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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.
