Four Week Class Taught Online Via Zoom
Sundays, July 5 - 26, 2026
1:00 - 2:30pm ET (NYC Time)
$150 Paid Patreon Members / $175 General Admission
PLEASE NOTE: Classes will be recorded and archived for students who cannot make that time
Join author and occultist Carl Abrahamsson for a deep dive into the life and work of author J. G. Ballard, the great cartographer of late modernity: the writer who realized that the true science fiction of our age is the motorway, the high‑rise, the airport lounge and the shopping mall.
We will begin our journey in wartime Shanghai and the Lunghua internment camp, reading Empire of the Sun as the hidden blueprint for Ballard’s imagination: the collapse of empire, the allure of machines, catastrophe as both trauma and strange liberation. From there we enter his “inner space” period — the flooded and burning worlds of The Drowned World, The Drought and The Crystal World — and the fragmented media‑lab of The Atrocity Exhibition, where climate, architecture and the unconscious fuse into a single hallucinatory landscape.
The second half of the course will follow Ballard’s ideas into ever more recognizable spaces. Crash and High‑Rise relocate his apocalypses to West London’s motorways and luxury towers; Concrete Island and The Unlimited Dream Company transform slip roads and suburbs into zones of revelation. We will his turn to the corporate enclave and the leisure resort in Cocaine Nights and Super‑Cannes, where crime becomes social glue for bored elites, and finally to the gated developments and retail parks of Millennium People and Kingdom Come, where middle‑class revolt and “mall‑fascism” emerge from consumer culture itself.
Throughout, we will set Ballard against the shifting backdrops of decolonization, the Cold War, the New Wave in Science Fiction, Thatcherism and neoliberal globalization. We we also trace his impact on underground and industrial culture, RE/Search, post‑punk and contemporary media, which inspired bands like Throbbing Gristle and Joy Division. By the classes end, the term “Ballardian” will no longer be just a stylish adjective, but a way of seeing. You will come away with a sharper sense of how cars, towers, screens and malls quietly script our desires — and why Ballard remains one of the most unnervingly accurate guides to the world we already live in.
Carl Abrahamsson is the author of 20+ books, many of which deal with his many decades of working with occulture and magic. He is also the editor and publisher of the occultural journal ”The Fenris Wolf” (1989-present day). He lives with his wife, American psychoanalyst Vanessa Sinclair, in Vimmerby, Sweden.
Four Week Class Taught Online Via Zoom
Sundays, July 5 - 26, 2026
1:00 - 2:30pm ET (NYC Time)
$150 Paid Patreon Members / $175 General Admission
PLEASE NOTE: Classes will be recorded and archived for students who cannot make that time
Join author and occultist Carl Abrahamsson for a deep dive into the life and work of author J. G. Ballard, the great cartographer of late modernity: the writer who realized that the true science fiction of our age is the motorway, the high‑rise, the airport lounge and the shopping mall.
We will begin our journey in wartime Shanghai and the Lunghua internment camp, reading Empire of the Sun as the hidden blueprint for Ballard’s imagination: the collapse of empire, the allure of machines, catastrophe as both trauma and strange liberation. From there we enter his “inner space” period — the flooded and burning worlds of The Drowned World, The Drought and The Crystal World — and the fragmented media‑lab of The Atrocity Exhibition, where climate, architecture and the unconscious fuse into a single hallucinatory landscape.
The second half of the course will follow Ballard’s ideas into ever more recognizable spaces. Crash and High‑Rise relocate his apocalypses to West London’s motorways and luxury towers; Concrete Island and The Unlimited Dream Company transform slip roads and suburbs into zones of revelation. We will his turn to the corporate enclave and the leisure resort in Cocaine Nights and Super‑Cannes, where crime becomes social glue for bored elites, and finally to the gated developments and retail parks of Millennium People and Kingdom Come, where middle‑class revolt and “mall‑fascism” emerge from consumer culture itself.
Throughout, we will set Ballard against the shifting backdrops of decolonization, the Cold War, the New Wave in Science Fiction, Thatcherism and neoliberal globalization. We we also trace his impact on underground and industrial culture, RE/Search, post‑punk and contemporary media, which inspired bands like Throbbing Gristle and Joy Division. By the classes end, the term “Ballardian” will no longer be just a stylish adjective, but a way of seeing. You will come away with a sharper sense of how cars, towers, screens and malls quietly script our desires — and why Ballard remains one of the most unnervingly accurate guides to the world we already live in.
Carl Abrahamsson is the author of 20+ books, many of which deal with his many decades of working with occulture and magic. He is also the editor and publisher of the occultural journal ”The Fenris Wolf” (1989-present day). He lives with his wife, American psychoanalyst Vanessa Sinclair, in Vimmerby, Sweden.
