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Extreme Metaphors
Simon Sellars

J. G. Ballard

Dan O’Hara


J.G. Ballard was a literary giant. His novels were unique and surprising. To the journalists and admirers who sought him out, Ballard was the ‘seer of Shepperton’; his home the vantage from which he observed the rising suburban tide, part of a changing society captured and second-guessed so plausibly in his fiction.Such acuity was not exclusive to his novels and, as this book reminds us, Ballard’s restive intelligence sharpened itself in dialogue. He entertained many with insights into the world as he saw it, and speculated, often correctly, about its future. Some of these observations earned Ballard an oracular reputation, and continue to yield an uncannily accurate commentary today.Now, for the first time, ‘Extreme Metaphors’ collects the finest interviews of his career. Conversations with cultural figureheads such as Will Self, Jon Savage, Iain Sinclair and John Gray, and collaborators like David Cronenberg, are a reminder of his wit and humanity, testament to Ballard’s profound worldliness as much as his otherworldly imagination. This collection is an indispensable tribute to one of recent history’s most incisive and original thinkers.


















Contents

Cover (#u7c64a913-208b-54de-97a3-dbf1f622d32f)

Title Page (#uf2710887-1b32-5512-9648-4071a91a9134)

Simon Sellars – Introduction: A Launchpad for Other Explorations (#u55ae7b8f-2268-53a2-96bd-7e0e7bf6447f)

1967: George MacBeth. The New Science Fiction (#uad54432b-cb49-550f-b750-df707073cf59)

1968: Uncredited. Munich Round Up – Interview with J.G. Ballard (#u2908aa21-791c-5094-ad24-9e9f1fab556b)

1968: Jannick Storm. An Interview with J.G. Ballard (#u364e4bd1-5e38-52a8-a616-ad5ae89cad84)

1970: Lynn Barber. Sci-fi Seer (#uada9c5cf-9d5d-5c13-86bf-d9465bbfdbf1)

1971: Frank Whitford. Speculative Illustrations: Eduardo Paolozzi in Conversation with J.G. Ballard (#uf2fcaca6-66bd-5bda-acc0-c29476a0cbe9)

1973: Peter Linnett. J.G. Ballard (#u06706db8-d75a-516a-b8de-21c67f10e085)

1974: Carol Orr. How to Face Doomsday without Really Trying (#uc8b8cff0-b337-5035-be9b-ae1c16bfa6f7)

1974: Robert Louit. Crash & Learn (#u53b5c21e-dbf3-569a-9154-53051e7c3e57)

1975: Philippe R. Hupp. Interview with J.G. Ballard (#udd6c0333-1f1c-55da-a5ed-3b033924f761)

1975: James Goddard and David Pringle. An Interview with J.G. Ballard (#u0723b7af-c829-55c2-9a5e-2a5830215f04)

1976: Jörg Krichbaum & Rein A. Zondergeld. ‘It would be a mistake to write about the future’ (#u606c0bcd-0958-5143-9a32-efec87c4a710)

1978: Jon Savage. J.G. Ballard (#u2a7e47b0-3345-5ca3-ac3c-86a76e4b64d6)

1979: Christopher Evans. The Space Age Is Over (#u2313819b-6738-5651-ac7c-8a013a119aaa)

1982: Werner Fuchs & Joachim Körber. An Interview with J.G. Ballard (#u9a2dd999-848f-5a13-8092-94a6a61163ed)

1982: V. Vale. Interview with JGB (#u2456ee50-e840-595c-a15e-782fd01daa21)

1983: Sam Scoggins. Ninety Questions from the Eyckman Personality Quotient (#u35911dae-ce09-595d-bade-414ec3bed449)

1984: Thomas Frick. The Art of Fiction (#u2ada3420-351b-5b09-9cdd-202341577461)

1984: Peter Rønnov-Jessen. Against Entropy (#uf5434c98-fdf5-5169-9ffa-3bd7daef356b)

1985: Tony Cartano and Maxim Jakubowski. The Past Tense of J.G. Ballard (#u0750e70b-ac20-5731-9edd-d69195116340)

1986. Solveig Nordlund. Future Now (#u1eb92c0c-bc36-5899-93b5-073b9c1b4011)

1988: James Verniere. A Conversation with J.G. Ballard (#ude142f53-85af-5a71-8080-53ae46c09ee4)

1988: Rosetta Brooks. Myths of the Near Future (#u28185f77-36be-579f-a7f8-9d70f605ce35)

1991: Jeremy Lewis. An Interview with J.G. Ballard (#u8fe7f52b-9f34-5b0e-a6ff-891fbe09703b)

1992: Phil Halper and Lard Lyer. The Visitor (#u64e1f5ce-0aa7-537d-9d39-dcc592254ea3)

1993: Joan Bakewell. Memento: J.G. Ballard (#ubaac03f1-52a4-566e-af20-43bee74d6d0c)

1994: Lukas Barr. Don’t Crash (#u15b551d7-9a88-549d-bcc8-74fe913ada32)

1995: Nicholas Zurbrugg. Empire of the Surreal (#uf48e0e95-74cb-5b2b-866a-cd46536b0681)

1995: Will Self. Conversations: J.G. Ballard (#u845afb54-3862-5450-bc3f-3776d505b778)

1996: Damien Love. ‘Kafka with unlimited Chicken Kiev’: J.G. Ballard on Cocaine Nights (#u3415498b-0766-5fcc-89a0-0baa629d1f0a)

1996: Chris Rodley. Crash Talk: J.G. Ballard in Conversation with David Cronenberg (#u606d8101-8aaa-5db8-8a26-a11b059b5188)

1997: Mark Dery. J.G. Ballard’s Wild Ride (#ue103336a-f9cd-5253-83ba-2ce35fec384d)

1997: Richard Kadrey & Suzanne Stefanac. J.G. Ballard on William S. Burroughs’ Naked Truth (#u077de242-d903-5fa0-af90-c472c446a915)

1998: Zinovy Zinik. Russia on My Mind (#u8206a771-ebe7-551a-9f61-561cb3a43718)

1999: Iain Sinclair. J.G. Ballard’s Cinema in the Slipstream of Discontent (#u0dff25a2-d1a3-5775-bde9-b81ac501e9c9)

2000: John Gray. ‘Technology is always a facilitator’: J.G. Ballard on Super-Cannes (#uaecffd82-347f-5041-8003-7369a5734b82)

2003: Hans Ulrich Obrist. ‘Nothing is real, everything is fake’ (#uc577bb80-fdab-53e7-9d57-f1d043beae30)

2003: Chris Hall. ‘All we’ve got left is our own psychopathology’: J.G. Ballard on Millennium People (#u35985ccd-efe8-5696-b1eb-7915ff00b056)

2004: Jeannette Baxter. Reading the Signs (#u5c5e8201-9335-5585-b929-fbb54d1798a7)

2006: Toby Litt. ‘Dangerous bends ahead. Slow down’: J.G. Ballard on Kingdom Come (#u82964dca-1a9a-585e-a288-847402d3a7e2)

2006: Simon Sellars. ‘Rattling other people’s cages’ (#u473921b6-4b10-527e-898e-a7b0aa6c217a)

2006: Mark Goodall. An Exhibition of Atrocities: J.G. Ballard on Mondo Films (#u47340847-e7b5-5e4c-83fa-84f292b3f388)

2006: Jonathan Weiss. ‘Not entirely a journey without maps’: J.G. Ballard on The Atrocity Exhibition (#ue71f2b18-ddd1-5912-a347-182c6d284223)

2007: Hari Kunzru. Historian of the Future (#u607e2e24-9a6f-55f3-9a93-63da7c080253)

2008: James Naughtie. ‘Up a kind of sociological Amazon’: J.G. Ballard on Miracles of Life (#ucdbd1400-6b61-523b-b2ee-222dc792ae95)

Dan O’Hara – Afterword: Script-writing the Future (#uaabbd3cb-b25a-57d7-947b-6ef03fc93d0d)

Footnotes (#ue9f80be2-2f89-5747-b71b-84a0f52718c5)

Biographies (#uc77d42bc-54fc-592e-9fda-18f71f449fa9)

Index (#u4accab70-6657-50b7-8f40-addde310e3f3)

Acknowledgements (#u73493014-b1ba-513c-86ff-70c34aef3876)

About the Authors (#ud4ae44de-0b05-5ce0-81ab-9128034970a7)

By the same author (#u8a6bb45f-4e6d-5db0-967e-f2538ed5f40e)

Copyright (#ue0f9e0e7-d7fb-58ba-8000-ead1804619a4)

About the Publisher (#u2474b11c-de34-542d-9e29-719eca813d22)





Introduction: A Launchpad for Other ExplorationsSimon Sellars (#ulink_24666af0-553a-5943-899d-c713ca9e411a)

I


The conditions of J.G. Ballard’s childhood in wartime Shanghai are well known, exposed by the success of his semi-autobiographical novel Empire of the Sun (1984), and Steven Spielberg’s film version of that compulsive self-mythology. Yet pre-Empire, Shanghai was admitted only in metaphor to Ballard’s writing, and the war mentioned en passant in the ubiquitous mini-biographies adorning the front-papers of his novels. A typical example might have read: ‘He was born in Shanghai in 1930 to English parents. The Japanese interned him for almost three years in a civilian war camp. He came to England when he was sixteen. He studied medicine at King’s College, Cambridge. He worked as a copywriter, then as a Covent Garden porter, then as an editor on a scientific journal. He trained to become an RAF pilot. His first professionally published short story was “Prima Belladonna” in 1956. He was a leading light in the so-called “New Wave” of science fiction. He lives in Shepperton, England. Crash is his most notorious novel …’ Occasionally, there would be self-reflexive variations, statements so intense they were surely the handiwork not of bored copywriters but of Ballard himself: ‘He believes that science fiction is the authentic literature of the twentieth century’ (or that ‘science fiction is the apocalyptic language of the twentieth century’). ‘He also believes that inner space, not outer, is the real subject of science fiction.’

Today, given Ballard’s post-Empire canonisation, it’s easy to forget he began as a writer of science fiction, although in the 1960s he established his name with a quartet of end-of-the-world disaster novels that keenly anticipated current conditions surrounding climate change: The Wind from Nowhere (1961), The Drowned World (1962), The Drought (1964) and The Crystal World (1966). In that decade, he also produced a number of short stories that inverted science fiction via one of its most cherished tropes, time travel, using the premise to formulate the fabled theory of inner space informing those early bios. Anticipating Marshall McLuhan and Jean Baudrillard, Ballard demonstrated how encroaching advertising and mass consumer culture played on submerged desire, implanting new, artificial subjectivities to create a schizophrenic underclass. In response to such conditions, his characters retreated into the private imagination – ‘inner space’ – cordoning it off as a virtual ‘nature reserve’, preserving its sovereignty by any means possible. A recurring theme was the idea of escaping or cheating time, precipitated by a period of psychic turmoil. Recording the Dalí-esque motif of stopped or ‘melting’ time, Ballard uses the symbolism of time (that is, the unit of measurement; clock time) as an arbitrary, man-made construct imposing order and control on the free reign and chaos of the unconcious. Faced with the reality of life in that tumultuous decade, inner space for Ballard was a far more strange and compelling setting for science fiction than its traditional environs in outer space.

Coining the slogan ‘Earth is the only alien planet’, Ballard joined forces with Michael Moorcock to lead the British New Wave, producing an extended, linked sequence of fragmentary, non-linear short stories that continued to address the psychosocial effects of the media landscape. These were mainly published in Moorcock’s revolutionary New Worlds magazine, the mouthpiece for the New Wave, and later collected as The Atrocity Exhibition (1969), which, billed as an ‘experimental novel’, cemented his reputation as a dark magus, a writer able to face the most extreme aspects of our culture and divine a secret logic from the chaos.

In the mid-seventies, Ballard mostly abandoned formal experimentation in favour of a more traditional narrative technique, although the subject matter was just as confrontational, perhaps even more shocking for the neutral style encasing it. The novels of this period include Crash (1973), about a cult of bored, middle-class professionals who feel alive only after modifying their bodies via staged car crashes; Concrete Island (1974), about a man who crashes into a patch of wasteland beneath a motorway, subconsciously ‘marooning’ himself in the city; and High-Rise (1975), in which a high-tech apartment block descends into tribal warfare. These seductive, disturbing narratives seek out the edgelands of cities, making strange the familiar landscapes of suburbia, and have proved enormously influential for their clinical portrayal of the new roles we assume from the technological landscape. They have inspired not only writers but also musicians, artists and film-makers, who respond to Ballard’s highly imagistic style (itself influenced by surrealism), and even architects and urbanists, drawn to his penetrating critique of the contemporary urban condition.

Then came a brace of unclassifiable novels: The Unlimited Dream Company (1979), Hello America (1981), The Day of Creation (1987) and Rushing to Paradise (1994). If an overarching theme could be detected, it’s perhaps that each presented a lysergic vision of mythical lands (sometimes right before our eyes, as in suburbia) undermining and degrading the structural integrity of the urban West. In between were Empire and its sequel The Kindness of Women (1991), both playing surrealistic games with Ballard’s life story.

In his later career, there was a final incarnation: Ballard, the writer of subversive crime fictions such as Running Wild (1988), Cocaine Nights (1996), Super-Cannes (2000), Millennium People (2003) and Kingdom Come (2006). Indeed, crime was the perfect genre for the age of conspiracy theory and inscrutable global power structures that would come to define the new millennium, and which Ballard’s work had always foretold. Of course, he continued to write brilliant short stories throughout, as well as the novella ‘The Ultimate City’ (1976), about a future New York abandoned and then re-populated, regarded as among his finest work.

Actually, what this potted history suggests is that Ballard’s career is almost impossible to summarise. Reading the blurbs of his later novels, therefore, with their Shanghai-Empire focus, feels like submitting to a ritual incantation designed to fix a public mask for this most elusive of writers. In reality, if your first introduction to Ballard is by way of, say, his short story ‘The Drowned Giant’ (1964), then you might think you have stumbled on to a master magical realist in the Swiftian tradition. If Crash is the initiation, then you might think twice before proceeding further, unless your palate is already sufficiently developed with a taste for the blackest intellectual meat. And what if your introduction is via one of the many interviews he gave across the arc of his career?

Ballard published approximately 1,100,000 words in novels, 500,000 in short stories and at least 300,000 in non-fiction. The combined word count of all the interviews he gave is around 650,000. In the Ballardian galaxy that’s a second sun, an enormous parallel body of speculation, philosophy, critical inquiry and imaginative flights of fancy that comments critically on his writing, often explains it and, sometimes, extends or even goes beyond it. Ballard enjoyed talking about his work, in marked contrast to the contemporary literary landscape where authors see interviews as a tiresome duty, or as a PR exercise, a chance to push product, or even as a chance to vent spleen on real and imagined enemies. As Iain Sinclair said of him: ‘He doesn’t speak badly of anybody, any named individual. It’s almost a superstition, no gossip.’ In interviews, it was common for him to ignore any mention of literature and fellow writers altogether. Questions as to his literary influences were often deflected or summed up with a short list of his childhood reading.

Ballard was never comfortable defining his place within the canon, and had little time for contemporary literature, which he saw as stuck in the mode of the nineteenth-century ‘social novel’, unwilling or unable to confront the fragmented subjectivities induced by the new media landscape. In contrast, his stories and novels present psychosociological case studies, based on highly skilled readings of real-world trends in culture, consumerism, technology and media. Frequently, this predictive charge was fomented in the interview situation, a kind of philosophical ‘laboratory’ where he could test ideas, opinions and observations, and later smuggle them into the airlocked worlds of his fiction. The opportunity to review his interviews is therefore an important one, and, in the twilight zone of critical opinion that invariably follows an important writer’s death, to be taken seriously. With the benefit of hindsight, and Ballard’s complete body of work before us stretching back fifty-five years, not only are we able to unearth the philosophical and imaginative seeds that would spawn his most significant writing, but we are also able to experience a kind of extended remix of the themes woven throughout his work.




II


Arguably, Ballard’s most striking interview is the one he gave to Carol Orr in 1974, soon after the publication of Crash, when his notoriety was riding high. Four years earlier, the entire run of the American edition of The Atrocity Exhibition, to be published by Doubleday, had been pulped after a Doubleday executive became apoplectic at some of the more controversial material within (principally the story ‘Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan’). Then, Crash was initially turned down by a publisher’s reader with the infamous words: ‘This author is beyond psychiatric help. Do not publish.’ Ballard was probably about as ‘cult’ as a writer could be at the time, and although still regarded as primarily a writer of science fiction, was distancing himself farther and farther from the genre. As a writer of SF, his ostensible line of work was to collate the future, yet he undermines that job description by telling Orr that there is no future, that ‘the present is throwing up so many options, so many alternatives, that it contains the possibilities of any future right now. You can have tomorrow today. And the notion of the future as a sort of programmatic device … a compass bearing … a destination that we are moving towards psychologically and physically … is rather outdated.’ It is for this reason, he has claimed elsewhere, that science fiction is dead, its predictive capacity castrated by the ever-changing, real-world present. The prophetic nature of that observation can be gauged by the fact that William Gibson, among the most intelligent and successful of contemporary science fiction writers, has said in recent interviews that he has given up on writing SF for similar reasons – almost three decades after Ballard.

Orr asks Ballard about the likelihood of nuclear holocaust, and his response both predicts and undermines the nuclear hysteria and paranoia that would peak in the 1980s. Warning that networked technology and identity theft will become greater threats, he argues that we must be prepared for a coming age ‘where bank balances will be constantly monitored and at almost any given time all the information that exists about ourselves will be on file somewhere … where all sorts of agencies, commercial, political and governmental, will have access to that information’. (This can be tested empirically: who among us has been the victim of online identity theft, and who of a nuclear holocaust?)

Compare with Alvin Toffler’s bestselling non-fiction book Future Shock, published three years earlier but in 1974 still considered a frightening, all-too-real vision of the future. Toffler warned of ‘massive adaptational breakdown’ unless ‘man quickly learns to control the rate of change in his personal affairs as well as in society at large’. He predicted turmoil on an epic scale, with most of the population struggling to cope with the psychological shock of a mass-mediated life. While Ballard is concerned about the effects of new technologies, he discerns a rather different outcome, rooted in his belief in the affirmative possibilities of technological advance. He tells Orr that modern urban dwellers are psychologically tougher than ever before, ‘strong enough to begin to play all kinds of deviant games, and I’m sure that this is to some extent taking place’. He explains how the isolation that results from immersion in technological systems will invariably play into our latent fantasies: ‘We tend to assume that people want to be together in a kind of renaissance city if you like, imaginatively speaking, strolling in the evening across a crowded piazza … [But people] want to be alone. They want to be alone and watch television.’ Orr is unsure, her voice trailing as she struggles to articulate: ‘No, I can’t agree with you there. I think it is not a question of a conscious decision …’

Patiently, Ballard clarifies the true ‘togetherness’ of the technological age: people pressed together in traffic jams, aeroplanes, elevators, hemmed in by technology, an artificial connectedness. Protesting, Orr says she doesn’t want to be in a traffic jam, but neither does she want ‘to be alone on a dune, either’. Ballard counters: ‘being alone on a dune is probably a better description of how you actually lead your life than you realise … The city or the town or the suburb or the street – these are places of considerable isolation. People like it that way, too. They don’t want to know all their neighbours. This is just a small example where the conventional appeal of the good life needs to be looked at again.’ The exchange is significant because, with hindsight, we can determine Ballard testing the hypothesis behind Concrete Island, the follow-up to Crash, and a concentrated study in willed social isolation (marooning himself under a motorway overpass, and deciding to stay there indefinitely, Concrete Island’s protagonist finds new reserves of psychological strength in the process). Here, his interview-art is in full effect: running the test, storing the results, turning the tables on his interrogator.

In later interviews, Ballard would refine his views on affirmative social isolation, enthusing about the possibilities of private media and suggesting that the average home would soon acquire the processing power of a small TV studio, enabling us to broadcast our intimate fantasies to one another. In 1982 he told V. Vale that ‘Everybody will be doing it, everybody will be living inside a TV studio. That’s what the domestic home aspires to these days … We’re all going to be starring in our own sit-coms, and they’ll be very strange sit-coms, too, like the inside of our heads. That’s going to come, I’m absolutely sure of that, and it’ll really shake up everything.’ It is this vision, not Toffler’s, that continues to resonate.

Yet for Ballard there was always a dark side. Today, online persona factories frame a fluid performativity enabled by the irresistible connective tissue of social media. What is YouTube – now inevitably banal, smoothly integrated into the fabric of everyday life – if not the medium for each of us to design and star in ‘our own sit-coms’? Anyone familiar with Ballard’s brutal short story ‘The Intensive Care Unit’ (1977) will surely recognise the dark shadow of those ‘very strange’ productions (indeed, of what we now recognise as social media), with its disturbing warning about the dangers that await when we have the capacity to broadcast ‘the inside of our heads’. Ballard’s futurism, always potent, extremely well reasoned and argued – frequently alarming – was, above all, uncannily accurate. He did not flinch, and he expected us not to, either.




III


From the moment I first read a Ballard interview (before any of his fiction, in fact), his slyly subversive conversational style colonised my thoughts and I became obsessed with tracking down every interview he ever did (my search continues; this collection merely scratches the surface). Back then, naive and inexperienced, I convinced myself that Ballard’s interviews were superior to his novels. Sacrilege today, of course, but there was a case to be made, for I deeply admired how he worked the interview format with a neurosurgeon’s skill, finessing philosophical positions and aesthetic strategies that would later find purchase in his work, triaging real-world scenarios into the dark revelations of his fictional mirror worlds. I would find a new fix in obscure zines. I would painstakingly transcribe his radio and TV appearances. I would badger my elder Ballard-watching associates for access to their magnificent collections, but I had a lot of catching up to do. Henry James gave just three interviews in his life; there are at least two hundred published Ballard conversations. Before he’d even uttered a word, Don DeLillo once presented an interviewer with a card that warned: ‘I don’t want to talk about it’; Ballard, in his heyday, could talk for hours, plying his interrogators with Scotch to keep things on an even keel.

He was courteous, approachable and generous with his time, and patient in explaining the terms and conditions of his work, although he once told an interviewer that ‘the ideal interview is one where I remain silent and you just ask a stream of hundreds of questions. Or – the interviewer hasn’t read the books he’s asking questions about, and the author can’t remember them!’ (He came close to achieving this goal in one of the more unusual interviews in this collection, the series of yes/no answers he gave to Sam Scoggins in 1983, an exercise in stylised repetition that, like a tape loop of music, grows in the imagination the more it is repeated.) Of course, he was being flippant. His real interest in making that remark was probably psychoanalytical, wanting to uncover the hidden intentions behind a particular line of questioning, or to turn the process into an autodidactic, quasi-surrealistic game in which the outcome for both parties is dependent on each person’s capacity to learn, the same result as in his fiction.

He championed the independent press, often granting interviews to obscure photocopied fanzines and other small publications. A review of the publication history of his interviews reveals titles like Speculation, Corridor, Cypher, Vector, Search & Destroy, Aether SF, Etoile Mecanique, Hard Copy, The Hardcore, Hard Mag, Albedo One. These are labours of love on the parts of their publishers, mimeographed enthusiasm, largely forgotten, even in the all-seeing digital age. After Empire of the Sun, of course, mainstream newspapers and magazines clamoured to speak to him, but still he held court with the underground. In the early days, it was the SF zines that came knocking on his door, but after RE/Search, specialists in ‘industrial’ culture, published Vale’s remarkable 30,000-word interview with him in 1984, punk and music periodicals picked up the pace. Ballard welcomed them, for he did not think his art was ‘pure’ and could speak for itself, nor did he appear to think it was degrading to explain his work, or that he had a certain type of audience, high or low.

In a 2010 article on ‘why novelists hate being interviewed’, Tom LeClair notes a recent trend: novels that portray interviewers as ‘irresponsible or unworthy of respect’. According to this ‘genre’, interviewers are hapless lackeys of the evil media machine, pilloried by long-suffering novelists because they haven’t read the books they’re supposed to be asking about, or they put words into the novelist’s mouth, or they want to talk about gossip and nothing else, or the novelist is forced to do the interview out of contractual obligation to the publisher. Finally, LeClair wonders ‘if the novelists’ animus against interviewers might be displaced animus against passionately curious readers, those who want to learn about authors to better comprehend their books. It appears that some novelists want to be understood, but not too thoroughly understood. [Philip Roth] suggests a darker, Oedipal motive for the animus: “Old men hate young men”.’ Such charges cannot be levelled at Ballard, who talked to almost anyone willing to make the trip down the motorway to his home in Shepperton or to ring the phone number he nonchalantly allowed to be listed in public phone directories right up until his death.

Of course, earlier in his career, he had little time for ‘fandom’ as at least one interview in this collection attests, but he was always prepared to converse with those genuinely interested in the mysterious forces propelling his work, which he catalogued in his prose poem ‘What I Believe’ (1984). There, we find an index of his obsessions, including the ‘power of the imagination’; motorways; birds (indeed, flight of all kinds, powered and unpowered); the ‘confidences of madmen’; ‘the beauty of the car crash’; abandoned hotels; forgotten runways; Pacific islands; ‘all women’; supermarkets; the ‘genital organs of great men and women’; the death of the Space Age; Ernst, Delvaux, Dali and de Chirico; and ‘all the invisible artists within the psychiatric institutions of the planet’. In fact, that small list could be a mini-index to this present volume, in which all its elements are present and correct, and which in turn function as launchpads for other explorations, other themes: psychological, ontological, metaphysical, sociological, political, satirical, comical.

As evidenced by the reference to Ernst, Delvaux and the rest, visual art was a touchstone for Ballard, and he often said he wished he’d been an artist rather than a writer. Perhaps it is within that discipline, rather than the navel-gazing, venom-inked pens of literature, that we might find the light that can illuminate Ballard’s inimitable strengths as an interviewee. Daniel Miller, in an essay on the function of interviews in the art world, wrote of the interview itself ‘as art form’. This is meant both literally and figuratively, the former in that the conversation piece becomes a thing of crafted beauty, and the latter in that it becomes an appendage of the visual artist, albeit one with a mutually beneficial, symbiotic function: ‘the principal vehicle of public relations and vital theoretical supplement to artistic practice’. Miller identifies interviewer and interviewee as switches in a circuit, an ‘actor network’ (after Bruno Latour) that also includes inanimate and virtual objects. Because visual artists, perhaps more than any other creative discipline, are constantly in negotiation with institutional and bureaucratic politics in order to find funding – ‘negotiation, exploration and strategy’ – they are also constantly in negotiation with their ideas and their work, and the best ways to present them in order to ride the dynamism and flow of the network they are enmeshed within. In this respect, Miller explains, ‘the interview serves both as a clinic in which abiding patterns are seen to and as a laboratory in which new connections are forged’.

In the same way, Ballard sought to make new connections in the interview setting, to use the occasion as a workshop for experimentation, a test bed for later integration into his art. Nonetheless, these are experiments based on familiar patterns, for repetition is vitally important to his work (both in the fiction and in the interviews, and in the body of both combined), as a kind of linguistic hypertext that endlessly turns in on itself, erases itself and erects itself anew, providing no discernible start or end point – evading linear time once again, even in death – yet still providing familiar markers with which to orient oneself. It is not for nothing that interviewers came to refer to Ballard as the ‘Seer from Shepperton’, for the insights he offered so casually were always infused with that deep intelligence, itself informed by a vast cosmology of inner space. All who interviewed him knew it well. We were struck by it, lost deep in thought, sometimes confused or disconcerted, after it came to us as part of that disarming mix of full-frontal future shock and old-world, erudite charm, delivered like a child’s spoonful of medicine that turns out to be surprisingly pleasant to the taste.

Doubtless you, too, will become enamoured of the taste as you make your way through the chronology we have assembled, spiralling down through wormholes to the far side of his fiction, and a parallel universe familiar but strange, where Ballardian pronouncements reveal their covert meaning, as he pulls all the outer limits and farthest reaches of his career into sharper focus.

Simon Sellars, Melbourne, Australia, March 2012




1967: George MacBeth. The New Science Fiction (#ulink_b7ac7aad-77d9-557f-8ed3-2362c53f539b)


Originally published in Langdon Jones (ed.), The New S.F., London: Hutchinson, 1969

Technically, Ballard’s first published interview was in 1951, when he won the Crime Story Competition held by Varsity, the Cambridge University newspaper. Varsity published his winning entry ‘The Violent Noon’ alongside this brief snippet of conversation: ‘[Ballard] admitted to our reporter yesterday that he had in fact entered the competition more for the prize than anything else, although he had been encouraged to go on writing because of his success. The idea for his short story, which deals with the problem of Malayan terrorism, he informs us, he had been thinking over for some time before hearing of the competition. He has, in addition to writing short stories, also planned “mammoth novels” which “never get beyond the first page”.’

However, his first full-length interview did not appear until 1967, when novelist and poet George MacBeth interviewed him for BBC Radio’s Third Programme. The transcript was later published in The New S.F., edited by Langdon Jones, and in the infamous Doubleday edition of The Atrocity Exhibition, pulped on the orders of a shocked Doubleday executive. MacBeth, a perceptive interviewer, captures Ballard at the start of that long interregnum from 1966 to 1973, when he took a break from writing novels to focus exclusively on short stories (and a few multimedia experiments), including the strange, elliptical narratives that would make up Atrocity.

After it was published Ballard always referred to Atrocity as a ‘novel’, but as this fascinating insight into his method demonstrates, the idea of a sustained narrative binding the chapters was but a glimmer in his eye at this time, albeit a persistent one. Elsewhere, there are penetrating remarks about the ‘non-linear’ nature of 1960s life and ideas that point towards Crash’s artistic breakthrough, such as when he declares that ‘the fictional elements [of today] have overwhelmed reality’, an observation paraphrased in Crash’s introduction. [SS]

MACBETH: You have been writing science fiction short stories and novels for several years now, but your story ‘You and Me and the Continuum’ is one of a recent group which, I think, in structure are really quite different from your earlier ones. Perhaps the most striking feature to someone reading ‘You and Me and the Continuum’, for example, for the first time, is that it is constructed not in continuous narrative, but in a sequence of short paragraphs, each of which has a heading – in fact, they’re arranged in alphabetical order. But the key point, I think, is that they are broken up. Why did you move on to using this technique of construction?

BALLARD: I was dissatisfied with what I felt were linear systems of narrative. I had been using in my novels and in most of my short stories a conventional linear narrative, but I found that the action and events – of the novels in particular – were breaking down as I wrote them. The characterisation and the sequences of events were beginning to crystallise into a series of shorter and shorter images and situations. This ties in very much with what I feel about the whole role of science fiction as a speculative form of fiction. For me, science fiction is above all a prospective form of narrative fiction; it is concerned with seeing the present in terms of the immediate future rather than the past.

MACBETH: Could I break in there? Would you contrast that with what the traditional novel does in the sense it’s concerned with perhaps the history of a family or a person?

BALLARD: Exactly. The great bulk of fiction still being written is retrospective in character. It’s concerned with the origins of experience, behaviour, development of character over a great span of years. It interprets the present in terms of the past, and it uses a narrative technique, by and large the linear narrative, in which events are shown in more-or-less chronological sequence, which is suited to it. But when one turns to the present – and what I feel I’ve done in these pieces of mine is to rediscover the present for myself – I feel that one needs a non-linear technique, simply because our lives today are not conducted in linear terms. They are much more quantified; a stream of random events is taking place.

MACBETH: I’d like to ask you a question here about the characters in these stories. Of course, you’ve written as well as ‘You and Me and the Continuum’ three or four others which have already been published in New Worlds, Impulse and Encounter, and one feature of them is that certain characters seem to recur from story to story. When I call them ‘characters’, they are not always perhaps, to the reader, immediately recognisable as characters so much as named areas of consciousness.

BALLARD: Yes, I don’t see them as ‘characters’ in the conventional sense of the term; they are aspects of certain character situations. They haven’t got the same name, but they have variations of the same name.

MACBETH: I remember a case of this myself. There’s a character called Tallis in one story and a character called Traven in another, and they seem to have something in common.

BALLARD: In effect they’re the same character, but their role in the stories is not to be characters in the sense that Scobie, let’s say, in [Graham Greene’s] The Heart of the Matter, or any other character in the retrospective novel is a character, an identifiable human being rather like those we recognise among our friends, acquaintances and so on.

MACBETH: Could we take a specific case from ‘You and Me and the Continuum’ here – Dr Nathan, who seems to be, as far as the reader or listener can put a label to him, a psychiatrist? Could you elaborate on what his function is in the story?

BALLARD: He serves the role of analysing the events of the narrative from the point of view of the clinical implications. He represents the voice of reason, whatever the limitations of that term might be.

MACBETH: The central ‘consciousness’ or area of character in the story is sometimes a composite one in some ways; somebody who has gone through an extreme situation or a psychological crisis or a public crisis; somebody in a mental hospital who might also be the pilot of a crashed bomber; and so on. What are you trying to do with this sort of merged consciousness?

BALLARD: All these characters exist on a number of levels. I feel that the fictional elements in experience are now multiplying to such a point that it is almost impossible to distinguish between the real and the false, that one has many layers, many levels of experience going on at the same time. On one level one might have the world of public events, Cape Kennedy, Vietnam, political life; on another level the immediate personal environment, the rooms we occupy, the postures we assume. On a third level the inner world of the mind. All these levels are, as far as I can see them, equally fictional, and it is where these levels interact that one gets the only kind of valid reality that exists nowadays. The characters in these stories occupy positions on these various levels. On the one hand, a character is displayed on an enormous billboard as a figment in a Cinemascope epic; on another level he’s an ordinary human being moving through the ordinary to-and-fro of everyday life; on a third level he’s a figment in his own fantasies. These various aspects of the character interact and produce the main reality of the fiction.

MACBETH: Yes, I think this element of layers also comes out in the density of some of the stories – the way you seem to link together references from a wide variety of fields. I quote if I may, as an interesting example, one passage from ‘You and Me and the Continuum’, which is the kind of passage that recurs in a number of these stories:

Kodachrome. Captain Kirby, MI5, studied the prints. They showed: (1) a thick-set man in an Air Force jacket, unshaven face half-hidden by the dented hat-peak; (2) a transverse section through the spinal level T-12; (3) a crayon self-portrait by David Feary, 7-year-old schizophrenic at the Belmont Asylum, Sutton; (4) radio-spectra from the quasar CTA 102; (5) an antero-posterior radiograph of a skull, estimated capacity 1500 cc.; (6) spectro-heliogram of the sun taken with the K line of calcium; (7) left and right handprints showing massive scarring between second and third metacarpal bones. To Dr Nathan he said: ‘And all these make up one picture?’

BALLARD: Exactly. They make up a composite portrait of this man’s identity. In this story I was examining the particular role that a twentieth-century messiah might take, in the context of mid-twentieth-century life. I feel that he would reappear in a whole series of aspects and relationships, touching an enormous range of events; that he wouldn’t have a single identity, in the sense that Jesus had – he would have a whole multiplex of contacts with various points.

MACBETH: I see this, but why do certain particular kinds of imagery recur? You may claim that these are the appropriate and inevitable ones, but you do seem as a writer to have a sort of ‘thing’ about certain kinds of imagery; for example, certain kinds of landscape – landscapes which involve sand keep recurring. Can you give any further explication of why these come in?

BALLARD: I think that landscape is a formalisation of space and time, and the external landscapes directly reflect interior states of mind. In fact, the only external landscapes which have any meaning are those which are reflected, in the central nervous system, if you like, by their direct analogues. Dali said somewhere that mind is a state of landscape, and I think this is completely true.

MACBETH: You do literally, in many of these stories, draw connections between pictures of parts of the human body and certain landscapes, don’t you?

BALLARD: Yes. In the story ‘You: Coma: Marilyn Monroe’ I directly equate the physical aspect of Marilyn Monroe’s body with the landscape of dunes around her. The hero attempts to make sense of this particular equation, and he realises that the suicide of Marilyn Monroe is, in fact, a disaster in space-time, like the explosion of a satellite in orbit. It is not so much a personal disaster, though of course Marilyn Monroe committed suicide as an individual woman, but a disaster of a whole complex of relationships involving this screen actress who is presented to us in an endless series of advertisements, on a thousand magazine covers and so on, whose body becomes part of the external landscape of our environment. The immense terraced figure of Marilyn Monroe stretched across a cinema hoarding is as real a portion of our external landscape as any system of mountains or lakes.

MACBETH: Are you aware of deliberately using surrealism as references in these stories? Quite often you refer to Dali in particular and sometimes Ernst, and sometimes to real pictures by them. How far is there a direct connection with those pictures and the events or descriptions in the stories?

BALLARD: The connection is deliberate, because I feel that the surrealists have created a series of valid external landscapes which have their direct correspondences within our own minds. I use the phrase ‘spinal landscape’ fairly often. In these spinal landscapes, which I feel that painters such as Ernst and Dali are producing, one finds a middle ground (an area which I’ve described as ‘inner space’) between the outer world of reality on the one hand, and the inner world of the psyche on the other. Freud pointed out that one has to distinguish between the manifest content of the inner world of the psyche and its latent content. I think in exactly the same way today, when the fictional elements have overwhelmed reality, one has to distinguish between the manifest content of reality and its latent content. In fact the main task of the arts seems to be more and more to isolate the real elements in this goulash of fictions from the unreal ones, and the terrain ‘inner space’ roughly describes it.

MACBETH: Yes, one often has the sense that certain of the events in these stories, insofar as they are ‘events’, might be taking place within, particularly, a Dali painting. I also have the sense in reading these stories that there’s a kind of hallucinatory vividness and clarity about the descriptions which remind me of certain techniques used by the cinema in the 1960s. Are you aware of being influenced by films at all?

BALLARD: Some films. The Savage Eye had a tremendous impact on me because it presented a completely fragmented and quantified narrative through which the heroine evolved her own identity. Most films, though, are still made in linear terms, and I find that painters, perhaps because a painting is a single image, are much more stimulating; they corroborate my own preoccupations much more.

MACBETH: Yes, indeed; it seems very much that your central preoccupation is, in the very loosest sense, with time and the absence of time, with a massive kind of stasis that embodies a sense of time moving. However, there are a number of difficulties here. I think that particularly this seems to lead you towards the special kind of density I’ve mentioned, and that, in a way, leads to the stories working perhaps rather more like poetry than like prose; they have overtones, associations and resonances. And I think most readers are likely to find them literally very difficult.

BALLARD: I think that’s simply the inertia of convention. If you could scrap all retrospective fiction and its immense body of conventions, most people who, for example, find William Burroughs’ narrative techniques almost impossible to recognise – in exactly the same way that some aboriginal tribesmen are supposed to be unable to recognise their own photographs – would realise that Burroughs’ narrative techniques, or my own in their way, would be an immediately recognisable reflection of the way life is actually experienced. We live in quantified non-linear terms – we switch on television sets, switch them off half an hour later, speak on the telephone, read magazines, dream and so forth. We don’t live our lives in linear terms in the sense that the Victorians did.

MACBETH: I can understand that, but I think it’s slightly more complicated than that, in that the reader has to move at quite a different speed through these stories; he has to pause, he has to reread, he perhaps even doesn’t have to start at the beginning and go to the end, he may want to shift about to get a bigger concentration on certain key sections; he also, almost certainly I think, has to work with a number of reference books available, because there are in all of these later stories words that certainly I didn’t know the meaning of at first and I would want to look up. At the same time, interestingly enough, you are publishing in science fiction magazines, which contain material that in terms of structure and content are obviously much simpler. I wonder really how far the audience you’re getting is naturally equipped to treat these stories in the right way. Does this worry you?

BALLARD: No, I think the science fiction readership, if there is such a readership, is much more sophisticated than one might imagine, far more sophisticated probably than the general readership of conventional fiction. These devices which I use are not as outrageous as they seem; they don’t in fact dislocate the elements of the narrative to anything like the extent they appear to do at first glance at the page.

MACBETH: Yes, I can see that, and historically speaking I can also see that your earlier stories do seem to be preoccupied with certain similar themes, though in a much less dense and exciting way. This theme of time emerges in a number of much more straightforward stories; the story of yours called ‘The Time Tombs’, for example, which does again have this thing about sand in it. Now the turning point, it seemed to me, was a story of yours called ‘The Terminal Beach’, which seemed to be midway between your older stories and your new ones.

BALLARD: Yes, there I made my first attempt at a narrative in which the events of the story were quantified in the sense that they were isolated from the remainder of the narrative and then examined from a number of angles.

MACBETH: The stories you’ve written which we’ve been talking about are those such as ‘You and Me and the Continuum’, The Atrocity Exhibition, ‘You: Coma: Marilyn Monroe’ and ‘The Assassination Weapon’. In fact, it sometimes seems, as I’ve read these, that one could almost translate bits of one into bits of the other. They seem, in a certain sense, not four independent stories, but four fragments of a kind of sequence. Are you aware of them relating, and do you have in your mind further ones which you will write, such that, taken as a group, they will shed extra light on each other?

BALLARD: I think they’re all chapters in a much longer narrative that is evolving at its pace. I don’t think it’s evolving in a sequential sense, in the sense that the events of, say, Moby-Dick evolve one after another; they’re evolving in an apparently random sense, but all the images relate to one another, and I hope when more stories have been written they will reinforce one another and produce something larger than the sum of their parts.

MACBETH: Despite what you said about the science fiction audience, I suppose you wouldn’t think of yourself as a writer of science fiction; you’d think of yourself as just a writer, presumably.

BALLARD: I don’t regard myself as a writer of what most people would call modern science fiction, which is predominantly American, even though much of it has been written by English writers. Modern American science fiction grew out of magazines such as the Popular Mechanics of the thirties; it’s an extrovert, optimistic literature of technology. I think the new science fiction, which other people apart from myself are now beginning to write, is introverted, possibly pessimistic rather than optimistic, much less certain of its own territory. There’s a tremendous confidence that radiates through all modern American science fiction of the period 1930 to 1960; the certainty that science and technology can solve all problems. This is not the dominant form of science fiction now. I think science fiction is becoming something much more speculative, much less convinced about the magic of science and the moral authority of science. There’s far more caution on the part of the new writers than there was.





1968: Uncredited. Munich Round Up – Interview with J.G. Ballard (#ulink_1fb633d1-7525-5199-b1fb-a32ca58ac4ab)


Originally published in German as ‘Interview mit J.G. Ballard’ (uncredited), Munich Round Up 100, 1968. Translated by Dan O’Hara

Early in 1968, Bavarian TV ran a four-part educational series on science fiction, the third episode of which featured excerpts from an interview with Ballard. The footage of this episode is no longer available, and is presumably now lost. Like so much valuable TV footage of that era, it was probably shot on tape which, owing to its expense, was reused, thereby erasing the interview. Later that year the director of the series, Brian Wood, published a translation of a full transcript of the interview in a German-language science fiction fanzine called Munich Round Up. The ’zine also contained ‘Notiz aus dem Nirgendwo’, a German translation of Ballard’s 1966 piece ‘Notes from Nowhere’.

Although I have retranslated this interview into English, inevitably such a process is unsatisfactory – after all, one must read Ballard’s words through the lens of another language. Yet it is striking just how difficult it is to strip Ballard’s words of their distinctive character, and very little of his meaning is lost in translation. It seems likely that this 1968 interview is in fact a transcript of the German subtitles used in the TV programme, as the interview here contains no questions. I have therefore chosen to translate back into English as literally as possible, preserving some of the odder and more interesting artefacts produced by the original translator, Gary Klüpfel. One of the most obvious of these is Ballard’s assertion that he uses the diamond (‘Diamant’) as a symbol of timeless structure in The Crystal World. Clearly the original translator decided that Ballard intended a more conventional symbol of eternity. [DOH]




On the early works


BALLARD: I believe that SF is important because it is the sole form of literature we have today that looks forward. All forms of literature other than science fiction are oriented towards the past. Their character is backwards-looking, whereas SF concerns itself with the future and interprets the present day in terms of the future, rather than of the past. It uses a vocabulary that is on the whole exclusively oriented towards the world of tomorrow, with all its science, its technology, and with all its developments in politics, sociology, advertising and so forth.

I have written three novels – The Drowned World, The Drought and The Crystal World – which form a trilogy dealing with the topic of time. In The Drowned World I deal with the past, and employ water as the central metaphor. In The Drought I deal with the future, taking sand as the central image. In The Crystal World I am concerned with the present, the symbol of which is the diamond or the precious stone which – so I believe – possesses a timeless structure.

In The Drowned World I describe the return of the entire planet to the era of the great Triassic forests, which covered the earth some 200 million years ago. I tell how human beings likewise regress into the past. In a certain sense, they climb down their own spinal column. They traverse down the thoracic vertebrae, from the point at which they are air-breathing mammals, to the lumbar region, to the point at which they are amphibious reptiles. Finally they reach the absolute past, which on one hand represents the birth of life itself in the hot womb of the primeval jungle, and which in another sense represents their own origins and birthplace in the mother’s womb. I show humanity face to face with the difficulty of making sense of this decline in their status to non-entities.

I use this portrait of the spinal column as a vessel containing a reflection of the memory of the past, and the details of the entire evolutionary development of the human race, as a literary device, as I was dissatisfied with the traditional forms used by SF writers to realise time travel. It seems to me that the method of investigating the imaginative capacities of the central nervous system gives a more reliable and more precise account of how the human race has evolved in time, and of how we as individuals have evolved in our own time, than Wells’ time machine.

In my novel The Drought, I see the future as a world dominated by sand. It is the end of the planet, and the few people who survive on the planet are governed by perfectly abstract relations, through an entire geometry of space-time, of emotion and action. It is a completely abstract world, as abstract as the most abstract of painters or sculptors one can imagine.




On SF


I believe that SF will become more and more an aspect of daily reality. It has migrated from the bookshelf to daily life. One sees the landscapes and imagery of SF, one sees their contents playing a part in the world of pop music, of film, even that of psychedelic experiences. The reason being, that SF was always concerned with psychological perceptions, and the world of pop music, film and psychedelic experience is now greatly concerned with the senses, with perspectives of our own psychological space-time, and has not so much to do with questions of individual histories, the past and so forth, as were the prejudices of the literature and cinema of the past.

I believe that in the last ten years the entire basis of SF has changed rapidly. Modern SF began at the end of the 1920s and the beginning of the thirties, and was at that time an authentically vernacular vision of the future, a future seen through the lens of science and technology and, above all, in the light of outer space, so I believe. Now in the last ten years SF as I see it has turned full circle. The physical sciences now play less of a major role than do the biological, inner space, the world of the mind – which once more reflects the altered attitudes of people towards science in general. After Hiroshima, the whole magic and authority of science was called into question. Now, I don’t think that the authority of biologists was attacked to such an extent, and to a considerable degree the biologist and the psychologist took over something of the functions of a lay church, in exploring man’s place in the universe.




On inner space


I define inner space as an imaginary realm in which on the one hand the outer world of reality, and on the other the inner world of the mind, meet and merge. Now, in the landscapes of the surrealist painters, for example, one sees the regions of inner space; and increasingly I believe that we will encounter in film and literature scenes which are neither solely realistic nor fantastic. In a sense, it will be a movement in the interzone between both spheres.




1968: Jannick Storm. An Interview with J.G. Ballard (#ulink_239badef-9783-5fd1-bcff-c48ec7df02b2)


Originally published in Speculation 21, 1969

Jannick Storm, a Danish publisher and writer, visited London in the late 1960s and became involved with the key players in the British New Wave of science fiction. He had a short story published in Michael Moorcock’s New Worlds and in 1970 founded Denmark’s first fanzine, Limbo, inspired by New Worlds. Storm was close to New Wave figurehead Brian Aldiss, who dedicated his book Billion Year Spree to him, and to Ballard. Throughout the sixties, Storm translated many of the individual Atrocity Exhibition pieces for Danish publications almost as soon as Ballard had written them. Subsequently, he was responsible for the world first edition of The Atrocity Exhibition, convincing Rhodos of Copenhagen to publish Grusomhedsudstillingen (1969), Atrocity in Danish, with Storm’s translations.

The following interview was conducted at Shepperton on 5 July 1968. It was originally recorded for a Danish radio programme on science fiction, and the transcript appeared in Peter Weston’s fanzine Speculation in 1969. It covers Ballard’s thoughts on the New Wave, his experiments in graphic design, his admiration for the work of William Burroughs, the media landscape of the sixties and, as a controversial parting shot, his withering views on science fiction fandom. The latter got Ballard into hot water with Speculation readers who took umbrage in hostile letters to the editor, in turn provoking Ballard to tell Weston he no longer wished to receive further copies of the ’zine. Weston lamented this in a later editorial, although Moorcock leapt to Ballard’s defence in Speculation 25: ‘I sympathise with Jimmy Ballard’s remarks, and, at times, find myself close to agreeing with them.’ [SS]

STORM: How did you start writing?

BALLARD: I was studying medicine at Cambridge University. I was very interested in medicine, everything I learned there I put to very good use. All the anatomy and physiology and so on. It seemed an enormous fiction. They have an annual short story competition at the University, and I wrote a story for that and won the competition that year. I suppose that was a green light, so I gave up medicine, and after a few years I had my first story published. I’d tried originally to write stories for English literary magazines like Horizon and that sort of thing. Just general fiction of an experimental character. And then I thought that science fiction, which in those days was all Asimov and Heinlein and Clarke – this was in the middle fifties – I thought, those writers were not really making the most of what science fiction could be. I felt that a new kind of science fiction should be written.

STORM: Your kind of science fiction, you say, is different from the old science fiction. In what way?

BALLARD: Modern American science fiction of the 1940s and 1950s is a popular literature of technology. Anybody who can remember reading magazines in the thirties, or looking at books published in the thirties, will know what I mean – they are full of marvels, the biggest bridge in the world, the fastest this or the longest that – full of marvels of science and technology.

The science fiction written in those days came out of all this optimism that science was going to remake the world. Then came Hiroshima and Auschwitz, and the image of science completely changed. People became very suspicious of science, but SF didn’t change. You still found this optimistic literature, the Heinlein–Asimov–Clarke type of attitude towards the possibilities of science, which was completely false.

In the 1950s during the testing of the H-bomb you could see that science was getting to be something much closer to magic. Also, science fiction was then identified with the idea of outer space. By and large, that was the image most people had of science fiction. The spaceship, the alien planet. And this didn’t make any sense to me. It seemed to me that they were ignoring what I felt was the most important area, what I called – and I used the term for the first time seven years ago – ‘inner space’, which was the meeting ground between the inner world of the mind and the outer world of reality. Inner space you see in the paintings of the surrealists, Max Ernst, Dali, Tanguy, Chirico.

They’re painters of inner space, and I felt that science fiction should explore that area, the area where the mind impinges on the outside world, and not just deal in fantasy. This was the trouble with SF in the early fifties. It was becoming fantasy. It wasn’t a serious realistic fiction any more. So I started writing. I’ve written three novels and something like seventy short stories over the last ten years – I think that perhaps in only one story there’s a spaceship. It’s just mentioned in passing. All my fiction is set in the present day or close to the present day.

STORM: Well, this is why your landscapes are not real, I suppose. They are sort of symbolic?

BALLARD: Well, they are not real in the sense that I don’t write naturalistically about the present day. Though, in the latest group of stories I’ve started to write, these stories written in paragraph form, which I call ‘condensed novels’, there I’m using the landscape of the present day. The chief characters in these stories are people like Elizabeth Taylor, Marilyn Monroe, Jacqueline Kennedy and so on. There I’m using present-day landscapes. Obviously if you’re going to set most of your fiction several years ahead of the present, you’re going to have to use an invented landscape to some extent, because you can’t write naturalistically about London or New York twenty years from now. It must be an invented landscape to a certain extent.

STORM: You seem to be quite hostile towards science, like Ray Bradbury, for instance, but not in the same way, I suppose?

BALLARD: I’m not hostile to science itself. I think that scientific activity is about the only mature activity there is. What I’m hostile to is the image of science that people have. It becomes a magic wand in people’s minds, that will conjure up marvels, a kind of Aladdin’s lantern. It oversimplifies things, much too conveniently. Science now, in fact, is the largest producer of fiction. A hundred years ago, or even fifty years ago, even, science took its raw material from nature. A scientist worked out the boiling point of a gas or the distance a star is away from the Earth, whereas nowadays, particularly in the social, psychological sciences, the raw material of science is a fiction invented by the scientists. You know, they work out why people chew gum or something of this kind … so the psychological and social sciences are spewing out an enormous amount of fiction. They’re the major producers of fiction. It’s not the writers any more.

STORM: What do you think of the so-called New Wave, as it manifests itself in New Worlds, for instance?

BALLARD: I am the New Wave! Well, the New Wave … I think it’s only at the beginning. Having knocked my own head against a brick wall for ten years … you know, it’s only now that people begin to accept that I’m not a deliberate fool, which a lot of people thought I was when I first started writing. It’s taken so long that I don’t expect any miracles to happen overnight, but already you see a group of younger writers coming along. People like Tom Disch, John Sladek, Michael Butterworth, Pam Zoline, the young American painter over here. They’re starting to write a different kind of science fiction, but whether they will stay within science fiction long enough to consolidate the so-called New Wave or whether – as I think will happen – they’ll just move out of science fiction altogether and begin writing a speculative fiction that doesn’t owe anything to science fiction, I don’t know.

STORM: Well, the same applies to you. You don’t consider yourself a science fiction writer?

BALLARD: I don’t consider myself a science fiction writer in the same sense that Isaac Asimov or Arthur C. Clarke are science fiction writers. Strictly speaking I regard myself as an SF writer in the way that surrealism is also a scientific art. In a sense Asimov, Heinlein and the masters of American SF are not really writing of science at all. They’re writing about a set of imaginary ideas which are conveniently labelled ‘science’. They’re writing about the future, they’re writing a kind of fantasy-fiction about the future, closer to the western and the thriller, but it has nothing really to do with science. I studied medicine, chemistry, physiology, physics, and I worked for about five years on a scientific journal.

The idea that a magazine like Astounding, or Analog as it’s now called, has anything to do with the sciences is ludicrous. It has nothing to do with science. You have only to pick up a journal like Nature, say, or any scientific journal, and you can see that science belongs in a completely different world. Freud pointed out that you have to distinguish between analytic activity, which by and large is what the sciences are, and synthetic activities, which are what the arts are. The trouble with the Heinlein–Asimov type of science fiction is that it’s completely synthetic. Freud also said that synthetic activities are a sign of immaturity, and I think that’s where classical SF falls down.

STORM: You’ve been running some advertisements in New Worlds. What do you think of them, what is the meaning of them?

BALLARD: It occurred to me about a year ago that advertising was an unknown continent as far as the writer was concerned, a kind of virgin America of images and ideas, and that the writer ought to move into any area which is lively and full of potential. It occurred to me I had a number of ideas which I could fit into my short stories, my fiction general, but they would be better presented directly. Instead of advertising a product I would advertise an idea. I’ve done three advertisements now, and I hope to carry on. I’m advertising extremely abstract ideas in these advertisements, and this is a very effective way of putting them over. If these ideas were in the middle of a short story people could ignore them. They could just say, ‘It’s Ballard again, let’s get on with the story’. But if they’re presented in the form of an advertisement, like one in Vogue magazine, or Life magazine, people have to look at them, they have to think about them. I hope I can go on, the only problem being the expense. I hope eventually the magazines will pay me to put advertisements in their pages.

STORM: In Ambit – where you’re prose editor – you’ve had a competition for things written under the influence of drugs, but as you admitted yourself in Ambit, the things which came out of it were pretty close to the things that you normally produce in Ambit. Would you comment on this?

BALLARD: Literary competitions never produce anything all that outstanding. Newspapers and magazines for years have been running competitions for the best short story and the best travel story and so on, and the stuff that is sent in is never all that original, or all that exciting. I think the entries we received were interesting, but probably not so much for literary reasons as for biographical reasons, the circumstances in which people write stories, write poetry. This was interesting, and I think it was worth doing. Also, there was a lot of talk at the time about psychedelia, a kind of psychedelic revolution, that a whole lot of new arts were going to be produced, based on or inspired by drugs. And it was interesting to see as a result of the competition that in fact drugs didn’t have all that big an effect, that they’re very much a short cut and a short circuit.

STORM: Well, you’re a well-known admirer of William Burroughs. Would you say that his style has influenced yours?

BALLARD: No, I wish it had. Burroughs and I are completely different writers. I admire him as a writer who in his way has created the landscape of the twentieth century completely as new. He’s produced a kind of apocalyptical landscape, he’s close to Hieronymus Bosch and Bruegel. He’s not a pastoral writer by any means. He’s a writer of the nightmare. I only started reading Burroughs about four years ago, and it may be that he will influence me, I can’t say. But certainly he hasn’t influenced me now, though some people say he has. They’re completely wrong.

STORM: Actually there’s been quite a development in your style of writing. You started out with some quite ordinary stories, and now you have got these ‘condensed novels’, as you call them.

BALLARD: It has been a process of evolution rather than revolution. I wrote a novel called The Drought, after The Drowned World. That was a novel about desert areas. I noticed while I was writing it that I was beginning to explore the geometry of a very abstract kind of landscape and very abstract relationships between the characters. I went on from there to write a short story, ‘The Terminal Beach’, set on Eniwetok, the island in the Pacific where the H-bomb was tested. There again I was starting to look at the characters, and the events of the story, in a very abstract, almost cubist way. I was isolating aspects of character, isolating aspects of the narrative, rather like a scientific investigator taking apart a strange machine to see how it works. My new stories, which I call ‘condensed novels’, stem from ‘The Terminal Beach’. They’re developments of that, but I don’t think there’s been a revolution in what I’ve done. There’s just been a steady change over the years.

STORM: In your new stories you are using actual persons like John F. Kennedy and Elizabeth Taylor and so on. Why?

BALLARD: I feel that the 1960s represent a marked turning point. For the first time, with the end of the Cold War, I suppose, for the first time the outside world, so-called reality, is now almost completely a fiction. It’s a media landscape, if you like. It’s almost completely dominated by advertising, TV, mass-merchandising, politics conducted as advertising. People’s lives, even their individual private lives, are getting more and more controlled by what I call fiction. By fiction I mean anything invented for imaginative purposes. For example, you don’t buy an airline ticket, you don’t just buy transportation, let’s say, to the south of France or Spain. What you buy is the image of a particular airline, the kind of miniskirts the hostesses are wearing on that airline. In fact, airlines in America are selling themselves on this sort of thing.

Also the sort of homes people buy for themselves, the way they furnish their houses, even the way they talk, the friends they have, everything is becoming fictionalised. Therefore, given that reality is now a fiction, it’s not necessary for the writer to invent the fiction. The writer’s relationship with reality is completely the other way around. It’s the writer’s job to find the reality, to invent the reality, not to invent the fiction. The fiction is already there. The greatest fictional characters of the twentieth century are people like the Kennedys. They’re a twentieth-century House of Atreus.

These figures that I use, I don’t use them as individual characters. As I said in one of my stories, the body of a screen actress like Elizabeth Taylor, which one sees on thousands of cinema hoardings, thousands of advertisements every day, and on the movie screen itself, her body is a real landscape. It is as much a real landscape of our lives as any system of mountains or lakes or hills or anything else. So therefore I sought to use this material, this is the fictional material of the 1960s.

STORM: In SF Horizons, Brian Aldiss wrote that ‘Ballard is seldom discussed in fanzines’. Time has certainly proved him wrong, and now you are one of the most discussed people in fandom. What do you think of fandom itself?

BALLARD: I didn’t know that was the case, because I never see any fanzines. I don’t have any contact with fans. My one and only contact with fandom was when I’d just started writing, twelve years ago, when the World Science Fiction Convention was being held in London, in 1957, and I went along to that as a young new writer hoping to meet people who were interested in the serious aims of science fiction and all its possibilities. In fact there was just a collection of very unintelligent people, who were almost illiterate, who had no interest whatever in the serious and interesting possibilities of science fiction. In fact I was so taken aback by that convention that I more or less stopped writing for a couple of years. Since then I’ve had absolutely nothing to do with fans, and I think they’re a great handicap to science fiction and always have been.




1970: Lynn Barber. Sci-fi Seer (#ulink_b5bbd870-4617-5be5-9b59-c6073c166308)


Originally published in Penthouse 5:5, 1970

From 1967 to 1974 journalist Lynn Barber worked for Penthouse, becoming the magazine’s literary editor in the late 1960s, when she discovered New Worlds and the New Wave. This interview was the first of three she would conduct with Ballard over the course of his career, conversations that betrayed their familiarity with each other. In their 1987 interview, she berated Ballard for the unkempt nature of his Shepperton abode, the most prominent in a long line of interviewers baffled by his modest living arrangements. In their 1991 encounter, she provided background to their relationship: ‘When I first knew him in the sixties, he was a familiar, but jolly peculiar, figure on the New Worlds or Arts Lab scene. He was older than most – thirty-something rather than twenty-something – rather obviously public-schooly and ex-RAF, whereas the other sci-fi writers were all beard-and-sandals brigade. He drank whisky while everyone else smoked pot, and often turned up with startlingly famous friends, such as Lucien Freud and Francis Bacon and Eduardo Paolozzi.’ It was in this interview that Barber claimed Ballard liked to show photographs of his girlfriend’s car-crash injuries to party guests, although Ballard later denied this.

By the time of this first interview, Ballard had published The Atrocity Exhibition, which was gathering a good deal of notoriety owing principally to the pulping of the US edition. While it would be three years before his next novel, Crash, he kept himself busy with an array of extra-curricular activities: full page, sexually charged ads in magazines; acting in a surreal short film with Gabrielle Drake, based on Atrocity fragments; attempting a multimedia play based around the car crash; and staging his notorious exhibition of crashed cars, which managed to enrage its audience of drunken guests.

The original Penthouse introduction provides a perfect summation of the early Ballardian manifesto: ‘He talks to Lynn Barber about the space programme, the outlook for science, car crashes, violence and his vision of a deviant sexual future’. [SS]

BARBER: Your books and your pronouncements about science fiction (‘the apocalyptic literature of the twentieth century’ and ‘Outer space is the symbol of inner space’) are miles away from conventional science fiction. Do you consider yourself a sci-fi writer?

BALLARD: Not in the tradition of Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury or even H.G. Wells. But I believe that science fiction is far more than the kind of popular space fiction that had its heyday between 1930 and 1960 and is now pretty well dead. American magazine sci-fi – Arthur C. Clarke and Heinlein and so on – that’s finished. Dammit, we’re living in the year 1970, the science fiction is out there, one doesn’t have to write it any more. One’s living science fiction. All our lives are being invaded by science, technology and their applications. So I believe the only important fiction being written now is science fiction. This is the literature of the twentieth century. I am convinced that in, say, fifty years’ time, literary historians looking back – if they bother, which they may not – will say: ‘You can forget about the social novel, you can forget about everything except sci-fi.’ Even bad sci-fi is better than the best conventional fiction. A ton of Proust isn’t worth an ounce of Ray Bradbury. It’s one hundred years since Verne wrote his Voyage to the Moon. I think it was published in 1870 or thereabouts and they landed on the moon almost one hundred years later to the day, and this is the only literature that matters a damn. Everybody should be forced to read it all the time. It’s true.

BARBER: Did the moon landing mean such a lot to you?

BALLARD: Of course it did. It’s probably the only important thing that has happened in the twentieth century. I had this feeling after they landed on the moon that in a way it gave me the moral right to do anything I wanted, because it didn’t matter what I did. I felt we were like a lot of animals in an abandoned zoo, and that the only important thing that was going to happen in our lifetime had happened. But the spin-off from the space programme – which should have had enormous effects on everybody’s lives, from the way we drive our cars to the way we light our cigarettes – and the effect on people’s imaginations, was absolutely nil. In fact when you think of the hundreds of millions of pounds that the Russians and Americans have invested in the space programme, the real effects of the moon landing could only be described as a gigantic flop, the worst first night in history. I noticed this after the first orbital flights a few years ago: within a day people had totally lost interest in them. How many people, if you asked them, could tell you the names of the men who first orbited the moon, the Christmas of – when was it? – 1968? How many people could tell you the names of those men who recited the extract from the Book of Genesis? Yet it was a fantastic voyage, a triumph of technology, courage, science, organisation, everything.

BARBER: If you think the moon the only important thing likely to happen in your lifetime you presumably have no great expectations of 2001?

BALLARD: We’re ahead of the clock, that’s the whole point. It’s like Buckminster Fuller, you know, saying that World War III is already over and we lost. People aren’t interested in the future any more. The greatest casualty of World War II, I think, was that the past ceased to have moral authority for people, the authority of precedent, tradition, one’s father, social background, everything. That ended with World War II, and thank God. But what has happened in the twenty-five years since then is that the future has become a casualty too. One could say that the moon landing was the death knell of the future as a moral authority. No one thinks that the future is going to be a better place – most people think it’s going to be a worse place. The moral authority of science was colossal in the 1930s. I can remember myself that children’s encyclopedias were loaded with scientific marvels – the greatest bridge in the world, the longest tunnel, the biggest ship, Professor Picard in his stratosphere balloon. But the idea that science was building a bigger and better world ended with Hiroshima and Eniwetok. Now people feel that science may not bring a better world, but a nightmare. Dr Barnard may really be Dr Moreau. Now people are frightened of science and they’re frightened of the future. They no longer feel that because something’s going to happen tomorrow it’s going to be better than today.

So the idea of America is dead, I think, because America was built on the assumption that tomorrow was a better day. The American Dream is the American Nightmare now. I think that’s why American sci-fi of the forties and fifties has come to a full stop. Nobody is writing it any more, no new writers have come into the field, because people don’t accept the authority of the future any more. God knows, the present is infinitely more varied and bizarre and fantastic. People have annexed the future into the present, just as they’ve annexed the past into the present. Now we have the future and the past all rolled into the present – one day you’re wearing Edwardian clothes, the next you’re dressed like an eighteenth-century samurai. One can visualise by, say, the end of the century calendars no longer existing. They won’t be necessary, there’ll be no dates, there won’t be a year 2000, because no one will be interested. And if the proverbial visitor from outer space lands here in the year 2000 (by his calendar, because we won’t have them) he might find himself in anything from Elizabethan England to ancient Rome to Nazi Germany to a Barbarella fantasy of the year 1,000,000 ad.

BARBER: Now you’re making a prediction about the future yourself.

BALLARD: Yes, because we’re still in the dying twilight of tomorrow, we can still see the idea of the future. But my children, or today’s teenagers, they’re not interested in the future. All the possibilities of their lives are contained within a different set of perspectives, an inner life. If you look back over the past ten years you can see a continuous retreat inwards. I coined the expression ‘inner space’ about ten years ago and usually sci-fi writers’ predictions are proven wrong with 100 per cent consistency, but in this one instance I was certainly right: that what you see is the death of outer space, the failure of the moon landing to excite anyone’s imagination on a real level, and the discovery of inner space in terms of sex, drugs, meditation, mysticism. Just look at the career of the Beatles and you see this retreat from the exterior by steady stages, through drugs, then meditation, to a more or less complete involvement with their own bodies. Lennon and Yoko seem to be rediscovering the tactile existence, the organic reality of their own embraces, and it’s very beautiful, I think.

BARBER: If what you say is true, why is there so much science journalism around? Why so many articles on the future of genetic engineering, or heart transplants, or the population explosion?

BALLARD: Most science journalism is really fiction masquerading as fact. Almost anything you care to name nowadays is really fiction, serving someone’s imaginative end, whether it’s a politician’s, or a TV executive’s, or a scientist’s. So-called hard science is now the new show business. Take someone like Desmond Morris, a so-called scientist who is really one of the leading pop entertainers. He’s as much a showbiz performer as John Lennon.

BARBER: What about Barnard?

BALLARD: I think he became show business afterwards. That was where science created its first superstar, the moment Washkansky had his new heart, the first one, that was something unique. I’m sure that most scientific developments in the future are going to be made in the Barnard way. There’ll be no more of the absent-minded professor in his laboratory stumbling on penicillin and taking five years to develop it. No, he’ll be a pushy, ambitious, publicity-oriented scientist who will launch himself not just into the new discovery, but into show business at the same time.

BARBER: Do you also dismiss the sort of science journalism that deals with serious extrapolations of the future, the population explosion, pollution, demographic factors?

BALLARD: This is the Herman Kahn school of distant extrapolation, which I find absolutely meaningless. They say something about the present and they say something about the mind of Herman Kahn, but they don’t say anything about the world fifty years from now, because one simply can’t anticipate. The world rate [sic] changes so fast you don’t need to be much of a mathematician to work out that things will be so different even in ten years’ time that one won’t be able to say anything about them now. It’s like women’s fashion – one can’t even guess what it’ll be like this time next year.

BARBER: Most of your novels and stories seem to be set in the future, and give the impression of a future after the holocaust, after some terrible catastrophe has changed the world.

BALLARD: Well, the facts of time and space are a tremendous catastrophe, aren’t they? Each day millions of cells die in our bodies, others are born. Every time we open a door, every time we look out across a landscape – I’m deliberately trying to exaggerate this – millions of minute displacements of time and space are occurring. One’s living in a continuous cataclysm anyway – our whole existence takes place in the eye of a hurricane.

BARBER: But those changes aren’t a sudden worldwide disaster which would change the character of life on this planet.

BALLARD: Well, look at the events of the last thirty years, the slaughter of human life alone, anything from thirty to fifty million people dead in World War II. World War III, still a possibility, would multiply that figure by ten presumably. That’s one cataclysm that’s already occurred and another that’s possible, of the order of anything invented by science fiction.

BARBER: Are you a pessimist?

BALLARD: I don’t know. Perhaps I’m just being honest. What I’m trying to do is to look at the present and to get away from the notion of yesterday, today, tomorrow.

BARBER: Your latest book, The Atrocity Exhibition, seems to use more personal or autobiographical material than before.

BALLARD: A little more, yes. I mean when I say I want to write fiction for the present, I’m clearly not trying to pretend that I’m not influenced by the past, because we all are to a tremendous degree. Besides, enough time has now elapsed for me to be able to look back. In fact, the setting of The Drowned World, the apartment blocks rising out of the swamp, is like the landscape of immediate post-war China where I was brought up. I was interned during the war in a camp a few miles from Shanghai and I used to look out through the barbed wire across these deserted paddy fields where one saw big abandoned apartment houses of the French Concession surrounded by unbroken areas of water in the sun, especially in the flooding periods. There was a big Japanese airfield adjacent to the camp and it was under attack by the Americans throughout the last year of the war. I’m sure now that was the landscape I used in The Drowned World, though I thought I’d invented it when I was writing the book.

BARBER: As doctors and hospitals figure prominently in your recent stories, perhaps this is a reflection of your early medical training?

BALLARD: Maybe it is. Doing anatomy was an eye-opener: one had built one’s whole life on an illusion about the integrity of one’s body, this ‘solid flesh’. One mythologises one’s own familiar bits of flesh and tendon. Then to see a cadaver on a dissecting table and begin to dissect it myself and to find at the end of term that there was nothing left except a sort of heap of gristle and a clutch of bones with a label bearing some dead doctor’s name – that was a tremendous experience of the lack of integrity of the flesh, and of the integrity of this dead doctor’s spirit. Most cadavers, you know, are donated by doctors; and the doctors can visualise what’s going to happen to their bodies after death, because they’ve done dissection themselves.

BARBER: What happened to your medical training – did you complete it?

BALLARD: No, I didn’t. I guess I learnt enough medicine to cure myself of wanting to be a doctor. That sounds pat but I wanted to be a doctor for neurotic reasons and once I’d got over the neurosis, solved whatever problems I’d had, I found that medicine was a sort of fiction – all that anatomy and physiology. Gray’s Anatomy is the greatest novel of the twentieth century. By comparison with our ordinary experience of our bodies, to read Gray’s Anatomy is to be presented with what appears to be a fantastic fiction, an epic vastly beyond War and Peace and about as difficult to read. This is serious.

BARBER: Does early science training help in writing sci-fi, and must a sci-fi writer get the ‘sci’ part right?

BALLARD: No, one’s not dealing with facts like the boiling point of lead or the density of neon or the precise formula of DDT. The science one’s writing about is the science that comes out of one’s TV tube, the mass magazines, the labels on oral contraceptive wallets, whatever. Just as the novelist, when he’s writing about other people’s emotions, doesn’t have to know the blood pressure of the young woman who’s getting excited by her lover.

BARBER: Actually, you tend to put that sort of fact into your stories.

BALLARD: Because I’m interested in that sort of thing. What I’m talking about, though, is the kind of scientific information that one is accurate about. It’s the technology of everyday life, if you like, and how you use particular kinds of soup mix, what proof a certain brand of whisky is, how much you dilute your car antifreeze.

BARBER: Rather like Len Deighton?

BALLARD: Exactly. I think Deighton is marvellous. His narration is absolutely packed with fact material, and it’s the right fact material. His eye is looking at the right things. I think Fleming did the same before he lapsed into fantasy. He knew exactly what make of camera a Japanese secret agent would carry in Europe, and this is important, because when you go on holiday in Venice or somewhere and you see Japanese wandering round they’re always carrying a particular brand of camera. People’s behaviour all over the world, whatever they’re doing, reflects this kind of technology of everyday life. Mass magazines are based on this kind of expertise – from clothes to furnishings to food to sex to holidays. That’s why the old-fashioned kind of novel is so boring, because it doesn’t relate to all this.

BARBER: Haven’t you said somewhere that the writer is obsolete?

BALLARD: Yes, obsolete in the traditional sense of storyteller. I think most of the people who move across the media landscape – presidents and presidents’ widows, great surgeons, film stars, whatever you like to name – are generating fictions far beyond anything the writer can produce, and they’re more interesting and real because they’re earned out of actual experience.

BARBER: You don’t think, like McLuhan, the writer’s becoming obsolete because people won’t read any more?

BALLARD: They probably won’t read in the future. At the moment they are reading, but they’re reading different things. They’re reading pornographic magazines, a huge range of magazines and periodicals which offer them an instant replay and comment on their own lives. Not books – the technology of the book publisher is so out of date, he hardly has a technology. You think of the idea you want to write about, you take perhaps a year before the book is finished, you then send it through your agent to a publisher and a certain amount of wheeling and dealing goes on. Perhaps a year later – that’s two years after you thought of it – the book is finally published in hardcover. Two years after that it goes into paperback. So it’s four years before a large (so-called large) audience reads the book. Well, that’s the time it takes for a signal to come from the nearest star! So most of my writing is done for magazines because there the feedback of response from editor and readership is much quicker. Also you appear sandwiched between advertisements for motor cars and brassieres and this context is much more exciting than marbled endpapers.

BARBER: This interest in advertising, brand names, etc., seems to echo the pop painters.

BALLARD: Absolutely. I feel a tremendous rapport with pop artists and in a lot of my fiction I’ve tried to produce something akin to pop art. For instance, I’ve just published a piece in New Worlds called ‘Princess Margaret’s Facelift’, in which I’ve taken the text of a classic description of a plastic surgery operation, a facelift, and where the original says ‘the patient’, I’ve inserted ‘Princess Margaret’. So I’ve done precisely what the pop painters did, using images from everyday life – Coca-Cola bottles, Marilyn Monroe – and manipulated them. The great thing about pop painters is their honesty. They’ve turned their backs on the traditional subject matter of the fine arts – which had hardly changed since the Renaissance – and looked at their own environment and decided: yes, the shine on domestic hardware, like the refrigerator or the washing machine, the particular gleam on the mouldings of a cabinet, the moulding of door handles, are of importance to people, because these are the visual landscapes of people’s lives, and if we’re going to be honest we’re going to use reality material instead of fiction. I want to do the same.

BARBER: Have you ever been involved in a car crash – you seem preoccupied with car crashes recently.

BALLARD: No, I’ve never been in one. Serious car crashes take a very long time to recover from, and if I’d been in one I’d probably have a different view of them. But the car crash is probably the most dramatic, perhaps the only dramatic, event in most people’s lives apart from their own death, and in many cases the two will coincide. It’s true people are dying in Vietnam and people are being involved in all kinds of other violence, but in America something like 35,000 people die in car crashes every year, and about 7,000 over here, and about 12,000 in Germany. And the totals are rising. It’s a tremendous dramatic event, fascinating and even exciting. That’s why all safety campaigns which aren’t backed up by penal legislation are doomed to failure.

A car crash harnesses elements of eroticism, aggression, desire, speed, drama, kinaesthetic factors, the stylising of motion, consumer goods, status – all these in one event. I myself see the car crash as a tremendous sexual event really, a liberation of human and machine libido (if there is such a thing). That’s why the death in a crash of a famous person is a unique event – whether it’s Jayne Mansfield or James Dean – it takes place within this most potent of all consumer durables. Aircraft crashes don’t carry any of these elements whatever – they’re totally tragic and totally meaningless. We don’t have any individual rapport because we’re not moving through an elaborately signalled landscape when we go aboard an aircraft: it’s only the pilot who’s moving through that. It’s like people who are good chess players watching top chess players play chess. When one player defeats another, the good chess player understands what has happened, whereas you and I wouldn’t have a clue.

Really, it’s not the car that’s important: it’s driving. One spends a substantial part of one’s life in the motor car and the experience of driving condenses many of the experiences of being a human being in 1970, the marriage of physical aspects of ourselves with the imaginative and technological aspects of our lives. I think the twentieth century reaches just about its highest expression on the highway. Everything is there, the speed and violence of our age, its love of stylisation, fashion, the organisational side of things – what I call the elaborately signalled landscape.

BARBER: Surely the twentieth-century image ought to be something like a computer?

BALLARD: I don’t see that. Computers may take over that role in fifty years’ time, but they certainly don’t play it now. Most people have no first-hand contact with computers yet. My bank balance may be added and subtracted by a computer but I’m not aware of it.

BARBER: How do people respond to your car crash theory? How did they react to your exhibition of crashed cars at the New Arts Lab this spring?

BALLARD: People used words like ‘cynical’ or ‘perverse’ or ‘sick’. There’s a whole series of subjects people are not really honest about. Violence is another one. Most people take the view – I would myself – that violence is wholly bad whatever form it takes, whether it’s the huge violence of Vietnam or the violence of, say, police brutality. But the point is that we’re also excited by violence, and if we are attracted to it, it may be for good reasons. If we were honest about the Vietnams of the world, the real appeal of these events, we’d see them in a totally new light and they might never happen again.

Honesty always enriches our lives, just as it has in the area of sex. I think it’s good to explore it, to find out why Mondo Cane movies are such tremendous successes, why the newsstands of Japan and America are loaded with sadistic literature. Obviously this serves some sort of role. Conrad said: ‘Immerse yourself in the most destructive element’ – if you can swim, fine. I just want to know why people need violence and how can one come to terms with this thing. The Vietnam War clearly fulfils certain needs and one must be honest and work out what they are. We’ve all taken part in this war, given the tremendous TV coverage; we’re all combatants.

BARBER: Surely the point is that we’re not being shot, we’re just enjoying the show.

BALLARD: Absolutely right. The important thing is that it is a show. All of us have made the world in which we live – we’re not forced to watch the newsreels on television, we don’t have to look at the pictures in illustrated magazines. This war, if it is a show, is a show at which we are the paying audience, let’s remember that. All I’m saying is that one ought to be honest about one’s responses. People didn’t in fact feel the kind of automatic revulsion to the Biafra war that they were told they should feel. They were stirred, excited, involved. It may be that one needs a certain sort of salt in one’s emotional diet.

BARBER: Perhaps these overexcited responses come from leading sheltered lives?

BALLARD: Everybody has a sheltered life. Life in northern Europe is particularly sheltered. What’s the old quotation by Villiers de L’Isle-Adam: ‘As for living, our servants can do that for us’. Living is one of the most boring things one can do. The really exciting things, the most interesting experiences, go on inside one’s head, within those areas covered by the intelligence and imagination. It’s not particularly interesting to go to the supermarket and buy six TV dinners, or have your car filled up with petrol, or shuffle up an airline escalator queue. It’s much more interesting, let’s say, to think about those things.

BARBER: That could apply to sex as well.

BALLARD: Right. I believe that organic sex, body against body, skin area against skin area, is becoming no longer possible simply because if anything is to have any meaning for us it must take place in terms of the values and experiences of the media landscape, the violent landscape – this sort of Dionysiac landscape of the 1970s. That is why I bring in things like the car crash. A whole new kind of psychopathology, the book of a new Krafft-Ebing, is being written by such things as car crashes, televised violence, the new awareness of our own bodies transmitted by magazine accounts of popular medicine, by reports of the Barnard heart transplants, and so on.

There’s a new textbook of psychopathology being written, and the old perversions are dead. They relate to a bygone age. A fantasy like a man dressing his wife in a gymslip and beating her belongs to the past. What we’re getting is a whole new order of sexual fantasies, involving a different order of experiences, like car crashes, like travelling in jet aircraft, the whole overlay of new technologies, architecture, interior design, communications, transport, merchandising. These things are beginning to reach into our lives and change the interior design of our sexual fantasies. We’ve got to recognise that what one sees through the window of the TV screen is as important as what one sees through a window on the street. But I don’t mean exclusively television when I talk about the communications landscape: I mean every facet of one’s experience through newspapers, magazines, television. If you take something like travelling by aircraft to Paris, it’s a very fictional experience. One’s actual physical experience of going from London to Paris by air is completely overlaid by advertising and commercial and fashion concepts.

BARBER: Who or what controls this sort of experience?

BALLARD: Well, it’s a democratic world. It’s controlled by the people who design the handrails of airport stairways, who design hostesses’ dresses – the smiles the hostesses give you are themselves a kind of fictionalised smile based on an image of the sort of smile they should give us. Nothing is spontaneous, everything is stylised, including human behaviour. And once you move into this area where everything is stylised, including sexuality, you’re leaving behind any kind of moral or functional relevance. I mean, this is the thing about the pill – not that it gives women freedom, because it doesn’t – but it removes the orientation provided by the reproductive impulse so that, let’s say, there’s no longer any reason why intercourse per vagina should be any more satisfying or any more desirable or any more right, morally or organically, than say intercourse per anus, per navel or armpit or anywhere else you care to dream up. This is serious. In fact, women may not be necessary anyway, just as men may not be necessary to women. With various electronic aids – closed-circuit TV, videotape feedback and so on – one can see sexuality extended into a whole series of new perversions, new unions.

When people travel, have more experiences and meet more people, they tend to have more sexual experience – as they would have more meals. I feel that so-called normal sexuality (if there ever was such a thing), i.e. heterosexual relationships oriented around genital sex of a reproductive character, which sustained people through most of their adult lives in the past, will probably in future be exhausted within a few years. People may well go through a phase of their young lives, say their late teens and early twenties, when their sex lives take place in genital terms and they have children, but that will be the adolescent stage. One’s real puberty will be reached when one moves into the area of, let’s say, conceptualised sex, when sex is between you and a machine, or between you and an idea.

BARBER: When sex becomes so totally detached from any genital procedure, it surely ceases to be sex and just means pleasure. In those terms, food is sex.

BALLARD: Exactly. The analogy is with food. Apart from economic and minor religious obstacles, there’s been unlimited freedom to explore every avenue and byway imaginable, and some of the greatest delicacies world cuisine can offer couldn’t be farther removed from the basic nutritional requirements of the human body. I’m talking about frogs’ legs, bird’s nest soup, etc. Eventually, conventional sex is the first of the new perversions. Just as you would think it odd to meet an intelligent adult who ate tapioca three times a day, though nutritionally it’s perfectly sound (and it’s the staple diet of the Polynesians), so I think in future we’ll regard people who only have conventional sex as odd. People will begin to explore all the side streets of sexual experience, but they will do it intellectually – there won’t be any kind of compulsion to become, let’s say, a high-heel fetishist – which is a monomaniac impulse. Just as recipes are now given on TV for making a veal escalope, so in twenty years’ time TV will offer nightly new sexual experiments and deviations, and we’ll put them into practice. Sex won’t take place in the bed, necessarily – it’ll take place in the head. And in a sense the head is a much richer place than the bed. Well, it is!




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