JG Ballard, 1930–2009: We Are All Ballardians Now

Original covers for Ballard's Concrete Island (1974) and High-Rise (1975)

I will not be alone among sf writers when I say that JG Ballard was, for me, the one. He was the one who showed me how radical, how relevant, and how dangerous fantastic fiction could be. He had little time for the fictions of space travel or problem-solving so popular in the early sixties when his first pieces came out. He was more interested in problems that could not be solved: the darkness and perversity of human sexuality; the disconnect between reason and the irrational projects to which reason is applied; the paradox between the twentieth century’s cheeriness about the future and the constant erosion of human interaction that went along with it—a loneliness embedded especially in the architecture to which he always paid such great attention.

His books and stories influenced me so much that it took years to shake off that “clinical” Ballardian voice that he used like a scalpel to cut away and hold up for public inspection the most pathological cultural tumors of the twentieth century. The scalpel wasn’t the right tool for me and I’m better off now that I’ve left it behind. But words can’t say how much I loved to see it in action.

Take these tidbits from a piece called “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan,” originally published in 1967:

Subjects were required to construct the optimum auto disaster victim by placing a replica of Reagan’s head on the unretouched photographs of crash fatalities.

In 82% of cases massive rear-end collisions were selected with a preference for expressed fecal matter and rectal hemorrhages. Further tests were conducted to define the optimum model-year. These indicate that a three year model lapse with child victims provide the maximum audience excitation (confirmed by manufacturers’ studies of the optimum auto disaster). It is hoped to construct a rectal modulous of Reagan and the auto disaster of maximized audience arousal.

Astounding, yes. Difficult, of course. And so offensive in its combination of cryobiotic Freudian jargon with outright political prophesy that Nelson Doubleday had the entire print run of The Atrocity Exhibition shredded in 1970 when he happened to come across it. Yet no piece of “flash fiction”—which is I guess how WIWTFRR would be categorized today—has struck me as more original in its use of language or more insurrectionary in its disrespect for authority. And who else writes with a greater understanding of science—not the basic grasp of astrophysics that is so often privileged in sf, but real familiarity with experimental design, standard science writing, and the leaping enthusiasm with which science and marketing are joined?

It’s easy to forget, considering the far-out circle of surrealist sculptors and famous novelists Ballard ran with, that he did not come to his experimentalism through privilege and leisure. Ballard and his wife Helen had three children before she died suddenly of pneumonia in 1964, and he subsequently raised those children as a single father. All those carefully composed early stories and novels, then, were written in stolen moments while the kids were at school.

And precisely as other intellectuals and artists were fleeing the suburbs for the supposed excitement and stimulation of the city, Ballard insisted that the cities were relics of the past. In a way he was wrong; cities worldwide are growing hugely and half the world’s population was urban for the first time in history in 2007. Yet the suburbs indeed set the tone for the political and artistic landscape of the US and Britain in the second half of the twentieth century, and Ballard was among the few to see it coming, document it, and even—in a strange, ambiguous way—celebrate it. With the ability to look beyond snobbery and take interest in everyday life that characterized all his work, he moved to Shepperton, a suburb of London, in 1960. As far I know, he never moved away, and suburban life would later inform his novels of middle-class violence and unrest: Cocaine Nights, Super-Cannes, and Kingdom Come.

The implicit psychopathology of the well-trimmed suburban lawn was not Ballard’s only application of insight to the ordinary. He had an uncanny ability to focus on important yet unspoken cultural fault lines. In Crash, Vaughn’s pursuit of high-velocity sexual kicks underlined the murky fetishistic sexuality that props up our love of powerful machines. In Memories of the Space Age, a nostalgic astronaut’s story assaults the notion of space travel as heroic, casting it instead as a kind of mental disorder. And in “Zodiac 2000,” a short experimental piece that’s one of my favorites, Ballard updates the signs of the zodiac with symbols more relevant to the modern reader: the sign of the Intra-Uterine Device, the sign of the psychopath, the sign of the clones, the sign of the psychiatrist.

What I love about that is Ballard’s understanding that myth-making doesn’t belong to the past. It feels strange to replace the Chaldeans’ ancient sky-symbols of destiny with mundane images from our lives today, but it also feels satisfying, empowering, sexy, and somehow necessary. This is why Ballard struck a chord with so many artists; in a way that I can compare only with the Velvet Underground, Ballard’s creativity was contagious, and his artistic descendants include author Bruce Sterling, filmmaker David Cronenberg, the bands Joy Division and Radiohead (whose singer, Thom Yorke, posted excerpts from Kingdom Come to the band’s blog before In Rainbows came out). And that’s just to name a few. To the extent we actually notice the concrete underpasses and abandoned buildings we see around us, we are all Ballardians now.

Ballard was a kind of advance scout for our society, running ahead and sketching a map of plausible future territories we might come across. But instead of fetishizing the territories, Ballard took a warmer approach and focused on what they would mean for our moods, our relationships, our psychological stability. His fictions helped many of us to blink, open our eyes, and see the strangeness of the things we take for granted; to see, more specifically, how our modern, technology-saturated lives emerge from the clash of desire and rationality that twists within our own heavy skulls.

I hope that we will return to his work frequently, see it for all its flaws and brilliance, and keep discussing it. But I also hope we’ll do Ballard an even greater honor and continue writing in the tradition he founded. For Ballard was a child of World War II and a man of the twentieth century. His most famous experiences, which helped him become such a special writer, were quintessentially twentieth-century ones: the childhood months in a Japanese internment camp, the training with the Royal Air Force, the social upheaval of London in the 1960s.

He must have been curious about the emergent and uniquely twenty-first century situations, but they aren’t fully developed in his writing. I suspect he was simply too sick and too tired to address them: the Internet, with its unprecendented ability to connect and disconnect; the new city, that global agglomeration of luxury condos and slums; and the new military technology, which is all about searching and killing by remote control.

Perhaps the best toast to Ballard’s memory, then, is to remember the great courage and the playful willingness to exaggerate he brought to the situations he knew, and then to bring them—in our own style—to whatever is just around the corner. For Ballard was not just a great writer; he was the founder of a literary tradition. He insisted on full engagement with the contemporary and the everyday, even when the everyday seemed boring at first glance. He insisted on looking deeply over the spaces most eyes skip over, and finding a way to give them meaning. He insisted on the rejection of older generations’ concept of drama—a highly political demand that literature keep the spotlight focused on the present and soon-to-be-present.

This tradition deserves to live on, and I’m confident that Ballard inspired enough love and admiration among his readers to ensure that it does.