The panel. From left to right: Sellars, Sterling, Vale, Costa. Photo by Martí Pons, courtesy CCCB 2008.

“Hello Barcelona. I hope everyone there is enjoying the show, if I’m allowed to call it that. Vale is taking charge of everything, and I leave him to represent me.”

J.G. Ballard, from Vale’s opening video.

Two years ago, I appeared on a panel, ‘Myths of a Near Future’, with writer Bruce Sterling and V. Vale of RE/Search Publications to discuss the work of J.G. Ballard. Held at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB) as part of the Kosmopolis 08 literary festival, the panel was chaired by the Spanish critic Jordi Costa, the driving force behind the CCCB’s magnificent ‘JG Ballard – Autopsy of the new millennium‘ exhibition.

Jordi began with a Spanish-language introduction, and then Vale followed with a 15-minute video detailing his relationship and collaborations with Ballard. Jordi’s questions were in Spanish, and they were translated for us and the audience via earpiece. Our friend Tim Chapman was in the audience and he has kindly transcribed the discussion from his recording, although his Spanish was not sufficient to recall Jordi’s questions in English.

So here it is, two years late, but hopefully still of interest: ‘Myths of a Near Future’.

Jordi Costa: [a question about the definition of 'Ballardian']

Bruce Sterling: I’m of the school who believes JG Ballard really is a science fiction writer, and I think he made very wise choices in the sciences he was interested in. He did in fact work on this engineering and technology publication for quite a while. He was famous for saying that the rubbish can of science was the gold mine of science fiction. That’s certainly something I learned a lot from. But while a lot of science fiction writers were interested in topics like space flight and robots and atomic power and nuclear physics, Ballard was always interested in medicine, and psychotherapy, and extremes of human behaviour, and hysteria, and panic, and weapons.

I think his chosen scientific topics had more literary value than the ones that were chosen by his colleagues in science fiction. That’s why his work has lasted, and that’s why he was able to capture something about the nature of society that lets us use terms like ‘Ballardian’. He just had a better literary understanding than most of his colleagues, a better set of tools, deeper insights that were better expressed, and that’s why he’s a major cultural figure while most science fiction writers are genre writers.

Sellars, Sterling, Vale, Costa. Photo by Martí Pons, courtesy CCCB 2008.

Costa: [another question about the definition of 'Ballardian']

Simon Sellars: I think the adjective ‘Ballardian’ will become immortal, because I think that, to take what Bruce has said about the way Ballard turned from the traditional notion of science fiction from outer space to inner space, I think that was a very prophetic move. He saw the way technology was heading. There’s a famous phrase of his that he wanted to explore the next five minutes rather than the next 500 years. To me, that says that he saw that technology was creating a turning inward in a psychological sense. He saw the democratisation of technology, in terms of technology that – in a phrase of Bruce’s from the cyberpunk era – would stick to the skin rather than being something else. He would write about this stuff rather than the modernist aesthetic of rockets and outer space. I think that was a very prophetic move.

Also, he saw the way that we’re entering this globally homogeneous space, a sort of eventless present as he likes to call it, where you virtually can go to any country in the world. He talks about the areas around motorways and airports as a metaphor for this homogeneous space, and I think he saw the implications of where this is all heading. He also reacted against it, so I see his work as a resistance against this sort of corporate culture, and against the drive of, I guess, late capitalism to classify and categorise everything.

To me, the most important thing about Ballard is providing this space that he evokes, that preservation of inner spaces and autonomous zones. I’ve been reading a lot of mainstream newspaper articles recently, talking about the colonisation of inner space and the way we’re really crowded with information. The terms that were used and the arguments they were making were the things that Ballard was talking about in the ’60s. In that sense, I’d say there was this philosophy of resistance to a political culture. To me, that’s a sort of ideal for living.

Costa: [a question about future perceptions of Ballard]

Sterling: I think what you’re asking there is, like, is his work due to date because he’s a period figure. No, I don’t think so. Like the work of William Burroughs, there are aspects of Ballard’s work which will be very frightening and even astonishing to people in a hundred years. It’s true that some things that he foresaw have become everyday things among us, but there are aspects of Ballard’s work which are really intensely visionary and are never going to be seen in everyday experience, like say The Crystal World disaster novel, or something goes wrong with the structure of time and people are overwhelmed by this cosmic disaster. As a young man, that was one of the touchstones of my literary experience – it’s by no means a realist novel, but it had a really powerful, emotional, liberating effect on me as a teenager, just because it was showing me the scope of things that it’s possible to imagine.

Ballard has a tremendous power of imagination which the passage of time is not going to be able to dim. There are topics of his which will become out-dated, like Marilyn Monroe or John F Kennedy that are going to be period figures. In a way he’s a lot like Kafka – even though Kafka writes about the experience of the 1930s, when we say ‘Kafkaesque’, we know what that means, that no real bureaucracy will be as ideally horrible as a Kafka bureaucracy, no disaster (although we have plenty) can ever be as ecstatic and total as a Ballard disaster.

Costa: [a question about the Ballardian implications of the global financial crisis]

V. Vale: You know, Ballard is a very wise man in his judgement, and I’m thinking that of course when he starts taking in the input of information about the financial crisis, what is he thinking about. He’s not really thinking about himself, he’s thinking about the welfare of his children and grandchildren, I think. Also, he knows who his audience is. I’m also a parent. This may sound strange, but he actually heartened me with his response. He more or less said to me, regarding the current state of financial chaos, downturn, whatever you call it – he said you know, I remain optimistic. I was really happy about that, regardless of whether there’s any foundation or not.

I think it is important to preserve a sense of optimism and hope. In many situations, I think, one can only hope. There certainly isn’t any point in just becoming very depressed, because that takes away your power, especially the power of your imagination which Ballard himself has demonstrated and incarnated in his life. He walks down the street and every time he does, it might be the same street but the street is transformed in his imagination. This is something we can all do – we don’t have to take reality at face value. There has to be another dimension of inner space and inner strength we can tap, and that’s got to be built up in each one of us by a sustained exercise – daily, hourly, minutely – of the imagination. Please, never take anything at face value, you never accept any of these mass media notions of reality.

Sellars: I think that’s true, and that’s why Ballard’s books are optimistic. It’s a misreading when people say they’re a negative vision of the world – you hear that so often about Ballard’s work. But for the reasons you say, the characters are trying to make sense of chaos, and that transforms the world.

Sterling: I completely agree. He is a fantasist, he’s not a realist writer. I find his work attractive because of the sense of liberation and inspiration and release that he gives me. Really, as a young man of imaginative bent, when I was reading these early books of Ballard in the 1960s, I was never depressed or upset by them for a moment. To me, they were one torrent of good news. They were like sunlight through a [brick?] wall in the existence I had as a young teen in a small Texan industrial town.

This is someone who really is a grand master of the imagination. Yes, he does have black humour, and yes he very much enjoys pulling the legs of the bourgeoisie, he likes to make harsh jokes at the expense of power figures, and he’s really a clinician of the psychopathology of everyday life. There are a lot of things that people do in our society which are irrational and bad for us. He had a great deal of personal experience of that, and there are aspects of his own experience which are universal.

Sellars, Sterling, Vale, Costa. Photo by Martí Pons, courtesy CCCB 2008.

He’s not a tremendously popular figure, he’s not the author of Harry Potter, but he’s by no means a minor figure. Certainly, in the circle of American science fiction writers of my generation – cyberpunks and humanists and so forth – this was a towering figure. We used to have bitter struggles over who was more Ballardian than whom. We knew we were not fit to polish the man’s boots, and we were scarcely able to understand how we could get to a position to do work which he might respect or stand, but at least we were able to see that the peak of achievement that he had reached. It was not like the slough of despond, that’s just a rhetorical tactic.

To call Ballard depressing, it’s like a Christian fundamentalist who says ‘If I didn’t believe Jesus was watching me, I’d kill myself’ who then argues that therefore you must be suicidal because you don’t have Jesus to help you make breakfast. You’re not suicidal if you understand JG Ballard. On the contrary, this guy’s a consummate survivor. Burroughs and his friends and the beatnik movement had a tremendous casualty list, whereas Ballard and his friends in the British New Wave movement and the Pop Art scene were actually fairly solid, well-balanced if unconventional individuals – people with jobs and children, they were not reedy figures. This is a towering oak tree of a writer, who wrote many volumes of consistently good, accomplished work.

Many science fiction writers have – even [Homer?] nods, it’s common for a writer to do something unworthy of himself and you have to overlook that. In Ballard’s case, I can’t think of a single work. Even his minor work is very polished, very assured – he’s never hasty, he’s a consummate professional, he’s really in charge of every sentence on the page. It’s really no accident that he’s being honoured at this event. I must say that I am enjoying the show, as he urged me to do, it’s a lot of fun to see this happen.

Vale: I think another thing about Ballard is, during my 32 years in publishing I’ve pretty much concentrated on the interview or the conversation format for a very simple reason. You don’t give the questions in advance, and you just use your intuition to listen carefully and observe how the author responds in real-time to something completely unexpected and how they improvise answer. You’re not even improvising if you’re JG Ballard, this is just coming out of you without pause.

Really, the amount of editing I’ve had to do on all the people I’ve recorded and transcribed, the amount of editing was absolutely the least I’ve ever had to do with JG Ballard and, of course, William S Burroughs. Their conversations are practically extensions of their writing. I wish we could all be like that.

Sellars: Vale, can I ask did you get the sense through the interviews that Ballard was testing ideas that he would later come back to in his writing?

Vale: I don’t think he tests, I really think there’s almost a perfect marriage in his soul between – as soon as he starts talking and thinking and expressing himself, it’s beyond some rational process level. It’s just coming out, he has such an incredibly detailed and complete philosophy, such an evolved vision of the universe, unlike most of us he doesn’t have to censor himself or choose his words carefully or any of that, it just comes out. One reason I like him so much is because you really think that he’s considering your feelings, you really think that unlike 99 per cent of writers out there, he just tells the truth. I can’t explain it any other way. I mean, how rare is that?

Costa: [unknown question]

Sterling: Well, I wouldn’t call Crash a jolly book by any means. It’s a very sinister work which is well informed by a deep understanding of human psychopathology. In some ways, it’s like expecting a medical textbook to be optimistic. If you read a medical textbook, it’s usually a long list of terrible things that can go wrong with people. By the time you reach the end of a medical textbook, you’re looking at yourself for symptoms – is it my liver, could it be my eyeballs?

I don’t think that work in itself is a happy work, but when you put it down the sense of escaping that world gives you a strange uplifted feeling. It’s like being subjected to a really violent massage, something on the edge of pain, and when it stops you have this sense of achievement and joy. It’s like, what’s the worst thing that can happen to me during the rest of my life? Will I be involved in a sexual cult involving crashed automobiles? Probably not, you know, and that’s another reason to go on.

Vale: A writer often takes you – if you have an idea or a fantasy, I think you ought to take it to the utmost limit. It’s only writing, it’s not real life. In writing, you can kill people, you can do sexual things that you might not do in real life, but it’s just writing, it’s just words on paper. I think you have a duty to yourself to carry an obsession, any obsession is valid, to its utmost extension in writing, on paper, in the realm of the imagination – I’m not saying to do any of that in real life.

Ballard and Vale, in a still from Vale’s opening video. Photo by Martí Pons, courtesy CCCB 2008.

Sterling: I really don’t think that’s the ultimate extension of this particular problem. There are probably people in Nascar who are worse off than the characters in that. There are probably fans of monster racers in the United States who are more psychopathological than the characters in Crash.

To me, the thing that I find really useful about that book is that most science fiction writers, if you asked them to write science fiction about cars, would write about, say, a flying car or a car that’s also a submarine. They would not write about an intense psychosexual fixation with cars, or the car as another method of being, or people who are so dependent on cars they can’t get through a day without cars. They certainly would not illuminate the truth about cars, which is they kill more of us than wars.

There’s probably not a person in this audience who hasn’t had a loved one injured or maimed or killed in a car. That’s just the truth about cars, but we are very rarely shown that truth. Certainly not by the car industry. Sometimes there will be a mention of car safety in a car commercial, like your child is safe in the back seat, but you will never see a major car company of any description, from Fiat to Toyota or General Motors, apologising to the people who die in their vehicles, any more than you would see an armaments manufacturer saying, you know, I’m sorry people were killed by handguns. But it’s true. It’s not even like sort of true, it’s kind of like a vast open scandal in our society that so many of us are murdered, I mean just slaughtered, by cars.

Sellars: But it’s very ambiguous with Ballard, isn’t it, because he’s also aware of the seductive nature of cars and technology and speed.

Sterling: Well, we love our cars. But there’s something wrong with a society that is so in love with something so destructive. I don’t even know if it is wrong, it’s a statement about the nature of mankind that we love that which destroys us. We’re more interested in poisonous snakes than we are in rabbits, we’re fascinated by things with the potential for menace, we find them arousing and exciting. The same goes for political leaders. Really, someone who promises to simply pave our streets and look after our children will be immediately thrown aside for a person who promises us blood and sweat and tears and toil and death and a sense of exultation. Ballard talks about this openly many times, about the attractive psychopathology of cult leaders. They have command over us because they can tap into our urge to harm ourselves, and we do.

Costa: [a question about Ballard's methods]

Vale: Well, there’s a huge component of theatre in everyone’s life. Ballard was the first that I read to point out how the invention and widespread adoption of the cellphone has led to almost everyone becoming a sort of actor. As they talk on their cellphones in public, they’re acting a lot of the time, with their gestures, and it is kind of shocking to me how cellphone users will talk about the most intimate details of their lives while other people can overhear them.

The thing is, what a book can do, it can, like, let you know in a pretty universalising way that you’re not alone in any of your sexual fantasies or whatever, no matter how extreme you might have thought them. Your participation, even if just in your imagination, with these theatrical fantasies, you’re just not alone. I suppose it’s a form of justification to make your life easier for you. We do look to writers, I think, for help in navigating very perplexing times such as now when we have so many options for everything in our lives. What are some core values which can last when we’re assaulted with so many contradictory media images, and they’re usually either sexual or violent in nature, how do you sustain some kind of inner compass or barometer so we can survive all this?

Left: Bruce Sterling. Photo by Martí Pons, courtesy CCCB 2008.

Sterling: Some of Ballard’s greatest inspirations were surrealists in the 30s and pop artists in the 60s, and they were both very big on the power of the unconscious and the libido and urges which did not surface within consciousness. There was an ideal there that if you could speak to these urges directly and break the code of bourgeois behaviour and liberate something deep.

Ballard is not a sex writer in the way that say Henry Miller was a sex writer, I don’t really think that’s one of his major interests. He mentions it, he’s kind of deploying it in the way that Max Ernst might put a nude in a collage, but there aren’t really long intimate sex scenes in Ballard novels, he’s not really that interested in what happens between individuals. It’s more like his lasting interest in celebrity worship, which is something that shows up in his work all the time. It’s like some kind of very intense social, emotional, sticky and vaguely unhealthy allegiance between people’s unmet emotional needs and a figure like Jackie Kennedy or Marilyn Monroe or Princess Di. It’s somebody you’re never going to actually have sex with, but it’s somebody who’s going to come up in your erotic imaginations sort of like the Loch Ness Monster.
That’s the kind of thing that Ballard finds as a totem and a touchstone. He’s kind of deploying these things against us – he wants us to disrupt our sleep with these images, he’s not trying like Miller to get to the core of the erotic impulse, that’s not really his major line of work.

Sellars: He also foresaw that whole anti-celebrity thing, that celebrities now don’t have the lustre or starpower they used to. Those surgical fictions with Princess Margaret and Mae West where it’s cutting up these celebrities in a very clinical medical way, it’s very prophetic of the end of that particular paradigm.

Sterling: I’ve been saying Paris Hilton is a very Ballardian figure. Here you have somebody whose major reason for being a celebrity is this kind of unsought sexual transgression which was blown up through the media. It’s not really like that fantastic an act of sex that Paris Hilton has, it’s not like she’s a sexual athlete of some kind, it’s merely that she’s a minor celebrity who became a major celebrity and was able to work it, to industrialise that and build upon it with the perfume and the record and clothing line and the Los Angeles celebrity life, really just construct a life out of elements of 1960s transgression.

Costa: [unknown question]

Sellars: It’s a kind of system of circular time that Ballard uses, that sort of eventless present that’s always a symbol of oppression in Ballard’s work. He reuses events from history and his own personal history and re-inhabits them and re-interprets them throughout his whole career, and I think that’s a very liberating force as well. It becomes a sort of parallel history in a sense, something that runs counter to the main narrative.

Sterling: I think Ballard knows a great deal about the work of the surrealists in the 20s and 30s. So much so, that he is almost a surrealist writer. He quite frequently chose surrealist canvases for his own work, and they make a lot of sense. I think he also has a deep knowledge of modernist design and urbanism and architecture. He’s very aware of the roots of that in the 20s and 30s and how it developed, and the successes of the modernist programme and the failures of modernism, and the oncoming and rush of postmodernism. To be a good futurist, you need some kind of roots in the past. I think those are his roots, and those are the things he was looking at when he was quite young and he really is a scholar in those fields, and I think that has helped him a lot in his prognostications.

Left: Simon Sellars. Photo by Martí Pons, courtesy CCCB 2008.

Costa: [a question about Ballard's influence on visual art]

Sellars: I think it’s like Bruce and Vale have said, that Ballard has a surrealist background, has a very visual mindset. I think that aside from using that to explore his ideas of the subconscious and inner space, I think that in the 60s he saw how advertising was becoming basic in how we were shifting towards a visual culture. He has sort of encoded this into his writing. As we’re starting to see this happen, I think that aspect of his work is becoming more and more influential and people are really picking up on that.

He is a visual person to the extent that he’s created his own collages, he’s starred in his own film, and I think he was working on a theatre play in the 60s, so he was really interested in breaking the frame of his fiction to create something that was in a sense a prototype for a multi-media society, and he was doing that a long time ago. If you look at that visual work that Ballard did today, the collages, they’re still very strong graphic works that really re-use the tricks of advertising against itself. When I started up the website, that’s an aspect that really interested me a lot, and we started to find a lot of examples of people who were really quite influenced by that. We’re still continuing to find a lot of people who are really influenced by that aspect.

Sterling: I think he has a great friendliness for the artist. Like his short story collection Vermilion Sands is set in a future art colony and he takes artistic work seriously. I think artists and musicians respond to that. When they find a novelist who thinks that painters are important, they think well of him. Whereas most science fiction writers are much more in love with scientists than they are with artists, Ballard is the kind of guy who would actually go hang out with pop artists and go to their openings and befriend them and be kind to them and chat things over with them and learn with them and trade things with them. He was never a philistine, he’s actually quite sophisticated in that way, and still has the dapper look of a ’60s pop artist gentleman in his neat little kitted-out white suit and snappy white fedora. He’s won the friendship of people in other lines of work.

Vale: He has constructed a whole universe and whole world, and the world always needs a soundtrack. What would this be – it would not be something mainstream so much as something unusual. Grace Jones at one end and you could have Joy Division at the other, and in the middle there’s the Teddy Bears Picnic. The thing is, the spectrum of music is – I have to confess I’m going to reveal a small secret, I hope she doesn’t mind, but Claire Walsh [Ballard's partner] did tell me that she suggested one of the numbers on the [Desert Island Discs] list, one of the 10 pieces on the list was actually suggested by Claire Walsh as a sort of prank. They certainly puzzled me, those two classical pieces, which is where it’s at to me. You always want to have an aspect of mystery about everything you do, even if it’s by chance that something happens. I think Ballard, again as a surrealist, is very open to the miracle of a chance encounter or a chance suggestion. He is open to that, in the same way the surrealists were.

Sterling: He’s someone who doesn’t just facilely admire Dali or Ernst, he’s actually read Dali and frequently quotes Dali. I think he probably learned quite a lot from Andre Breton. Similarly, I read Andre Breton because I thought Ballard took him seriously. Many people say Breton was a rather downbeat figure as well, but that was certainly not what occurred to people in Breton’s immediate circle. They all called him the torch who lights our steps, they considered him an organising and enlightening figure, not someone who was on the fringe of society but someone who was leading them into sunlit uplands.

I think that comes across very strongly in his work, he’s not really interested in the arts, he’s interested in how artists think and how they approach reality, and that’s what gives him a well-rounded sensibility. There are a lot of pop writers and comicbook writers and so forth who are very into pop music, and heaven knows cyberpunks love rock and roll, but to have a whole wider sensibility that really appeals to a great many people in many different lines of creative work, it’s more like surrealism which is almost a philosophy, a way of life, rather than a painting, a poetry, a form of sculpture, a form of music, that’s a way of being.

Left: V. Vale. Photo by Martí Pons, courtesy CCCB 2008.

Vale: I agree with that. Surrealism is definitely a way of life, a philosophy, a consciousness with historical art roots that’s something living, the potential is far from extinguished. You just have to read the hundreds of books, that’s a start. Most people – they didn’t get taught surrealism in my art history class. I hope things have advanced since then.

Costa: [unknown question]

Sterling: Stunned, the audience stares at one another…

Audience question: [about preventing horrible futures]

Sellars: Only if we read more Ballard books, it’s the only way…

Sterling: I really think probably the critical moment in Ballard’s literary life was the two years he spent in Canada, when he was in the Royal Air Force in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan. He described his period at this air force base as being paralysingly boring, and the only outlet he found there were copies of these American pulp science fiction magazines which by some strange accident had ended up on this military base. You have to imagine this young very asocial man who’s basically flunked out of medical school and joined the military, and having lived in China is now in an icy camp somewhere in Canada reading American science fiction for a lack of any other alternative. From that experience which is frankly rooted in boredom we get the greatest literary artist of the science fiction genre, and probably the most visionary science fiction writer of the 20th century. Boredom can be the seed of great things.

Vale: Well, the imagination is obviously the antidote to any boredom, and it’s always there ready to be deployed. Imagination and brains are our secret resource which makes everyone in the audience an artist, because in your dreams you’re a complete film director, you’re the scriptwriter, you’re the set designer, you’re the make-up person, you create everything and it’s all happening when you dream every night. It’s really kind of a miracle.

Audience question: [about film adaptations]

Sterling: I know he enjoyed appearing as an extra in his own film. In Empire of the Sun, there’s a period where Ballard appears in the movie as an older figure. He’s always lived in Shepperton which is quite close to the Shepperton film studios which in Britain are famous for the films that are made and the sets that are made. But I don’t think he’s either disturbed or enthusiastic about it, I think he’s had a very mature response to his unsought cinematic success. I don’t think he was either disappointed or shocked or chagrined. He did the wise thing by letting Hollywood do what it wanted.

Costa: [closing comments]

[applause]

…:: Previously on Ballardian:

+ ‘Unblinking, clinical’: From Ballard to cyberpunk
+ Kosmopolis 08: Landing Gear
+ Kosmopolis 08: Switching stations
+ Negative acoustic space: Ballardian sound art
+ Rick McGrath’s Letter from Barcelona: The Exquisite Corpse, An Autopsy of the New Millennium
+ Ballardoscope: some attempts at approaching the writer as a visionary
+ J.G. Ballard: In the Raw
+ J.G. Ballard, Autopsy of the New Millennium: Press Release
+ Autopsy of the New Millennium: JGB exhibition opens tomorrow in Barcelona
+ ‘Child of the diaspora’: Sterling on Ballard

Illustrations by Mike Saenz for two Ballard stories in Semiotext(e) SF: ‘Jane Fonda’s Augmentation Mammoplasty’ and ‘Report on an Unidentified Space Station’.

Rudy Rucker’s wonderful reminiscences about the early days of cyberpunk (‘it felt like being an early Beat’), Bruce Sterling (who ‘loved all things Soviet’) and William Gibson (the man with the ‘flexible-looking head’) got me thinking once again about Ballard’s role in the shaping of the cyberpunk mythology.

In his introduction to the Mirrorshades anthology, Sterling wrote: ‘The cyberpunks are perhaps the first SF generation to grow up not only within the literary tradition of science fiction but in a truly science-fictional world… the techniques of classical “hard SF” … are not just literary tools but an aid to daily life. They are a means of understanding, and highly valued.’ Sterling’s reference to ‘hard SF’ — time-honoured narratives infused with the spirit of scientific investigation — suggests an affinity with the traditions of the genre, a love of the dizzying ideas and sheer scope of the best SF writing. However, his positioning of the cyberpunk movement as ostensibly a form of realism indicates a shift in the genre’s relationship to the technology it once idealised:

‘Science fiction — at least according to its official dogma — has always been about the impact of technology. But times have changed since the comfortable era of Gernsback, when Science was safely enshrined — and confined — in an ivory tower. The careless technophilia of those days belongs to a vanished, sluggish era, when authority still had a comfortable margin of control.

For the cyberpunks, by stark contrast, technology is visceral. It is not the bottled genie of remote Big Science boffins; it is pervasive, utterly intimate. Not outside us, but next to us. Under our skin; often, inside our minds.’

Sterling, introduction to Mirrorshades.

Early Sterling (photo courtesy Rudy Rucker). ‘He dug the parallel world aspect…’.

For Sterling, there was no doubt as to Ballard’s importance in shaping this attitude, when he called attention to the latter’s ‘unblinking, almost clinical objectivity’, which makes him an ‘idolized role model to many cyberpunks’. He reiterated this impact at the recent Kosmopolis panel on Ballard:

In the circle of American science fiction writers of my generation — cyberpunks and humanists and so forth — [Ballard] was a towering figure. We used to have bitter struggles over who was more Ballardian than whom. We knew we were not fit to polish the man’s boots, and we were scarcely able to understand how we could get to a position to do work which he might respect or stand, but at least we were able to see the peak of achievement that he had reached.

Sterling at Kosmopolis.

Another cyberpunk link worth noting is the inclusion of two Ballard pieces, ‘Jane Fonda’s Augmentation Mammoplasty’ and ‘Report on an Unidentified Space Station’, in the anthology Semiotext(e) SF (1989), edited by Rucker, Peter Lamborn Wilson (the man behind ‘Hakim Bey’) and Robert Anton Wilson. Alongside Ballard there appeared writing from the three editors, and from Sterling, Gibson, Ian Watson, William Burroughs, Colin Wilson, Robert Sheckley, Philip José Farmer and others. The introduction to Ballard’s stories acknowledges a clear debt:

Without J.G. Ballard, none of this would exist. We’re weak on SF history, but we think it fair to say that Ballard was among the first world-class writers (perhaps along with the Soviets) to realize that SF was no longer merely a pulp genre, but had become the only possible vehicle for a mythos of the modern world, that it had replaced the psychological novel as the central artwork of our culture.

Anonymous, Semiotext(e) SF.

In the Acknowledgements, Bey/Wilson writes: ‘Despite the already daunting size of the anthology, I feel compelled to mention some writers who should be in it, but, for various reasons, aren’t… Samuel Delaney and Thomas Disch … Michael Moorcock, Brian Aldiss…’ These names suggest Wilson’s desire to replicate the strategies not only of Ballard but also of New Worlds, which is further reflected in the anthology’s collage illustrations, concrete poetry and impressionistic typesetting. The intent is clear and the inclusion of Gibson and Sterling, alongside Burroughs and Ballard, made it plain: for the editors, cyberpunk was the New Wave updated for a new era, its relevance as enduring as ever. And for Wilson, as it was for Sterling, Ballard remained the key, a writer able to straddle eras with deep insight into the increasingly science-fictional nature of day to day life.

Peter Lamborn Wilson at Living Theatre, NYC. Photo: amc.

The influence of Ballard on Semiotext(e) is also underscored by the anthology’s inclusion of Michael Blumlein’s story ‘Shed His Grace’. It features a character called ‘T’, who sits before a bank of TV screens displaying various broadcasts from TV and cinema, distorted and magnified many times over. When T selects clips of President Ronald Reagan and the First Lady and freezes on their smiles, he strips naked and projects live-action images of his genitals onto the middle screens. Absorbed inside televisual reality, he then amputates his penis while the Reagans ‘watch’, with T apparently unaware of the consequences to his body in the real world. This seems both homage to and reimagining of Ballard’s own character (often referred to as ‘T-’) in The Atrocity Exhibition — who of course was obsessed with the then-Governor Reagan. But Blumlein updates the template for the 80s, when Reagan’s presidency was seen as a farce of sickly emotion masking devastating consequences for ordinary people. The story also echoes Ballard’s ‘Motel Architecture’ (1978), which features a character obsessed with a bank of TV monitors, similarly oblivious to the destruction he performs on his own body, so lost is he in the ‘gaze’.

Back in the New Worlds era, in 1964, Ballard noted the SF elements in Burroughs, which: ‘play a metaphorical role and are not intended to represent “three-dimensional” figures. These self-satirizing figments are part of the casual vocabulary of the space age’. For Ballard, Burroughs’s importance is that he ‘illustrates that the whole of SF’s imaginary universe has long been absorbed into the general consciousness, and that most of its ideas are now valid only in a kind of marginal spoofing’. This then provided a test bed for Ballard’s own work, in which ‘the next five minutes’ was to be the focus rather than the next 500 years, documenting the SF of today, so thoroughly absorbed and integrated into our everyday lives as to go unnoticed.

Early Gibson (photo courtesy Rudy Rucker). ‘High on some SF-sounding substance…’.

It was a move demonstrably ahead of its time. Almost 50 years later, when asked if the present day had caught up with his work, Gibson replied: ‘I thought that writing about the world today as I perceive it would probably be more challenging, in the real sense of science fiction, than continuing just to make things up… I don’t know if I’ll be able to make up an imaginary future in the same way… things are changing too quickly… you don’t have any place to stand from which to imagine a very elaborate future’.

Today, people continue to reignite heated debate about the worth of SF – re-asking the question ‘Does the future have a future?’, to quote Ballard. But anyone who has absorbed Ballard’s work has been privileged to know the outcome of such a debate for quite some time.

That is, ‘no’. The answer is No. No future for you.

BALLARDOSCOPE: SOME ATTEMPTS AT APPROACHING THE WRITER AS A VISIONARY

by Jordi Costa

ABOVE: JGB in 2006 (photo courtesy The Terminal Collection).

Translation by Dan O’Hara.

The interview below was published in a vast tome, an annual German review of the year in science fiction which came out in July last year. The interview itself was presumably conducted sometime in Spring 2007, after the publication of Kingdom Come and the re-issue two-volume set of The Complete Short Stories.

One suspects, in the end, that Ballard’s playful teasing of his interviewers results from a certain sanguinity about the state of his health; it’s less a callous dissimulation at the expense of his interlocutors than the resolution of the old Lunghua survivor. Evidently by the time of the interview he had already been visiting hospitals, as he notes their science fiction-like hypermodernity, and even advises his interviewers to visit one. I’d rather remember the Ballard of this interview, his sense of mischief intact even in the face of his physical atrophy, than the Ballard who has appeared in recent TV interviews, in which he seems oppressed by less considerate and more parasitical personalities.

Dan O’Hara

Many thanks to Michaela Pape for proofing these interviews.

WERNER FUCHS & SASCHA MAMCZAK: Mr Ballard, last year marked a very special anniversary for you: fifty years ago, in 1956, with the publication of your first story, your career as a science fiction author began.

J.G. BALLARD: Yes, that’s true. But don’t remind me of it! I’m an old man.

Well, your publishers have effectively reminded you of it by newly publishing a thousand-page-plus collection of all your stories from the last fifty years.

Naturally, I was very impressed. After all, that’s half a century of hard work, half my life, if you like. You know, short stories were always very important for me. Like many science fiction authors, I began by writing short stories, which isn’t the norm any more, at least not among British authors today. Today young authors would rather write novels straight off – and that’s precisely why these novels are mostly so poor. In every job you need a certain amount of practice, whether you’re a violinist or a joiner, and short stories offer writers a wonderful chance to acquire the necessary tools. The Mona Lisa, was, after all, not exactly Leonardo da Vinci’s first painting. In any case I learned what it meant to be a writer by writing short stories; what my weaknesses and strengths are.

Today, short stories – even SF short stories – have fallen out of style somewhat.

Yes, one’s become used to these overlong novels in which everything is explained and tidied up. At the heart of every good short story lies a certain ambiguity, a sort of “Yes, but.” That’s very seldom found in novels. And yet this ambiguity is the very stuff of life. Many people tell me I should write more short stories – and I reply that I don’t know where I’d publish them. When I began writing them fifty years ago, it was completely different: nearly every paper and magazine in those days published short stories, some of them even every day. And then there were of course the science fiction magazines, which had an almost insatiable appetite for short stories. The SF magazines in those days were an entirely wonderful training space for budding authors – one could pursue one’s obsessions, one’s fantasies; one could discover what kind of writer one wanted to be. It’s a little like the way that, in one’s youth, one has a lot of affairs: one learns how to make love. It’s different now: most young authors don’t know how to make love, and they don’t know how to write. Oh, well, that’s only the grumbling of an old man.

ABOVE: JGB in 2006. Photograph by Adam Bloomberg & Oliver Chanarin.

How, back then, did you come to write science fiction?

Now, most authors in those days were fans before they began to write professionally. Which means that they’d already written something or other in their youth, mostly for fanzines. With me it was different, I only came to science fiction later. I was twenty-six when I published my first story. Before then I’d scarcely read any science fiction. It was when I went to Canada with the Royal Air Force that I first became aware of SF. We were based somewhere in the Canadian provinces, it snowed incessantly, and there was nothing to do and nothing to read, not a single daily paper. So I started to read science fiction magazines – and I was extraordinarily surprised. It gave me a glimpse of a hitherto unexplored terrain. The then literary mainstream – the stories which the New Yorker or other magazines published – was purely oriented towards the past, both thematically and stylistically. That didn’t interest me. I was interested in the changes around us – the consumer society, the first computers, TV, the fear of nuclear war, gigantic motorway and airport complexes – all of that created a new landscape, an external landscape like the mental one. I wanted to write about that. So I thought, why not science fiction? One could investigate this landscape there.

And of course the nascent space age.

Of course. I remember very well how in 1956 – as I said, the year in which I published my first short story – I heard for the first time on the radio the Sputnik 1 signal: beep, beep, beep. The sound of a new world. So long, past! Hello, future! They were really very exciting years. Years in which, in practice, I wrote exclusively short stories.

Which authors – both within science fiction and outside it – influenced you the most back then?

Within SF, very few – I simply learned too little from them. I was weaned, if you will, on the classical European and American menu, and the one to make the most impression on me was Franz Kafka. He was the most significant writer of the 20th century, far more significant than James Joyce. Edgar Allan Poe and Dino Buzzati also fascinated me. Of the SF authors in those days I had the most respect for Ray Bradbury, but I’ve never written like him. He was too romantic, too naive for me at times.

What about Philip K. Dick? And Theodore Sturgeon?

I did like Sturgeon. Dick, less so – he was too American for me. Many British authors imitated the Americans in those days, so as to get published in the US magazines. And that’s exactly what I didn’t want. I’d prefer the neutral tone of a Robert Sheckley or a Cyril Kornbluth. But if you ask me who really influenced me – it was less writers than painters like Max Ernst, Salvador Dalí, Giorgio di Chirico, René Magritte. The surrealists. I wanted to create in words what they created on canvas. These dreamlike landscapes, this fascinating way of artistically realizing psychological states. You know, as a teenager I lived through the greatest surrealistic situation on the planet: the war. You go into the street, and half the houses are in ruins. A car sitting on top of one of the houses. And so on… War is full of surreal surprises, full of surrealist images. Back then it became clear to me that something in human culture was taking a dreadfully warped turn – and as an artist, a writer, I wanted to understand it.

LEFT: The Drowned World, German edition (Phantasia, 2008).

When your first stories were published in British SF magazines, what was the reaction in the USA? Were many of the stories accepted?

No, the Americans were very hesitant to publish my stories. They just didn’t understand what I was driving at. The American SF magazines of the late 50s and early 60s wanted conventional SF stories, stories set in the future or in space. An SF story set in the present irritated them terribly, and many of my stories were set in the present then. In time it got better, naturally, and many of my stories could then appear over there, but the experimental pieces were really published almost exclusively in Britain. So up to 1963 – when the success of my first really serious novel The Drowned World brought me a certain independence – I wrote almost entirely experimental short stories.

Can it be that your 1964 short story ‘The Terminal Beach’ marked a turning point in your work? With respect to what one generally designates ‘inner space’?

Absolutely. ‘The Terminal Beach’ is certainly one of my most important stories. Even though it was published in New Worlds, it wasn’t a science fiction story at all, but rather conveyed merely a certain science fiction atmosphere. It described a landscape that was the expression of a particular psychological state – our fear of nuclear war. Yes, I think ‘The Terminal Beach’ is the first real ‘inner space’ story and it leads directly to The Atrocity Exhibition, but also to novels like Crash, High Rise and Concrete Island. There, there are particular mental landscapes described throughout, like those made by the surrealists in their paintings.

‘Inner space’ was also the thematic centre of the start of the New Wave back then. When you look back today, how do you see your rôle in that literary movement?

I was the New Wave! (Laughs.) Well, in some ways there was something inevitable about the New Wave. Back then in the early 60s American science fiction had exhausted itself in repeating its themes, and people were looking for something new and exciting. You know, as soon as I began to write, I constantly saw in SF authors and especially in the American ones a collection of truly naive and, if you like, innocent men – people who truly didn’t know what they were doing. Ray Bradbury is a prominent example. A few years ago someone sent me a book about him, with many photographs. One of these showed Bradbury in his work room, which is about as large as a tennis court – and every millimetre of this huge workroom is stuffed full of toys: rockets, spaceships, dinosaur models, every kind of monster. A child’s room. A wonderful image for the American science fiction of these times, even for the whole of American culture.

You said that you wouldn’t describe ‘The Terminal Beach’ as a science fiction story at all. Would that go for everything you’ve written since?

Absolutely. I don’t see novels like Crash, High Rise or Concrete Island as science fiction. And I think that many people only describe it as science fiction because in that way they can neutralize the uncomfortable feeling it radiates.

Then what are these novels and tales?

Good question. They’re certainly not part of Realism, which dominates modern fiction – I’ve only really written one ‘realistic’ novel: Empire of the Sun. No, I think they belong to another literary tradition, one which goes back to Sade and which was carried on by writers like Genet or Celine. The bad boys of literature, if you like. An extraordinarily powerful tradition that deals with truths people don’t want to hear. I’ve always seen myself as a kind of moralist, one who stands on the roadside holding up a sign with the legend: Look out, dangerous bends, drive slowly!

ABOVE: JGB in 2006 (photo courtesy The Terminal Collection).

So, stories that read like science fiction, but aren’t?

Something like that. It’s simply that the themes of science fiction were eagerly ingested by the mainstream, and readers got on with them better and better. Just take William Burroughs, who I admire greatly: he demonstrated very early on, with his paranoid fantasies which naturally go back to Kafka, that one doesn’t have to be a science fiction author to write science fiction. No, I think that with The Atrocity Exhibition at the latest, I abandoned the genre for good. And I’ve not gone back to it since. But that’s not at all uncommon: even H. G. Wells began as a science fiction author, and at some point left off with it and wrote mainstream novels.

In the 80s with cyberpunk there arose a literary movement about which, in retrospect, one asks oneself if it was still science fiction.

Yes, I greatly admired the cyberpunk authors, William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, many others. Whether they wrote science fiction or something else is hard to say. The fact is that new forms of communications have a great influence on literature, particularly the internet – and cyberpunk was the first expression of it. But it came too late for me. I’ve never owned a computer, and I still don’t have one even today.

But you surf on the internet now and then, don’t you?

Naturally. One cannot avoid it anymore. The internet’s a fascinating thing – it really has made the world into a global village.

Let’s come back to your short stories. Or rather to the fact that in the 90s you hardly wrote them any more…

I think that short stories are basically a playing field for young authors, a bit like the lyric. Moreover there are, as I said, scarcely any more opportunities to publish short stories. Of course now and then a magazine rings me and asks for a story, which is quite wonderful. But when I then ask how long it should be, they answer: 2000 words. 2000 words! That’s not a story, it’s a vignette. Yes, I stopped writing short stories in the 90s. But in some ways all my most recently published novels are extended short stories. But please don’t tell anyone.

And all these novels seem to have a common theme: the failure of every form of middle-class utopia.

Yes, in some ways. I’m very interested in social pathology, in what really drives us on in our everyday lives. My newest novel Kingdom Come raises the question of whether the consumer thinking of the present day might not at some point suddenly turn into fascism.

A very trenchant thesis.

Yes, but just take a look at what’s going on in these huge shopping malls. Evidently not much more than shopping is left for us. That and sport. That’s where we get our kicks, those are the new religions. I already believe that one of these days we could end up in a kind of leisure-time dictatorship.

But don’t events like the attacks of the 11th of September or the catastrophe in New Orleans remind people of the hard facts of reality?

I’m not so sure about that. I think it was difficult for many people to distinguish the picture of the collapsed World Trade Center from all the other images they know from Hollywood. It’s such a binary matter: real, unreal, real, unreal… And as for whether the current American administration finds itself brought down to reality or not, I very much doubt it. No, I think we live in dangerous times.

Do at least modern SF authors react appropriately to what’s going on around us?

I can’t say, I read practically no science fiction any more. You know, it’s like an old affair: if it ends, it’s gone forever. It doesn’t come back. What fascinated me about science fiction fifty years ago has long become a part of our everyday life, it’s permeated the whole of society. Just go to a modern hospital sometime – it’s pure science fiction. I only very seldom read novels at all. I read far more non-fiction, political analyses, biographies. The older one gets, the more one clings to facts.

And to come back to the aforementioned tome of fiction, your collected short stories: could you tell us what your favourite short story is?

Hm… My favourite story is probably ‘Why I Want To Fuck Ronald Reagan’. That story changed everything for me.

And will there one day be a sequel? ‘Why I Want To Fuck George W. Bush’?

No, I really would not want to fuck George W. Bush! Hillary Clinton, maybe. If you know what I mean.

Many thanks for the chat, Mr. Ballard.

Originally published in German as Werner Fuchs and Sascha Mamczak, ‘George W. Bush möchte ich nun wirklich nicht ficken!’ in Das Science Fiction Jahr 2007, eds. Sascha Mamczak and Wolfgang Jeschke (Heyne, 2007).

The canon of “Slipstream literature,” defined by a panel at Readercon has been posted by Paul DiFilippo. JGB is mentioned (Complete Stories as part of the “core canon” at number 10 and Empire of the Sun at 99). Kindness of Women was also suggested by one of the participants.

Here is a response by Paul Kincaid, who is unkind towards Empire.”

I’m very surprised to see the re-emergence of the term ‘slipstream’. When i was reading cyberpunk stuff about 10 years ago it was briefly in use, but I haven’t come across it since. Bruce Sterling coined the term and even he thought it was pretty throwaway:

“Slipstream” is not all that catchy a term, and if this young genre ever becomes an actual category I doubt it will use that name, which I just coined along with my friend Richard Dorsett. “Slipstream” is a parody of “mainstream,” and nobody calls mainstream “mainstream” except for us skiffy trolls.”

Sterling recently commented on this slipstream canon business:

Fire up the core cannons and lay down a barrage of theoretical activity… I was the first guy to write an essay about “slipstream,” lo eighteen years ago, but this is a lot more work than I ever bothered to do… I’ve read almost all of those slipstream works, but I sure wouldn’t want to read them all in a row.”

Mac Tonnies is a Kansas-based writer of post-cyberpunk science fiction (recently published by the redoubtable Rudy Rucker). He’s also the author of the book After the Martian Apocalypse, a speculative search for life on the Red Planet, as well as the originator of a ‘cryptoterrestrial’ philosophy that ambitiously seeks to explain (with ‘balanced skepticism’) a phenomenon — UFOs — that’s been around at least as long as religion. He’s also the owner/operator of Posthuman Blues, an irreverent yet entirely serious blog examining, how shall we put it, ‘weird science’, imprinted with endorsements from Bruce Sterling and John Shirley.

A Ballardian philosophy ties it all together. Mac’s existential probing into the nature of the interface between man and machine, an analysis of the posthumanism which we have blundered into (the ‘blues’ part, it seems, derives from the fact that we’re not quite there yet), is based on respect for the work of J.G. Ballard.

It’s one of the more provocative excavations of a meme that remains largely unexplored in comparison to the more well-trodden trails in Ballard’s strange fictional jungle.

Simon Sellars

So, Mac, exactly how does a cryptoterrestrial ufologist pursuing transcendence of the flesh become interested in Ballard?

I guess my pat answer on this one is that I’ve never been comfortable with the veneer we’re asked to accept as ‘real’ because, ultimately, it’s a very shallow façade. So I’m open to subversion and transgression, whether literary, esoteric or in between. Ballard’s books nail that interzone between reality — our world of endless parking lots and fast cars — and the more primal, mythic substrate just underneath. I think Ballard, like William Gibson, is a literary shaman of our time. I’m just waiting to meet a character like Vaughan, a death angel of the cul-de-sacs and strip-malls who’s suffered some terminal breach.

Can you single out the Ballards that have had the greatest impact on you?

The short story ‘The Voices of Time’ is one of my favourites. It should be mandatory reading for anyone who professes to live in the 21st century. Ballard has the ability to take mundane scenery and make it seem prescient; he’s consciously reinvented the touchstones of the collective unconscious. When I encountered that for the first time I immediately knew I wanted more. ‘The Voices of Time’ was a sort of primer for me, a guidebook.

LEFT: Concrete Island (artist: Richard Clifton-Dey; Panther, London, 1976).
RIGHT: High-Rise (artist: Chris Foss; Panther, London, 1977).

Everything in Memories of the Space Age is a winner. Crash, of course, is inimitable. I really like High-Rise and Concrete Island, but I think I like The Day of Creation and The Unlimited Dream Company even more. Ballard writes with a surgical eye for detail that’s ideal for addressing some of his narrative concerns, but it works dangerously well when he’s at his most surreal.

You once blogged about how Bruce Sterling rejected some of your fiction, calling you ‘Mr Ballard’. Obviously Ballard is, or was, a big influence on your work.

I went through a phase in which I essentially attempted to channel Ballard’s style. I wrote an over-the-top story about machine-like beings that inhabit the margins of human perception. And another one that takes place in a shopping mall after a viral holocaust. Both were very Ballardian — and those are just the most explicit examples. I like to think I’ve been able to take what I needed, stylistically, from Ballard and moved on, but he’s a hard influence to completely avoid. I’m reading Our Ecstatic Days by Steve Erickson right now; it’s a book filled with echoes from Ballard’s apocalyptic fiction, a retelling of The Day of Creation in some ways.

It’s interesting to hear you champion Creation and Dream Company, as both are virtually ignored in the Ballard canon. I guess they’re hard to categorise, especially if you’re coming to him from Crash and his more machinic texts. Instead, there’s a lush beauty at work, a more phantasmagorical realm.

You’re absolutely right about Dream Company and Creation being overlooked; it’s a shame, as they’re actually rather pivotal. For instance, the presence of cameras is prevalent in both, suggesting that even Ballard’s phantasmagorical fiction shares the preoccupation with ubiquitous technology found in Crash and High-Rise.

:: Cover detail from The Unlimited Dream Company (artist: Bill Botton; Jonathan Cape, London, 1979).

Here in the States I have yet to find The Unlimited Dream Company in bookstores and the copy I checked out from a local library has since disappeared. Truthfully, I don’t remember the plot so much as the motifs, which is exactly the sort of relationship I have with my own dreams. So I think the book’s impact was largely subconscious, as Ballard probably intended. And you could argue that it invites readers to create the future anew by exploiting the mythical syntax of the 20th Century.

How so?

We tend to think of people of the future as inordinately pragmatic. We’re weaned on dystopian visions like THX 1138 and fear that we’ll lose our capacity to dream as we inexorably merge with our technology. But Dream Company challenges that idea by introducing a new psychic vocabulary that we might do well to emulate. The book’s filled with images of flight that are both transcendent and mechanical. It’s a nexus of memes culled from the squalor of the 20th century: recording gear, airplanes, the central role of science. But it doesn’t diminish our capacity for wonder so much as reframe it for a new era. A new species will still dream, but the bedrock of our collective unconscious is experiencing nothing less than a seismic shift. The Unlimited Dream Company anticipates this admirably, just as Arthur C. Clarke’s books prophecy our future as a multi-planet species.

You once wrote, ‘Ballard attacks our uneasy truce with the artificial…[plumbing] the apocalyptic interface between desire and environment’.

Ballard’s stories are as much about the worlds inside our minds as the worlds produced by our minds; he’s an inversion of typical gadget-oriented science fiction. He’s able to diagnose the human condition by examining what we’ve created. So while he writes about technology, his main concern is our collective psyche. And the portrait he paints is both grim and exhilarating, as in Crash, which depicts humans as eminently sensual but confined by technological fetishes. At first glance, Crash seems to be about a tiny subculture of people enamoured of car crashes, but the implication is that we’re all obsessed by technology. For Ballard, car crashes are a metaphor with the potential to shock us out of our stupor and see the millennial landscape from the perspective of clinical onlookers. Very few writers even attempt this, let alone succeed. William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch is an obvious exception to the rule.

Is this where Ballard slots into your understanding of posthumanism?

Ballard has written some of the key transhumanist texts and they’re incredibly valuable because he never consciously allied himself with any particular futurist ideology. Crash is a frightening look at the kind of posthuman future we don’t want. The people in Crash have embraced the posthuman notion that we’re inseparable from our machines. They’re effectively cyborgs, just without the cool Gibsonian neural interfaces. Ballard leaves it to the reader to decide whether they represent an improvement; he simply reports.

Stelarc: not this…

Yes — the posthumanism in Ballard’s work is subtle, insidious. Instead of presenting, say, a Stelarc figure with a robot arm and a third bionic ear, he paints an everyday posthumanism, where ordinary people have merged with technology without really knowing it. One of Ballard’s major achievements is to identify and fully develop the idea that a person living in a hi-tech gated community is as much posthuman as your average sci-fi cyborg. As he has said, ‘You switch on your triple security locks and your hidden cameras and you’re virtually switching off the world. But, in a sense, you’re also switching off the central nervous system that evolution provides us with.’

Exactly. It’s a shame the more politically strident transhumanists don’t seem to have caught on to him. Or maybe that’s a good thing. I’m bothered by the quasi-religious conviction with which many transhumanists have addressed issues like the Singularity. Is there a case to me made for an all-encompassing technorgasm sometime in the mid-21st century? Certainly. But we don’t know this. It’s not an issue to approach if you’re prone to blind faith or seek to define the human predicament according to what seems like solid temporal footing. When transhumanism is heavily politicised it becomes dogmatic, an echo of the very dystopian scenarios it seeks to remedy.

LEFT: …but this: Cronenberg’s Crash.

You say Crash portrays a ‘frightening posthuman future’. But after all the time I’ve spent with it I’m still not sure where I stand with it. I used to believe for a long time, for example, that it was actually a ‘positive mythology’ — a necessary evolutionary mutation.

The characters have taken an evolutionary step but lost something along the way. They’re analogous to the ‘Greys’ of UFO mythology: anaemic caricatures, needy and emotionally vacant. I think it’s imperative we learn how to take the next step in self-directed evolution while retaining some sense of individuality because that’s the sort of resource a computer-dominated leisure society is liable to relish. I foresee posthumans governed by insatiable curiosity. Having transcended their environment, they’re going to have the time and resources to undertake a comprehensive intellectual investigation of their heritage. Like archaeologists, they’ll want to interrogate their past.

You’ve referred to transhumanism a few times — is this a sexier term for posthumanism?

Transhumanism seeks to modify and improve the human condition through technology. It’s a transitionary stage between ‘human’ and ‘posthuman’, the latter denoting a stage beyond human. Of course, it’s arguable that we’ve always been transhumans to some degree. The mere act of creating something — be it a simple tool or something more in keeping with industrial society — can be meaningfully viewed as an effort to enhance or augment the human condition. Stanley Kubrick captured the essence of this perfectly in 2001′s ‘Dawn of Man’ sequence. So while transhumanism isn’t new, it’s recently become much more intimate, with plans to tweak our very genome and replace our organs with synthetic counterparts that, for the first time, are actually better than the originals. We’re suddenly feeling transhumanism in a fundamentally new way as we invent better prostheses that blur the already-tenuous boundary between ‘self’ and ‘environment’.

Early transhumanism: Kubrick’s Dawn of Man.

We became transhuman sometime last century, and I’m interested in what we do in the meantime, while retaining human traits and gravitating toward newfound posthuman abilities. We’re going to have to endure a great deal of psychological friction. We’ve blundered into an existential interzone of instantaneous wireless communication, blogs, Mars probes, big-box stores, freak weather, artificial life, and high-tech warfare. Whatever emerges from this will be something significantly new, maybe even ‘postsingular’. Ultimately, I wonder if we really want free will. Is it worth the effort? Considering how accustomed we’ve become to a numbed, automated existence, the phenomenon of consciousness could be on the brink of fading out or becoming vestigial. The science-fiction writer Peter Watts, in Blindsight, shows us how evolution might select for something for which the very concept of ‘I’ is literally unimaginable.

I’m personally interested in transhumanism because the human species won’t survive unless we take it seriously. A species that stubbornly refuses mutation won’t last long.

Are there any current signs pointing towards this evolutionary mutation? Or is the situation hopeless?

We either evolve or we die off. Right now the overwhelming trend is toward smarter, smaller machines and increased understanding of our genetic source code. But that’s not to say that trend will continue indefinitely. A climate catastrophe, for example, could easily derail Kurzweilian evolution.

Tell me about extropianism.

The Extropians were a more formalized transhumanist movement that flourished in the 1990s and went extinct in the early 21st century. They were very good at marketing the idea and developing the lexicon that continues to preoccupy transhuman thought. I used to consider myself an extropian with a lower-case ‘e,’ as I’m generally wary of -isms. Even -isms I sympathise with. Especially the -isms I sympathise with.

Thanks. You know, I’m not fully up to speed. The last time I deeply engaged with posthumanist theory, Donna Haraway’s cyborg manifesto was the key text and cyberpunk the key art form. Obviously things have moved on from then.

The latest thing is the ‘Singularity’ and the general expectation that we’re in for a huge and relatively sudden technological change in approximately 30 years because of breakthroughs in genetics and computation. I find a lot of ‘Singularitarian’ arguments naively optimistic — sort of like extrapolating flying cars from the 1950s state of the art — but I’m willing to play along because it’s fun to see where that might lead.

But Haraway’s work is probably more relevant than ever, with or without the Singularity. Humans have always craved mutation, and it will take a lot more than a single failed techno-prophecy to put the brakes on.

The writer Andres Vaccari has been scathing of the transhumanist and extropian movements. He writes, ‘There is a most crucial question absent from this wet utopian dream: What for? Why do you want to live forever? So you can watch more TV? Read more crappy science fiction? Find yourself? Be more productive in the office? Improve your social skills?’
Any thoughts on that?

Vaccari seems unable or unwilling to look the future in the eye. His argument is the temporal extension of ‘Who cares if we discover extraterrestrials?’ Most of us can’t get past the idea that the alien is merely a skewed version of the familiar. I predict the future will be very alien.

If the Singularity crowd if right — and I have little doubt they’re right about at least some of the implications of exponential technological progress — then the art of prediction, always difficult, becomes effectively impossible. Technology will have come into its own, perhaps even achieving a kind of sentience. Given that sort of milieu, who speaks for humanity? A human-built AI, or an AI built by another AI, will be an effectively alien form of intelligence, every bit as weird and unaccountable as an extraterrestrial. And if we decide to persist in anything like our present form, we’ll necessarily cede some of our autonomy to machines, who might have some fascinating agendas in store. For the very first time, we’ll be sharing the planet with a technologically robust nonhuman intelligence.

Unless, of course, I’m right about living geographically shoulder-to-shoulder with cryptoterrestrials.

Well, you might well be, given that your work, from what I gather, shares similarities with one of the more forceful and convincing ufologists, Jacques Vallee. A fair assessment?

LEFT: Jacques Vallee.

I’m somewhere in the Vallee camp in the sense that I don’t think we’re dealing with anything as simple as ‘mere’ extraterrestrials in cool spaceships, although that very well might be part of the mystery. I suspect the human species is interfacing with something much more secretive and considerably more alien than what we’re conditioned to expect. I actually waffle quite a bit when it comes to UFOs. On one hand I’m convinced we’re dealing with an authentic unknown, but I’m open to different ideas about its origin. Are we seeing some kind of ‘reified metaphor’? Actual ETs? Tulpas?

Lately I’ve been developing what I call the ‘Cryptoterrestrial Hypothesis’, which attempts to dispense with the extraterrestrial angle altogether. If you take a long look at the phenomenon’s complexity and psychosocial impact, it’s tempting to speculate that we’re interacting with an intelligence native to this planet. If so, where are they hiding? What are they up to, and why do they show themselves to us in the most baffling manner possible? It’s plausible we’re the victims of a long-term psychological engineering campaign designed to keep us in check lest we discover we have neighbours.

If I’m right — and I don’t pretend for a moment that I am — then maybe the idea’s testable. We should be able to use existing technology to monitor anomalous activity in our airspace and oceans. If the ‘cryptoterrestrials’ are humanoid, as they seem to be, it’s likely we share a common ancestor, so perhaps a careful look at the human genome is in order. Paranoid? Certainly. But I don’t think the idea is any more outlandish than the phenomenon itself, which has proven quite durable and tenacious over the last 60 years — and that merely encompasses the so-called ‘modern’ UFO phenomenon. I think it’s likely that some, if not many, UFOs are deliberate diversions to make us think we might be dealing with space-faring visitors: in effect, special effects displays enacted for the benefit of strategically selected witnesses.

I’ve interviewed other UFO researchers. Some have had paranormal experiences, some haven’t. What about you?

Disappointingly, I’ve never had any striking paranormal experiences. I think I became fascinated with UFOs and related subjects when I realized just how portentous the subject could be, how absolutely devastating it could prove if validated. Ufology is a rich psychosocial breeding ground, and it’s always interesting to watch the latest memes worm their way into the mainstream. The MJ-12 mythos, for example, is now positively ancient. Everyone ‘knows’ that the government is hiding alien bodies and that the Roswell incident was the crash of an alien ship. Everyone’s familiar with black helicopters and abductions and malevolent alien/government treaties. Collectively, we’re waiting for the sequel to all of this and hoping it has better special effects and bigger explosions.

Just the simple fact that so many people believe, or want to believe — regardless of whether the phenomenon is ‘real’ or not — surely demands it be taken seriously as a socio-cultural, investigative, psychological phenomenon.

While I’m convinced UFO encounters have a basis in the material world, I think the ‘psychic’ aspect that accompanies many experiences has been marginalized for fear of contaminating the much sexier ‘aliens from space’ meme. We’re still wrestling with the very definition of consciousness, all the while naively assuming that nonhuman intelligence will abide by the same behaviours of Apollo astronauts. Until we shed that sort of dogmatic approach we have little or no chance of making sense of the UFO experience. The state of ufology being what it is, I think it’s probable the nature of the UFO/contact experience will be discovered by researchers outside ufology altogether.

Britain’s premier UFO group, BUFORA, recently announced that they were virtually shutting up shop; they say ‘the halcyon days of ufology are over’, that there’s ‘a lack of material’ these days. But that seems to fly in the face of the work that researchers such as yourself and Nick Redfern are conducting.

BUFORA’s demise is due less to a lack of UFO activity than intellectual stagnation. Researchers have succumbed to the idea that ‘real’ UFOs must necessarily be extraterrestrial craft, and when that belief fails to be validated it’s all-too-tempting to want to stop looking. But the phenomenon is far richer than lights in the sky. As Vallee has made clear, we’re dealing with something of profound psychological importance. As such, the search for UFOs neglects other avenues for research such as ‘anomalous cognition’ and DMT studies. Investigators like Redfern and Greg Bishop seem to understand this; they bring a much-needed ‘punk’ mentality to UFO research.

Call it ‘ufopunk’.

What’s next for you?

Possibly some television writing. I’m also conceptualising a cyberpunk stage-play for a Canadian theatre company; it will be interesting to see where that goes. In late October or early November I’ll be in Halifax, Nova Scotia delivering a presentation on the cryptoterrestrial idea and taking part in a ‘para-science’ DVD project for Paul Kimball’s Redstar Films, which should be incredibly fun. And I’ve got a reading list that’s long since escaped the bounds of Earth’s atmosphere. I’m really eager to read William Gibson’s Spook Country, among others.

But the future is such an inherently strange place that it’s difficult to predict much farther with any hope of accuracy — and that’s not a bad thing.

..:: MORE INFO

+ Mac Tonnies
+ ‘Dead Astronauts, Cyborgs, and the Cape Canaveral Fiction of J.G. Ballard: A Posthuman Analysis’ by Melanie Rosen Brown
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“Exactly when the term medical fetish became popular among the BDSM community is hard to determine. However, it is a widely used phrase that has been touched on by authors like J.G. Ballard, romance novelists in the romantic doctor/patient role-play scenario, filmmakers like David Cronenberg, and photographers like Romain Slocombe.

Yet, even among these diverse artists and perhaps not unlike medicine itself, there is an obvious and expansive divide among their specialized medically themed works. Slocombe appears like an ER specialist or ambulance worker as he makes a fetish art out of bandages in his ‘Broken Dolls’ series. In Deviant Desires, Katharine Gates describes his bandages as a medical version of Japanese erotic rope bondage.

Cronenberg is said to describe himself as a ‘Beverly Hills gynaecologist’ and you can see how this arises in many of his films from his use of speculums and references in Dead Ringers (1988) and to the vaginal-looking organic game in eXistenz (1999). Ballard, who is the author of the notorious novel, Crash (1973), which was, not surprisingly, turned into a film by Cronenberg in 1996, is a medical student, and his specialty seems to be forensic psychology and science. “When he is shown some kind of techno-social-medical innovation, he’s always trying to peel it back and understand it from the unconscious urgings that power it.”

All of these artists are avant-garde and just like anything that’s avant-garde or taboo, it eventually moves into the popular imagination. Through these artists, we can certainly see how fetishism plays a role and particularly how medical fetishism may have appeared more prevalently in popular and porn culture since the early seventies.”

Bruce Sterling is a prolific science-fiction writer, futurist, social critic and design professor, best known for his bestselling novels and seminal short fiction, and as the editor of the Mirrorshades anthology that defined the ‘cyberpunk’ subgenre. His nonfiction includes works of futurism such as Tomorrow Now; a regular column and blog for Wired; and his Viridian Design listserv that presciently riffs on climate-change issues and Green design. He’s also wrapping up a one-year tenure as Visionary in Residence at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. In his hometown of Austin, Texas, Sterling sat down in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, after a day spent visiting the local evacuee center, to talk about the continued importance of JG Ballard in an increasingly apocalyptic world.

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Chris Nakashima-Brown writes short fiction and criticism in Austin, Texas. See www.nakashima-brown.net for more.
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So, have you read any Ballard lately?

I read Super-Cannes and the User’s Guide to the Millennium essays. And I come across his critical work with some regularity – newspapers columns, interviews and so forth.

Yeah, he’s kind of a regular in all of the English newspapers.

He is. He’s doing a lot of occasional journalism these days. It’s surprising how often I’ll be reading something and just think to myself “Gosh, this is so lucid and stimulating and – wait a minute, this is Ballard!”

You wrote in the introduction to Mirrorshades that Ballard had a key role in cyberpunk.

I think I may have name-checked him in the introduction to that book, but that wasn’t the half of it. Ballard was the first science-fiction writer I ever read who really blew my mind. I was reading a lot of basic Andre Norton ‘space-squid’ nonsense at the time – I must have been 13 or 14 – then I read The Crystal World. And the assumptions behind The Crystal World were so radically different and ontologically disturbing compared to common pulp-derived SF. If you just look at the mechanisms of the suspension of disbelief in The Crystal World, it’s like, okay, time is vibrating on itself and this has caused the growth of a leprous crystal…whatever. There’s never any kind of fooforah about how the scientist in his lab is going to understand this phenomenon, and reverse it, and save humanity. It’s not even a question of anybody needing to understand what’s going on in any kind of instrumental way. On the contrary, the whole structure of the thing is just this kind of ecstatic surreal acceptance. All Ballard disaster novels are vehicles of psychic fulfilment. But at the age of 14 I couldn’t begin to think in terminology like that. All I knew was that there was something going on in this book that was radically different from the sensibility of everything else I had seen.

They’re narrative laboratories, right? They’re constructed to explore the subconsciousness of the humans that inhabit them rather than getting at it the other way around.

Sort of. Ballard’s a medical student. And he’s also a guy who’s really good at pastiching things that he finds in the wastebasket: the sterile language of the Warren Commission or crash-injury textbooks. He’s really good at repurposing found material. It’s like Mark Pauline – you ask him, “Gee, Mark, how do you make your machines so monstrous?” Pauline says, “I try to get close to them and understand what it is they’re really trying to do”. Right? So it doesn’t surprise me that Pauline is a big Ballard fan, because Ballard has a very similar approach. If you show him some kind of techno-social-medical innovation, he’s always trying to peel it back and understand it from the unconscious urgings that power it.

So how do you position him as an influence on you and the other seminal cyberpunks? Would cyberpunk have happened without him?

Well, I’m sure cyberpunk would have happened without him because cyberpunk is just science fiction by another name. It’s just another attempt, another wave of technical development, and another wave of literateurs trying to jump the gap between the two cultures. Trying to literarily repurpose the computer revolution. And Ballard is someone who’s really good at repurposing scientific material to literary purposes without ever speaking that kind of spavined pop science-ese. The kind of lame language that says something like [holds up digital camera]: “You know, if you could see the tiny grooves that have been carved on the chip of this digital camera, why they would stretch to the moon and back three-and-a-half times!” Which is an attempt to invest wonder in a dry, industrial process. It’s the Carl Sagan school of trying to pump mystic scientism into the dryness of physics. There’s just something phoney-baloney about it because it’s taking an intellectual process that’s very much about methodically stripping the mystery out of natural phenomena and then trying to re-mystify it by approaching it from some more “friendly” sensibility. And there’s just something bogus about that. It has the bogusness of an adult telling a pre-pubertal child about the birds and the bees without talking about the burning needs of sexuality.

That’s what a lot of pop science writing is like. It talks down to the reader, and it covers the stark majesty of Euclidean insight with redigested pap. You don’t get that kind of talking down from Ballard. He’s someone who really seems at ease in the science world, basically because he was writing for science magazines in the early years of bitter struggle. He knew how to get the stuff, translate it down, and pass it out to the readers of technical mags. So he’s not buffaloed by the material. He doesn’t go in for mystic scientism. He doesn’t dress things up in any kind of literary majesty or outrageous metaphors or phoney-baloney sideshows, style, extended similes.

Is he a science-fiction writer?

Oh, yeah. In some sense he’s the only science-fiction writer. He’s a figure who ranks with Stanislaw Lem in that regard, I think. He’s just repurposed the tools of the genre to such a tremendous extent that he’s doing things that are unheard of. He’s like a Hendrix figure who’s, like, this guy that picks up a guitar and instead of doing the things you expect to hear from a guitar, there are notes coming out of it that are like flutes and saxophones. That’s the kind of creative idiosyncrasy that Ballard brings to the genre.

But he’s not extrapolating anything. He’s not a futurist, is he?

Well, he is a futurist, and he’s always extrapolating something or other, but he’s usually extrapolating dark motivations.

More social science than physical science?

No, I don’t think it’s even social science. I mean, a book like Crash is like a guy who’s studied hardcore porn, like bondage porn. The kind of porn where people are so trussed up in like ropes and bags that it’s weirdly asexual, like latex porn, or one of these really extreme levels of fetishism that are close to mental breakdown. And he’s thought: why doesn’t someone do this with cars? That’s an extrapolation. It’s like saying, okay, given A and given C, given latex porn, what about people who have sex with car collisions? And in point of fact, there doesn’t seem to be a reason why people couldn’t get obsessed with car collisions. On the face of it it’s like saying, given a car, why not a flying car – which is a very standard sci-fi extrapolation.

Ballard is one of the few people who would extrapolate that kind of interiority in the human psyche – to say, okay, given bondage porn, why not cars colliding? Take his story “Manhole 69″ – it’s about an experiment that renders people sleepless, and they end up with attacks of claustrophobia. They’re sort of liberated and they don’t sleep, and at the end they succumb to a massive mental breakdown where they feel like their psyches have been crushed in a box. And that’s an extrapolation, but it’s an extrapolation along the lines of madness. It involves someone thinking about the human reaction to technical innovation in a way which is not cut and dried. It’s not design thinking, it’s not science thinking, it’s not technical thinking, it’s not medical thinking – it’s really surreal thinking.

Is it the reaction to technical developments that makes it science fiction, or is it the surreal element?

Well I don’t know what else you would call it besides science fiction, because it posits a breakthrough. It’s got cognitive estrangement. It’s got an arc of idea development. In some sense it’s a reasonable extrapolation, but it’s also just very horrifying, and you don’t see many science-fiction writers who are willing to push that line of development – the flaws in the human psyche and what might happen under such circumstances.

You mention Lem. Are there other writers within the genre that you think come at science fiction from a similar angle?

Well, the British New Wave writers. Aldiss’s Barefoot in the Head – that’s a pretty Ballardian work. But Aldiss is very prolific and he can sort of do anything for anybody, whereas Ballard does stick to his last.

A lot of his work has an apocalyptic setting, similar to more contemporary climate-catastrophe works from people like Kim Stanley Robinson; some of your mid-90s work has that going on. Ballard comes at it from a very different angle, like he’s one of these cosy English catastrophe-school writers, but with a perverse enjoyment of the liberating aspects of the disaster.

Well, I think it’s Ballard’s youthful acceptance of life in a prison camp that allows him to cheerfully look at the major breakdowns of the bourgeois world and accept them. Lem is very much the same way. I remember Lem saying something along the lines that the Nazi concentration camps had conclusively destroyed the ability of literature to be written about the individual – that from now on you could only write serious work with the scope of the annihilation of a whole population. It simply made no sense to write to any scale less grand than a response to genocide. Lem has the experience of somebody who has witnessed the unspeakable. It’s like going out one day and finding your capital city reduced to ruins by Stuka bombers – that gives him a grandeur of the imagination.

< < Italo Calvino

Do you suppose the next Ballard or Lem is going to come out of the Ninth Ward?

Well, I’m not sure if we saw the next Ballard or Lem we’d be able to recognise them as such. We’d just say, well, okay, he’s William Vollman, or whoever. He’d be as sui generis as these other two characters. You know, another guy who I think is oddly in Ballard’s camp in some profound way is Calvino.

Absolutely.

Yeah. Calvino is similar because his work is very extrapolative in a lot of ways, an Oulipo-style mathematical game playing. A Calvino story will posit something unusual, and then it’s chewed over from a whole mathematical-philosophical perspective. And there’s a great deal of mental fireworks in it, but it’s not the sort of thing that makes your Analog engineer-reader slap his forehead with a sense of fulfilment: “Oh, that’s my kind of story”. No, afraid not.

Some of your work has some really overt Ballardian influences, like “The Beautiful and the Sublime,” where you have these people hanging out at this kind of Alpine Vermilion Sands, and you have grounded astronauts and people flying gliders and they’re all very bourgeois and it’s got this English parlour thing going on – it’s a beautiful story, like the kinder and gentler aspects of Ballard. Are you cognisant of those similarities?

I internalised the guy’s work at an early age but I never wanted to write a Ballard pastiche, any more than I would have wanted to write an Edgar Rice Burroughs pastiche. There have been moments in stories where I’ve written a phrase and thought, “Well, that’s very Jimmy Ballard”. But I wouldn’t dare write a Ballard story. I just wouldn’t do it.

Do you perceive that he had a similar influence on some of the other seminal cyberpunks like Gibson or Neal Stephenson?

Lew Shiner talked a lot about Ballard – he was a Ballard fan. Gibson is certainly a Ballard reader. A lot of cyberpunks were major Anglophiles. We’re really kind of New Wave 2.0, and if you were into New Wave, you really had to be into British New Wave because that was where it was happening. Of course, I’m a Harlan Ellison disciple, so I’m American New Wave by right of inheritance. But, yeah, you had to read Ballard. I know for a fact that John Kessel and James Patrick Kelly and a lot of the other humanist writers were jealously anxious of Ballard. They didn’t appreciate the idea that cyberpunks were somehow appropriating this guy – someone they really thought of as a hero of their own – as somebody who was willing to write real literary fiction about scientific things, without doing these annoying cyberpunk tropes like “my deck’s got more RAM than yours”.

How do you think it is that Ballard transcended the genre in terms of critical acceptance?

Well, mostly because he really knows what he’s talking about. Ballard can write a movie review that I would dare any other science-fiction writer to do. Science-fiction writers can’t write about popular culture, even high culture, without trotting out their own self-importance. Which is sort of humiliating. Ballard never does that. He’s said things that are very affirmative about science fiction, like “it’s the only true literature of the twentieth century,” “Earth is the only alien planet,” and other wise things. Ballard’s the kind of guy – the kind of science-fiction writer – who can put on a performance in a pop art gallery that would cause a riot! If you took most science-fiction writers and dropped them in a pop-art gallery, they’d be saying things like “I didn’t get it about Picasso”, or “I kind of like Bridget Riley op art. Is that her real name, Bridget Riley?” They wouldn’t grab the bit between their teeth and push the world of artistic expression to a place that caused people to freak out.

There’s a disconnect between the science-fiction community and the rest of popular culture.

Well, science fiction’s a form of popular culture. But if you’d look at most science-fiction practitioners, they basically come across like a Nashville hat act. They’re hicks.

William Gibson wrote an introduction last year to Eileen Gunn’s short story collection, Stable Strategies, in which he recalled his younger self yearning for SF as Bohemia. Ballard seems like he really pulls that off in the context of London in the swinging Sixties. He takes the genre more into the same territory as abstract painters or pop-art practitioners.

I think that’s right. And of course he’s a real scholar of the surrealist movement – he really gets it about André Breton and Max Ernst and the other surrealists. Take early Ballard books like Crystal World with its Ernst frottage cover – that wasn’t by accident. He just has better taste than most science-fiction writers. He’s better read than most science-fiction writers. He takes a coherent intellectual interest in things that aren’t science or technology or engineering. He’s cognisant of those things because he’s got a more variegated tool set. He’s better read. He’s a widely travelled guy. He’s a child of the diaspora. He grew up in China, mostly. He’s not a Little England kind of guy. There’s nothing parochial about him. He never succumbs to nationalist cant. He’s not religious. He just has imagination on the cosmic scale. He’s a hard guy to surprise.

Ballard wrote in the French introduction to Crash that “science fiction is the only true literature of the twentieth century”. Is that still relevant in the 21st century?

I’m not sure that that’s going to hold any water. But I would bet that, in the 22nd century, if someone read that, then Ballard, and if they themselves were of a Ballardian frame of mind, then they would certainly agree with him. Unfortunately, they would also think that if science fiction was the only true form of literature in the twentieth century, it’s only genuine practitioner was JG Ballard. Which may in fact be the case. The judgment of history is still out, but my suspicion is that he has a better chance of being read in a hundred years than ninety percent of his colleagues.

What about Burroughs? Ballard seems to talk about Burroughs a lot. Do you think he can be situated in the same territory roughly?

No. I think Ballard is actually about ten times smarter than Burroughs. I mean, Burroughs is like a drunk who found a sharpened screwdriver in the gutter. His work is claptrap, but it’s marvellous claptrap. So that gives it a weird demented Bohemian majesty. Whereas Ballard is a very fastidious kind of guy who’s very much on top of his game. He’s willing to stare into the same abyss as Burroughs, but he’d never sit there in a heroin stupor as the abyss started eating its way up his leg. You look at the colleagues of Burroughs and you just tick off the body count. It’s unbelievable. Whereas the colleagues of Ballard did pretty well for themselves. Burroughs may be a greater artist than Ballard, because he’s really pushing right past, and over, the edge. But I think Ballard as a creative figure is much more on top of his game than Burroughs. His muse is not a carnivore. He doesn’t have a monkey on his back. He’s really in command of his material.

Over the course of his career we’ve seen this retreat from conventional science-fictional settings and situations, at least in the novels, where we start out with the post-apocalyptic scenarios of the early novels, and then we go to the 70s novels – the urban laboratories of Crash, Concrete Island, and High Rise – and on to the contemporary novels, set in a very contemporary setting with very apparently conventional protagonists: Super-Cannes, Cocaine Nights, and Millennium People, where we have middle-class revolutionaries in Chelsea. Any thoughts on what drives that kind of progression?

Well, probably living in Shepperton…

I see similar trends with the cyberpunks: you and William Gibson and Neal Stephenson all write books that have a more contemporary setting. Your most recent novel, The Zenith Angle, is a kind of contemporary, cyberpunky techno thriller; Gibson’s last book, Pattern Recognition, is a post-9/11 quasi-thriller about a cool hunter…

I don’t know. You get good at something and you want to refine it. I think young men have a lot of trouble just keeping the muse down to a hard, steady glow. You tend to see an awful lot of fireworks when you’re a young science-fiction writer, and you tend to use a lot of found material, which I think Ballard did. You look at Ballard, you find a truly deracinated guy in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, in the Air Force with nothing to do with himself, suddenly discovering American pulp magazines and thinking, “Jesus, I had no idea this stuff even existed”. So he finds his toolkit at hand and he repurposes all of it. That was certainly the case in the first three books I wrote. They’re all stock material and I’m just trying to bring them up to date, file off the serial numbers, and adjust them to my own sensibility.

Do you perceive a lingering influence of Ballard and the other British New Wave writers in the new British SF?

< < China Mieville

You know, I’d like to say that I did, but I don’t know. There is a kind of edginess to, say, China Mieville – this kind of really “go for the Grand Guignol” thing, something you don’t see American fantasy writing do very much. British SF and fantasy generally just has a broader emotional palette than American fantasy. But the new British space opera, or even British New Weird, doesn’t feel particularly Ballardian to me. They really feel like the Beatles repurposing Chuck Berry or Little Richard. I mean, these are guys who were reading mostly American cultural product and recognising that the Americans had fallen mute in some terrible way and this is their chance to really step out onto the stage and play the pipe organ.

Who’s the real standard bearer in American sci fi these days, other than people who are just writing rack product?

I would guess it would be something like Small Beer Press or maybe McSweeney’s – if you want to read something that will make the hair stand up on the back of your neck, that would be where you would go. I mean, that really has a very British feel to it. McSweeney’s feels British to me – you read it and it’s all these arch little overeducated statements by guys who are making sort of dry, semi-British kinds of…I don’t know, it’s weird.

Ballard’s early novels were centred on environmental disasters: the environmental devastation is used as the excuse for the creation of a surreal landscape with its own strange logic. Do you see a new awareness of these issues of environmental disaster in the genre? Do you think that science fiction has a role to play in that debate?

I guess. There’s The Drought, The Wind From Nowhere, Crystal World, The Drowned World – his apprentice works. Those works, to me, don’t show any serious environmental awareness; The Wind From Nowhere is literally a wind from nowhere, which makes no sense on the face of it. It’s not like it’s a work of meteorological extrapolation. This isn’t Kim Stanley Robinson manfully tackling climate change. It’s really a guy who saw his world comprehensively destroyed as a young man trying to come to terms with what he himself went through, I think. They’re classic period pieces. The subtext of all those works is British imperial decline. If the question is whether we’re going to be seeing more works of imperial decline, then yeah, I’d be forecasting a few of those, actually. That wouldn’t surprise me a bit.

Do you see any early tremors of that out there?

I don’t know. My suspicion is that in another four to five years you’re going to find people writing about climate change in the same way they wrote about the nuclear threat in the 50s. It’s just going to be in every story every time. People are going to come up with a set of climate-change tropes, like three-eyed mutants and giant two-headed whatevers, because this is the threat of our epoch and it just becomes blatantly obvious to everybody. Everybody’s going to pile on to the bandwagon and probably reduce the whole concept to kindling. That may be the actual solution to a genuine threat of Armageddon – to talk about it so much that it becomes banal.

To me these late-Ballard pieces, these Shepperton pieces – Cocaine Nights, Super-Cannes and so forth – really seem like gentle chiding from somebody who’s recognised that his civilisation really has gone mad. They’re a series of repetitions that say, “Look, we’re heading for a world where consensus reality really is just plain unsustainable, and the ideas that the majority of our people hold in their heart of hearts are just not connected to reality”. I think that may be a very prophetic assessment on his part. I think we may in fact be in such a world right now – where people have really just lost touch with the “reality-based community” and are basically just living in self-generated fantasy echo chambers that have no more to do with the nature of geopolitical reality than Athanasius Kircher or Castaneda’s Don Juan.

Any reasons for optimism?

Well, yeah. I think it’s an optimistic thing that Ballard’s lived a long time. He’s sort of a great, spreading oak tree, really. If you had looked at the wild boys of the British New Wave in their heyday, you might’ve thought, “Oh, well, they’ll all hang themselves,” or “They’ll throw themselves into the sea like beatniks,” or “This will end in murder”. And if anybody was going to come to a wicked end, it would have been Jimmy Ballard – the obsessive, the psychotic crank, the man who’s staring right into the eyes of it. His condensed novels [collected in The Atrocity Exhibition] really have a freak-out quality to them. But he didn’t die of that. On the contrary, he just sort of fed on it. You can read his critical works now and he’s obviously in full possession of his senses. He’s funny, he’s on top of his game. He’s still an interesting guy to read even though he’s at an advanced age now. He’s got things to say that are remarkable and make you feel better about things and really demonstrate some analytical insight. I envy that. I hope that if I live that long I have that many marbles left in my little velvet drawstring bag. To me that’s reason for optimism. I don’t like to call it optimism, because as a futurist I think there’s something wrong with that term. If you say you’re optimistic or pessimistic about the future, it’s just giving you an excuse to place a patch over one eye and ignore half of the determining factors. You should struggle hard not to be optimistic or pessimistic about a future prospect. What you should do is be engaged and in command of the facts. So to be optimistic or pessimistic are really intellectual vices. But on the other hand, there’s nothing wrong with a role model.

Ballard is somebody who really has something to say. He’s saying it to a lot of different people. He’s never sold out, never wrote a cheesy trilogy. He had movies made of his books. He recovered. He didn’t care. They were okay movies, even. He had some money. His children grew to adulthood. He has grandchildren. He was never arrested. He hasn’t been in a jail or a clinic. He’s not Jeffrey Archer. He didn’t come to a bad end. He’s not an alcoholic. He has a life that many people would envy. And justly so. To that end, I feel very pleased about him. Not that I am an optimist about him or his worldview. I would not want him to have another worldview. I’m not going to criticise his sensibility. He’s a great artist. He’s given something very few people can give; in his case, he’s the only one who could possibly have given that. He gave a lot of it, it was good, it was consistently interesting. What more does one want?

..::: LINKS
>> Beyond the Beyond (Bruce Sterling’s blog)
>> Viridian Design
>> Art Center College of Design
>> Survival Research Labs/Mark Pauline
>> McSweeney’s