos of the subconscious”, whereas in a trilogy of Ballard’s astronaut stories in the 80s, Sellars writes that “to inhabit stopped time is to participate in an explicit act of rebellion”. He goes on to contrast Marker’s message of hopelessness in La Jetée with Ballard’s message of resistance (not a trope often assigned to the author by most of his interpreters.)
BrendanBrendanThing: you know Nick Land is obsessed with time travel now
BrendanBrendanThing: the character arc vastly resembles Nick Land’s real trajectory
BrendanBrendanThing: An academic taken over by their subject
BrendanBrendanThing: Like Land slowly became a character in a Lovecraft story, your narrator becomes a character in a Ballard story, except cursed with the knowledge of the narrative
markerian: yes very much so. Robin Mackay, Urbanomic’s director, wrote an essay about his memories of a crazed Land staying up late to decipher cryptic symbols
markerian: it stayed with me and fed into the chapter where my narrator tries to connect similes in ballard
BCB: As Sellars writes, “Ballard is renowned for his similes, detonating them constantly, carpet-bombing the text to add layers of unreality… The text builds a secondary mental image that gradually overwhelms the primary structure.” Toward the end of his spiral, the narrator of Applied Ballardianism tries to use the Burroughsian/Gysian cut-up method to string Ballard’s similes together into a massive, mad structure.
A former professor at Warwick University, Land, after a period of tumultous output in the ’90s (which included [re]inventing both theory-fiction and accelerationism with Cybernetic Culture Research Unit [CCRU]), disappeared, turning up in Shanghai and cheerleading the Neo-Reactionary movement online. At Warwick, Mackay, along with Mark Fisher, Hari Kunzru and others, were involved in his orbit.
markerian: so when robin said he wanted to publish my book, it was perfect. also, when i was in my 20s i was really into some early jungle breakbeat stuff that i only found put later was made by CCRU and the crew that made the tracks included mark fisher and steve “kode9” goodman
BrendanBrendanThing: Urbanomic has become sort of a clearing house for performance artists neo-cultural self-terrorizers
markerian: yes it is a vortex rather than a publishing house…
markerian: this place is very distracting by the way. we are trying to be serious, right?
BrendanBrendanThing: it’s cool to think about marker doing all this shit just because he wanted to
markerian: yes, how incredible is that? and that amazing dubai video….
BCB: Here Sellars is referring to the 2010 Marker short film “Stopover in Dubai”, which details the events around the assassination of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, the chief of logistics and weapons procurement for Hamas. Apparently Marker used the Gulf News TV documentary, composed exclusively of CCTV footage, whole, adding sections of a Kronos Quartet piece. As Sellars writes in Applied Ballardianism, it was “published with no fanfare or advanced notice, and for a long time no one knew if it was authentic or a hoax,” which was symptomatic of Marker’s late period. (The details around the film remain difficult to verify.)
markerian: in a way i aspire to what Marker did with that… the anonymous release of uneasy artefacts… i did instagram stuff quietly about AB themes for years before the book got done… and in a way i will continue to mine this terrain until i die… i used to do little vines that no one watched also
BrendanBrendanThing: well you’ve always maintained that any online presence or art is ephemeral. like your your occasional threat to nuke the blog from orbit
markerian: ballardian.com
BrendanBrendanThing: yes
markerian: it became a millstone
BrendanBrendanThing: holy shit! i just went there. and it’s gone.
BrendanBrendanThing: there’s just the ad for your book
markerian: haha
BrendanBrendanThing: i had no idea
BCB: The blog components of ballardian.com have, as of this writing, been restored. I’m not entirely sure if Sellars dropped them for the giant book ad, had taken them down previously, or did it just to fuck with me. (The blog was a key point in my education, both in theory and SF, and my first critical piece was originally submitted to it, though I’m unsure if Sellars knows/remembers this.)
markerian: i have been thinking about and writing about ballard for around 25 years now.
markerian: there are parts in my book that i wrote as a first draft of my thesis in 1996.
markerian: my book was the end to my life as a critic of ballard
BrendanBrendanThing: but now maybe not
markerian: what do you mean
BrendanBrendanThing: well, you said you’ll be mining this stuff till you die just now
markerian: yes, i mean AB themes… psychosis of surveillance… pervert of the info age… not as a ballard critic
BCB: The framing of Applied Ballardianism is of personal dissolution: academic failure, the dissolution of consensual reality, a destructive love affair, all presented as inexorable effects of a fractured personality’s deep engagement with Ballard. By the end of the book, the unnamed narrator is using his position as clerk in a big box store to choreograph patron brawls. Having extensively interacted with Sellars’ digital persona, and finding it/him more or less stable, I’d assumed this was a fictional amplification, close to the kind Ballard deployed in his 1984 fiction-as-autobiography Empire of the Sun (where the protagonist is “Jamie Graham”). Sellars’ narrator is (especially) obsessed with the Ballard quote, “Deep assignments run through all our lives; there are no coincidences,” which is physically manifested in the text by a series of street lights winking out as he passes under them.
BrendanBrendanThing: One of the central discussions you engage in is authorial identity, esp. how it relates to Ballard
BrendanBrendanThing: But the exaggeration of the narrator is much closer to what, say, Hunter S. Thompson does, rather than Ballard
markerian: in what way
BrendanBrendanThing: well HST had an exaggerated narrator who shared his biography but whose behaviour was extreme
BrendanBrendanThing: Ballard may have used his own name in his fiction, but he wasn’t attempting the same kind of performance art
markerian: but the narrator of Crash is called “James Ballard”…
markerian: and he wants to fuck machines
BrendanBrendanThing: just nobody ever confused the Ballard of CRASH for the real Ballard. I kept wondering how much of your life made it into AB
markerian: all of it. except for the ending of course
BrendanBrendanThing: no shit
BrendanBrendanThing: even the violence?
markerian: yes. except the violence in the store… and the jail time… all the rest though
BrendanBrendanThing: fucking hell dude
markerian: even the UFOs and the street lights. i have no shame in admitting any of this
BrendanBrendanThing: but then do you seriously believe your narrator’s self-dismissal: “not well-read enough to be an intellectual, too disconnected from reality to be a cultural commentator, too absorbed in the familiar to be a philosopher”?
markerian: yes thats how i view myself. i am not well read. and that quote from my book is really the heart of it…
markerian: because its about someone who is too pulled apart by media, by sensory bombardment and who just cannot think straight to form anything coherent…
markerian: to be well read, you have to concentrate! and this culture does not allow it
BrendanBrendanThing: it’s hard to keep track of the number of your narrator’s lowest points. they keep coming
BrendanBrendanThing: but this makes sense
BrendanBrendanThing: they don’t fit a neat narrative, since they are real
BCB: Later, while perusing my correspondence with Sellars, I found that he first described Applied Ballardianism to me, years ago, while he was writing it, as “a novel, or perhaps an essay-novel”. There are also slight inconsistencies between the book and reality. Sellars’ narrator is frustrated in his attempts to visit the micronation of Sealand (an exchange ending, as usual, in casual violence). In “real life”, however, Sellars both visited and wrote about Sealand. Other incidents in Applied Ballardianism, such as the friendship with the scarred Philip, who’s shooting a documentary on Melbourne’s psychotic car culture, closely mirror Ballard’s work (in this case the homoerotic relationship with Vaughan in Crash). Sellars would, no doubt, explain this via “deep assignments”.
Seeking stimulation, Sellars suggested we teleport elsewhere on Second Life’s abandoned island-world…
markerian: so are you getting what you need? is this too distracting?
BrendanBrendanThing: no this is cool. is this just an abandoned power station someone made?
markerian: i dont know what it is!
markerian: true to the cliche, i am obsessed by power stations and electricity lines so i just typed that in
BCB: Almost immediately, we stumbled into a basement room full of endlessly generating spiders, some kind of pulsing organic aperture, the rotting carcass of a tremendous dog-thing, and a Lovecraftian tentacle-monster. Immediately, I wondered if this was indeed the coincidence that Sellars claimed. Applied Ballardianism detours into the Lovecraftian (not the first connection one would make) when the narrator, as part of his travel-writer career, attempts to travel to the Pohnpeian city of Nan Madol, Lovecraft’s supposed model for the sunken city of R’lyeh: the “nightmare corpse-city was built in measureless eons behind history by the vast, loathsome shapes that seeped down from the darks stars.” (Sellars and Mackay would later hold a book launch event at said power station.)
markerian: help!!
markerian: brown slime!!!
BrendanBrendanThing: did you take me to lovecraft land?
markerian: oh wow this is crazy
BrendanBrendanThing: more beautiful, amazing questions…
BrendanBrendanThing: do you think Ballard is widely misread?
BrendanBrendanThing: He is neither a reactionary nor an accelerationist, and certainly not a Marxian techno-determinist, and his central thesis, that technology stripping the layers of civilization from the Overdeveloped World and revealing the savage therein, has a lot of extremely unpopular notions of “civilization” and “savagery” encoded in it
BrendanBrendanThing: but people seem to be fine with “HIGH RISE is about capitalism”
markerian: oh yes you are exactly right, and that is precisely what interests me, that he can be claimed by so many different ideologies
markerian: at one point he was even accused of being a right winger by that charming man rod liddle
markerian: i find that fascinating, that one writer is so resistant to one authorial truth…
markerian: in a way that is his greatest achievement…
markerian: how do we activate cthulhu in here by the way?
BrendanBrendanThing: seems like it’s already partly done. a failed summoning
markerian: but you are asking the wrong person in any case
BrendanBrendanThing: hahaha why
markerian: because i guess the point of my book is really to throw my hands up in the air and admit that i am no authority on ballard
markerian: and that i find him confounding in a way that i can’t really explain…
BrendanBrendanThing: which, coming from someone who knows more about Ballard than most people alive, is pretty telling
markerian: see thats not really true…
markerian: its an illusion
markerian: yes i did ballardian.com but i havent updated it in three years
markerian: others have published more on him, and yet he has virally infected me
BrendanBrendanThing: exactly! you have lived a more Ballardian life than Ballard academics
markerian: and that comes down to obsession, not critical analysis or academic rigour or reading him more than others…
BCB: Soon bored of the unending eldritch spawning, we teleported to yet another location chosen by Sellars, supposedly at random. This adult clubland, some kind of island with dungeons, refused to allow me to land due to my content settings. While I tried to adjust them, Sellars approached the few people he found, but they ran from him. He pursued. Teleporting in, I was unable to find him and ended up flying around an empty landscape which seemed to self-replicate under me. Despite the fact that we were still communicating via chat, our inability to be face to face led to communication breakdown. The usable pieces below were recorded while I was flying eternally over a sludge-like sea, knowing that searching for my interviewee any further was pointless.
BrendanBrendanThing: Other Ballard quotes, however, like “fascism is the form consumerism takes when it opts for elective madness”, which you spin out into the idea that a brand could head a dictatorship, seem to seize presciently on our current impasse
markerian: yes ok, i guess i do see him as prescient
BrendanBrendanThing: the book was written before the 2016 US election & Brexit, right?
markerian: yes, because i was actually rewriting it up until May 2018
BrendanBrendanThing: well the entire book, as a document of psychotic culture, certainly feels like now
markerian: i feel like this culture sent me mad
markerian :and also i think the scars of doing a phd never fade…
markerian: it is such a lonely and isolating process, and especially so when you are in a discipline that no one cares about or values
BrendanBrendanThing: do you think writing and publishing the book have allowed you some ability to say “that’s the end of that”?
markerian: i guess so, i mean i thought i would…
markerian: but in many ways i still see myself as a failed academic…
markerian: and judge myself because of it
markerian: but if i’d stuck with it i’d never have produced applied ballardianism
BrendanBrendanThing: you do lard your text with Ballardian cadences, although you do not attempt to directly mimic his style, outside of the similes, which you describe as building “a secondary mental image that gradually overwhelms the primary structure”
markerian: see that’s strange! i never knew i was doing that until a few people pointed it out when they read the manuscript, like how you have just done…
markerian: and then i realised that ballard was truly a virus that had entered my body
BrendanBrendanThing: that’s bizarre
markerian: the whole act of writing this thing has been truly the most bizarre experience of my life…
markerian: as robin can attest, as he was on the receiving end of several unhinged emails from me about where this would all land
BrendanBrendanThing: reading it, I was thinking the readership would consist of those interested in Ballard
BrendanBrendanThing: and those interested in autofiction, as I assumed you were writing fiction about your own life
markerian: what is “autofiction”
BrendanBrendanThing: kind of the latest iteration of authors who writing heavily fictionalized autobiography
BrendanBrendanThing: like Knaausgaard
BrendanBrendanThing: Ben Lerner
BrendanBrendanThing: Sheila Heiti, Tao Lin
markerian: its fascinating to me that this book fits in with all of that… there is something in the air and somehow i was among it….
markerian: i think its because we all live highly fictionalised lives…. all buried under layers of artifice….
markerian: or lives are lived like we are inside a novel, and then it all comes back to ballard’s prescience again, when he said… let me find the quote…
“In the past we have always assumed that the external world around us has represented reality, however confusing or uncertain, and that the inner world of our minds, its dreams, hopes, ambitions, represented the realm of fantasy and the imagination. These roles, it seems to me, have been reversed. The most prudent and effective method of dealing with the world around us is to assume that it is a complete fiction — conversely, the one small node of reality left to us is inside our own heads.” — Ballard
markerian: that could also be a ringing endorsement of conspiracy theory!
BrendanBrendanThing: um somehow I’m back on ouvroir
BrendanBrendanThing: i think i got kicked out of the other place for being underage?
BrendanBrendanThing: ok am back
markerian: haha i am in Ouvroir now!
BrendanBrendanThing: goddamit
BrendanBrendanThing: now it won’t let me go back to Ouvroir
markerian: hahaha
markerian: i’ll go back to you
BrendanBrendanThing: hey what’s up
BrendanBrendanThing: you are standing on me
markerian: can you hear that blade runner “off world colonies” type voice?
BrendanBrendanThing: no
BrendanBrendanThing: but my hearing is really bad
markerian: mine too
BrendanBrendanThing: we’d both be fucked if the apocalypse truly came
markerian: yes, and i wear glasses…
markerian: i am terrified that i would break them in the post apocalypse and be picked off by cannibals who i cant even see…
markerian: i have actually had this fear since i was a kid and first needed glasses
BrendanBrendanThing: wow the sun is going down on Sex Island
markerian: here’s a story to end with
markerian: as you know, right, in my book, the narrator suffers from an occult phenomenon known as “streetlight interference”
markerian: whenever he walks under this one streetlight in his street, his chaotic brainwaves turn it off
markerian: and then when he walks away it turns back on. this is a documented phenomenon, you can google it…
markerian: anyway in the book it ties together pretty much the entire narrative, and the streetlight as a symbol of his madness is even portrayed on the front cover
markerian: anyway…
markerian: the day i sent the final manuscript to robin….
markerian: i was walking home at night, when i passed under a streetlight, and it went out as i passed under it…
markerian: as i walked away, it turned back on…
markerian: i did it two more times and the same thing happened…
markerian: i cant explain it
markerian: “Deep assignments run through all our lives. There are no coincidences”.
— Interview by Brendan C. Byrne, 2018/2019
Applied Ballardianism: Memoir from a Parallel Universe
Written by Simon Sellars.
Published by Urbanomic.
Distributed via The MIT Press.
Available from:
► Urbanomic
► Amazon UK
► Amazon US
► Amazon Aus
► Book Depository
► Waterstones
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: cult author 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 fears, defeated by the tedium of academia, yet still certain that everything connects to Ballard, his academic thesis collapses into a series of delirious travelogues, deranged speculations and tormented meditations on time, memory, and loss.
Abandoning literary interpretation and renouncing all scholarly distance, he finally accepts the deep assignment that has run throughout his entire life, and embarks on a rogue fieldwork project: Applied Ballardianism, a new discipline and a new ideal for living.
Only the darkest impulses, the most morbid obsessions and the most apocalyptic paranoia can uncover the technological mutations of inner space.
