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"A thousand cerise and cyclamen lights…"
Author: Simon Sellars • Jul 9th, 2006 •Category: Ballardosphere, dystopia, utopia
The Wikipedia entry for Ballard features a discussion about whether Ballard’s work is dystopian or not. In response, Umberto says “Mah, I don’t care about discussion: Ballard is not a dystopian author, period. Maybe in some short story I have read and forgotten or never read… but in all his SF stuff he ain’t like that. Dystopian is Orwell, Zamjatin, Huxley, Dick (sometime), Atwood… Ballard was apocalyptic, and that ain’t the same ballpark & ain’t the same league.”
In response to Umberto, Rick says “dystopias are the opposite of utopias. dystopic novels are works of fiction describing an imaginary place where life is extremely bad because of deprivation or oppression or terror (I got that from ’sherlock’ on my mac). sherlock also says apocalyptic novels are ‘prophetic of devastation or ultimate doom’. dunno about you, but I can find both into JGB’s stuff — but the trick is how JGB deals with it… or seems to mix the two… then muddies the water by having his characters find themselves in the midst of devastation and doom. I’m not sure he’s either… and that’s the power of death of effect.”
In response to Rick’s statement that “dystopias are the opposite of utopias”, Tim says: “Can I be pedantic and point out that this antonymic definition is largely based on the confusion between the Greek-derived prefixes ‘u-’ (no – ie, ‘utopia’ = ‘no place’) and ‘eu-’ (good or well – eg ‘euphoria’, as opposed to ‘dysphoria’)? My dictionary (New Oxford) meanwhile defines dystopia as: ‘an imagined place or state in which everything is unpleasant or bad, typically a totalitarian or environmentally degraded one.’ And that certainly ain’t what Ballard’s about”.
And I say that while Ballard has flirted with dystopia — ‘The Subliminal Man’, for instance — by and large, how can any author whose characters have as much fun as Ballard’s be branded ‘dystopian’?
Of course, I could change the article myself but life’s too short to engage in a protracted edit war on Wikipedia.
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Why the big need to pidgeonhole? By defining you lose much of the magic.
agree… which is why the dystopian label shouldn’t be applied to ballard — as you suggest, his work defies categorisation.
I suspect there is a confusion here. The formal constraints of the dystopian genre clearly do not apply to Ballard’s work, he’s far too slippery for that. However the concept of (dys)topia as a topos, a (bad) place in space and time, could be said to apply to the way in which Ballard uses his settings. Spaces, such as the High Rise, or the Metrocentre, or the Eden-Olympia could be said to be somewhat malevolant in nature. The suburban nightmare spaces, Ballard’s distorted versions of outer London, are certainly unsettling visions. Malevolant spaces = bad places = dystopian settings? Experimentations with utopia (eutopia) building and utopia building gone wrong also seem to be a recurrent themes – for instance the god-like Blake in The Unlimited Dream Company (dreams and utopia), the pleasure dome of the Metro-centre, or the Eden-Olympia. Whether Ballard disapproves or approves of such experimentation is uncertain. As such they consitute a theme but cannot be said to formally comply with utopian or anti-utopian generic constraints. The settings might be dystopian in nature but the way in which the narrative functions certainly is not.