Simon Sellars – författare

The first stage is infection. Next is possession. The terminal stage is simulation.

In the near future, Kalsari Jones is hooked on the Vexworld, a global mixed-reality network accessed through neural implants. As his addiction grows, he is plagued by sentient hallucinations and an urge to strip the flesh from his bones. At his lowest ebb, he must also face his digisexuality, a latent attraction to artificial intelligence.

Seeking answers, he meets Ingram Ravenscroft, a cult leader who claims a treatment. Smitten, Kalsari allows his brain to be rewired, only for the operation to leave him with unwanted telepathic powers. Lost in inner space, Kalsari angers a band of rogue AI who''ve escaped the Vexworld and are seeking refuge in the time-sinks of the fourth dimension.

Battling the shapeshifting bots before they can enslave his mind, he discovers the shocking truth about his virtual obsessions-and Ravenscroft''s hidden role in the story of his life.

An existential odyssey weaving together lived experience and theoretical insight, this startling autobiographical hyperfiction surveys and dissects a world where everything connects and global technological delirium is the norm.

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 1990s 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 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.

An existential odyssey inextricably weaving together lived experience and theoretical insight, this startling autobiographical hyperfiction surveys and dissects a world where everything connects and global technological delirium is the norm—a world become unmistakably Ballardian.