Sources of the style

The book

Simon Sellars’s Applied Ballardianism is the first title in Urbanomic’s K-Pulp series of theory-fiction. It is a fictionalised memoir of an alternate “Sellars” trying to write a PhD on J. G. Ballard. Sellars’s real thesis stalled, and the book came out of the stall: writing about an alter ego writing the thesis was the way round it. Inside the story, “applied Ballardianism” is the narrator’s own framework, an attempt to live a Ballardian life. Sellars describes it as a severe misreading, and it nearly destroys the narrator. In interviews he has declined to use Ballardianism to explain current politics.

Reviewers describe the narrator’s procedure. Ordinary events are read as coded signs. Sightings, coincidences and paranormal interests count as data. Interpretation confirms itself, because any coincidence can be turned into a pattern. One reviewer calls the book a critical epistemology, a question about what we can know through texts. The fieldwork is physical and strange: a tsunami zone in Tohoku, nuclear test sites in the Northern Marianas, micronations. The reception is split, and one review argues Sellars has misread Ballard. Holagram does not depend on who is right about that.

Ballard’s own materials the book leans on

Inner space. Ballard’s 1962 essay “Which Way to Inner Space?” argues that fiction should explore the Earth and the mind, not Mars: “The only truly alien planet is Earth.”
The world as a fiction. In the introduction to Crash, the prudent way to deal with the external world is to treat it as a fiction, and the one node of reality that remains is inside the head. This is the licence for reading a place like a text, and also the trap.
Invisible literature. Ballard’s term, from around 1970, for the paper of the information age: market-research reports, company house magazines, abstracts, medical textbooks. For a planner this is the planning document: terms of reference, detailed plans, consultation reports, tenders. Now also prompts and model outputs.

What Holagram takes, and what it changes

In the book	Holagram takes	Holagram changes
The failed thesis is the book	A failure log is published with the result. Dead ends count as data.	Stop rules, so a failure does not have to be lived through to count.
An alter ego, “Sellars”, written by Sellars	Author and persona may be split. A synthetic agent can hold the persona.	The split is declared in every entry: who wrote what.
Fiction as the vehicle of inquiry where the academic form fails	Fiction is one of four registers of every entry.	It is labelled as fiction and is never used as evidence.
Everyday life read as coded	The Reading register: strong, even paranoid readings are welcome.	Every reading has a test at another level or by another agent.
Fieldwork as ordeal, the body as instrument	The field work is walked. A passage in Sellars’s book measures space by the time lived in it, so walks are time-stamped.	Fixed blocks and one outside reader who can call a stop.
Ballard’s invisible literature	The planning document is the first source, read as a text with an author and an audience.	Public documents only. No client material.