Abu Dhabi. Image from ‘Pillars of Wisdom’ (2009) by Paul Williams.

Paul Williams is stationed in Abu Dhabi doing contract work on computer systems. He has made a series of short films during his time there, which I find remarkable for their attempt to, in his words, ‘mix Ballardian landscapes with elements of Islamic mythology to arrive at something new and unfamiliar’. This film work is attuned to the subtle details and emergent urbanism at play in Abu Dhabi, which, like Dubai before it, is fast becoming the epitome of Ballardian spatial logic: an almost sentient, self-replicating landscape powered by the inexorable logic of capitalist realism. In such a place, tricks of perception are commonplace, enhanced not only by the preternatural, blasted desert light but also the strange stirrings of a future urban sensibility.

Below, find Paul’s latest two films, ‘Majlis al Jinn’ and the incredible ‘Vermilion Sands’, as well as another favourite of mine, ‘Solaris’, with its Lem/Tarkovsky references. I highly recommend exploring the rest of Paul’s output (often soundtracked by artists from the Touch soundscape label), which continue to mine this unique nexus of Ballard, Islam, rampant development, industrial isolation and subsonic hums. These filmic miniatures form a unique, ongoing travelogue, often shot from the upper-level hotel room high above the clouds that has served as Paul’s home for the past year, recording his nostalgia and emotion at the absence of his family in the UK, as he captures the evolution of the cityscape warping the desert below.

Note: these films are not viewable in Google Reader and other RSS devices due to embedding restrictions requested by the filmmaker.

Solaris from Paul H Williams on Vimeo.

Video and Music by Paul H Williams – Best experienced with headphones.

Successive bursts of static came through the headphones, against a background of deep, low-pitched murmuring, which seemed to me the very voice of the planet itself.

Stanisław Lem (Solaris)

Abstracted, Mason invented some tale to satisfy her, then carried his coffee into the study and stared at the morning haze which lay across the rooftops, a soft lake of opacity that followed the same contours as the midnight sea. The mist dissolved in the sunlight, and for a moment the diminishing reality of the normal world reasserted itself, filling him with a poignant nostalgia.

JG Ballard, ‘Now Wakes the Sea’.

One morning I awoke to find everything obscured by a thick roiling mist. It seemed to have a life of its own; sometimes moving slowly sometimes quickly. I could smell the sea and I realised that that was where it had come from. I stood on the balcony with the clouds drifting about me. I thought of home and, for a while, it was as if I was floating between two worlds…

- Paul H Williams, 2010.

Majlis al Jinn (Meeting Place of the Jinn) from Paul H Williams on Vimeo.

Video and music by Paul H Williams
Filmed on location in Abu Dhabi
Best experienced with headphones

Genie (Arabic: جني jinnī, or djinni) is a supernatural creature in Pre-islamic and Islamic mythology which (according to both mythology) occupies a parallel world to that of mankind, and together with humans and angels makes up the three sentient creations of Allah. (1)

The Holy Qur’aan reveals that Jinn are created from fire whereas the human beings are created from clay. Although they are invisible to human eyes, the jinn can see us… (2)

I have always felt that the empty swimming pools and abandoned hotels featured in JG Ballard’s stories are symbols of loss and can be seen as “ghosts”. The empty structures shown here are in the process of being made and therefore have a very different relationship with time.

In this video I wanted to mix Ballardian landscapes with elements of Islamic mythology to arrive at something new and unfamiliar.

This is the reality of this part of the middle east: 21st century technologies combined with religious beliefs forged in the 7th century.

Majlis al Jinn takes place on a site that is between dream and waking; between conception and realisation. As it pushes its way into our reality perhaps we can already feel the presence of those beings who may eventually live there… human or other… it will depend upon who comes…

(1) en.wikipedia.org/​wiki/​Genie
(2) http://inter-islam.org/​faith/​jinn.html

- Paul H Williams, 2010.

Vermilion Sands from Paul H Williams on Vimeo.

Video and music by Paul H Williams
Filmed on location in Abu Dhabi
Best experienced with headphones

“Sometimes in the late afternoons we’d drive out along the beach to the Scented Desert and sit alone by one of the pools, watching the sun fall away behind the reefs and hills, lulling ourselves on the rose-sick air. When the wind began to blow cool across the sand we’d slip down into the water, bathe ourselves and drive back to town, filling the streets and café terraces with jasmine and musk-rose and helianthemum.”

J.G. Ballard, ‘Prima Belladona’.

“At sunset, when the vermilion glow reflected from the dunes along the horizon fitfully illuminated the white faces of the abandoned hotels, Bridgman stepped on to his balcony and looked out over the long stretches of cooling sand as the tides of purple shadow seeped across them. Slowly, extending their slender fingers through the shallow saddles and depressions, the shadows massed together like gigantic combs, a few phosphorescing spurs of obsidian isolated for a moment between the tines, and then finally coalesced and flooded in a solid wave across the half-submerged hotels. Behind the silent facades, in the tilting sand-filled streets which had once glittered with cocktail bars and restaurants, it was already night. Haloes of moonlight beaded the lamp-standards with silver dew, and draped the shuttered windows and slipping cornices like a frost of frozen gas.”

J.G. Ballard, ‘The Cage of Sand’.

“May I have some water?”

I opened my eyes to find myself looking up at a tall figure standing over me. The voice was female but the silhouette, burned out by the intense, afternoon sunlight, was strangely androgynous. I was still drowsy. I’d come for a swim at the hotel’s small, artificial beach and, after half an hour of floating under the gaze of the semi-constructed skyscrapers on the neighbouring island, I’d returned to the shore for some food and a nap. The heat was relentless and I was sheltering beneath one of the thatched wooden sun shades planted deep in the soft white sand.

“Yes… yes… I must have drifted off,” I said to fill the vacuum while I located the bottle by the side of my sunlounger momentarily distracted by the lines of ants marching across the microscopic dunes.

When I looked back I realised I was in the company of a young woman. She seemed to be all arms and legs, very thin and angular. Her skin was deeply tanned and still dripping with water. Mirrored sunglasses obscured much of her small sharp face. As she raised the bottle to her lips a multitude of bangles slipped down her arm with a metallic rattle. I watched her drink for some time never having seen her amongst the regular group of hotel guests that I maintained my distance from with casual nods.

“That’s much better,” she said wiping her mouth with a satisfied gasp. “You like Ballard?” she nodded at the blanched copy of Vermilion Sands I had on the small, white plastic table next to me.

“Yes, I’m definitely a Ballardian,” I said smiling. I couldn’t place her accent. It seemed to veer from Russian into something much more eastern.

“Of course you know that Vermilion Sands actually exists,” she murmured.

There was a pause. Even the clanging of the workmen across the water constructing the new high-rise apartments seemed to fade for a few seconds.

“In our minds,” I said.

“A few hours drive from here,” she said ignoring my response. She let the idea slowly form inside my head. “Pen?” she demanded holding out her hand.

I fumbled in my rucksack wondering why I seemed to do whatever she said.

She started to sketch out a map on the pure white napkin that came with my lunch stopping occasionally to toss back her long black wet hair.

“That should get you there,” she said leaning back satisfied with her handiwork.

“Oh yes,” I looked at the map. “There it is Vermilion Sands…”

“You don’t believe me!” she laughed.

“I’m afraid not,” I laughed back. “Not even a little bit.”

She curled a forefinger at me to come closer. I leaned forward and so did she until our faces were just inches apart and I could smell the brine on her skin. She reached up to slowly move her mirrored shades down below the bridge of her nose. I looked into what should have been her eyes. Pale blue sea-anemones waved their delicate tendrils at me as if wafted by warm ocean currents from beneath a different sun.

I nodded my head.

She restored her sunglasses and stood up once more towering above me.

“Go and see,” she said over her shoulder as she returned to the gently lapping waves.

- Paul H Williams, 2010.

..:: Previously on Ballardian:
+ Dubai Ballard World

San-Zhr Pod Village. Photograph: Craig Ferguson.

The Tomorrow Museum is a new blog that I have really been enjoying. It’s curated by Joanne McNeil, a freelance writer on science and technology, and Jerry Brito, an academic researcher. Their brief is to ‘explore how technology, science, and economics are affecting the fine arts’ and the tendency is towards longer, thoughtful posts.

Joanne has just posted a great piece on ‘the world’s strangest housing communities’, an overview of micronational estates the world over. Joanne includes Alphaville in Brazil, patterned after Godard’s film and a place where the residents watch TV Alphaville, a 24-hour telesurveillance channel composed of nothing other than people coming and going into and out of the estate. This is my idea of heaven.

Joanne opens the piece with a riff on Super-Cannes:

“People at Eden-Olympia have no time for getting drunk together, for infidelities or rows with the girlfriends, no time for adulterous affairs or coveting their neighbor’s wives, no time ever for friends,” Wilder Penrose says in J. G. Ballard’s Super Cannes. The “great defect is that there is no need for personal morality. Thousands of people live and work here without making a single decision about right and wrong. The moral order is engineered into their lives along with the speed limits and the security systems.”

Many of Ballard’s later novels investigate the coven-like nature of suburbia — gated communities, high rises. The architecture and technologies designed to save us time and make our lives easier, only dull our senses. Or, as Gang of Four put it, “The problem with leisure, is what to do for pleasure.” Penrose, the psychiatrist in Ballard’s fictional French business park, believes there’s a science to it: “Part of the mind atrophies. A moral calculus that took thousands of years to develop starts to wither from neglect. Once you dispense with morality the important decisions become a matter of aesthetics. You’ve entered an adolescent world where you define yourself by the kind of trainers you wear.”

Ballard isn’t the only writer to explore these themes. Jingoism at the backyard level is the target in TC Boyle’s Tortilla Curtain. Neal Stephanson wrote about “burbclaves,” lots of franchised nations in suburbia. Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower takes place in a walled Los Angeles suburb. Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino sees housing communities optimistically as chocolate boxes. Then again, every example comes from the main character’s imagination. Here are several examples stranger than fiction…

In addition to Alphaville, Joanne goes on to detail the mythical Midgetville in Virginia; the quasi-religious compound Auroville in India; the peopleless pod city of San-Zhr in Taiwan (very Ballardian — to paraphrase JGB, a ‘city designed not for man but for man’s absence’); and the fake Orange County in China.

San-Zhr is amazing. It’s an SF-tinged housing project, a network of multicoloured pods that was abandoned in the 1960s just before completion due to a number of unexplained deaths. According to photographer Craig Ferguson, the ghosts of these dead workers haunt the site:

As news of these accidents spread, no one wanted to go there, even to visit, and the project was subsequently abandoned. The ghosts of those who died in vain are said to still linger there, unremembered and unable to pass on. The complex was left in its unfinished state because no amount of redevelopment will bring people to the area due to superstitions about ghosts, and it can’t be demolished because destroying the homes of spirits and lost souls is taboo in Asian culture.

Craig managed to persuade some locals to get him into the site and he’s published a series of remarkable images detailing his visit. In my former life as a travel writer, I myself might have spent a night there.

One further remark about Joanne’s article. She says that the fake Orange County, rather than patterning itself after the US gated community, should model itself on Melbourne instead, referring to a Treehugger article that lauds Melbourne’s pro-pedestrian and bicycle culture. Yes. As a Melbourne resident I’d love to visit overseas simulacra of my home town. I think then my mind would finally explode in an inverted subjective/objective feedback loop overload. But the Treehugger article only explores Melbourne’s inner city. The suburbs are a different matter. Perhaps the overseas versions might weed out the worrying strain of Mad Max style behaviour that sees cyclists as game to be hunted.

But then again, such behaviour inspired Mad Max itself, one of the finest films ever made.

Oh I don’t know. You decide.

Panels from Death Note 0, by Tsugumi Ohba (writer) and Takeshi Obata (illustrator).

Deep assignments run through all our lives; there are no coincidences.

J.G. Ballard, 1990.

Earlier, I noted the similarities between the manga New Engineering and Ballard’s first novel, The Wind from Nowhere. This is a connection that was flagged by the minicomic artist Tom Kaczynski. When I pressed Tom on this, he told me that although he wasn’t quite sure the similarities were deliberate, he thought they were still remarkable enough to be unpacked.

Wind is the ugly duckling of Ballard’s novels. With its generic plot and decidedly rushed feel, it’s been disowned by its author, left to feed off the crumbs of Ballard supporters looking to drill further down into the man’s back catalogue. Which is why I was amazed at the thought that something so obscure and unloved could have inspired anything let alone a node of the total cultural fission that is Japanese manga.

You wouldn’t think it could happen again, would you? But over at sub_divided, they’re claiming that Ballard’s 1959 short story “Now: Zero” is the basis for the 2003 manga Death Note! Unlike Tom Kaczynski, sub_divided doesn’t merely see this as an interesting coincidence; no, sub_divided is claiming direct inspiration:

“Now: Zero” was published in Japanese. Recently, in fact. Apparently, the connection between it and Death Note is not unknown to Japanese fans. There go my dreams of groundbreaking investigative journalism.”

Of Ballard’s shorts, “Now: Zero” is perhaps Wind‘s equivalent, described by John Boston as “about as inconsequential a story as Ballard has published”. It tells the tale of an office milquetoast who discovers that if he writes about someone, they die, so he sets about eliminating his enemies via the act of writing. The twist at the end of the story is that the reader is supposed to die, too. As John remarks, there are Poe overtones, notably in the air of supernature and in the ornate language, yet there are also sub-Ballardian themes, almost but not quite hatched, including intertwingled concepts of the tyranny of time and the erosion of free will and the notion of the writer bringing into being parallel worlds of the imagination that challenge the structural integrity of the real. Plus, when the protagonist tries to wipe out the inhabitants of the town where he was born, a faint whiff of the messianic madness of The Unlimited Dream Company might take you. I also like how the twist in the tail is one that actually kills the reader, corny in itself but clever if you look at it as revenge on the type of story Ballard might have felt obliged to write at this stage of his career, the type that would only be bought by a magazine if it had the twist, a device demanded by readers of the day. But I’m stretching, because the 29-year-old Ballard was clearly still finding his voice and this story is, formally at least, an experiment that would soon be abandoned.

Panels from Death Note 0, by Tsugumi Ohba (writer) and Takeshi Obata (illustrator).

Now read sub_divided’s full post for some interesting commentary on the ways “Now: Zero” collides with Death Note, including this:

In the pilot, there’s a mention of an incident that occurred in the mid-seventies in which a bank branch was forced to close after a series of ‘accidental’ deaths. The first two people to die were the branch manager and assistant manager, both from heart attacks. The rest of the employees all died in accidents until, finally, the last remaining employee of the branch committed suicide. After the last employee died, it was found that a lot more people involved with the employee (but completely unrelated to the bank) had all died in accidents. It’s only very briefly mentioned so that two detectives have an incentive to further investigate a series of heart attacks that happened at a school in Tokyo. But it just strikes me as being quite similar to the beginning of Now: Zero from what I’ve read here.

And this:

[In "Now: Zero"] you have:

1. A cowardly person with a tedious desk job who uses a notebook to kill people. This person doesn’t have the sense/imagination/diabolic mind to disguise what he’s doing, and only thinks of killing his coworkers and other people who have personally affected him.
2. Police who suspect that these “accidental” deaths are too coincidental to be accidents, and who suspect that the killer was someone who knew the victims.
3. Main characters who panic when the police start asking questions about them and resolve to get rid of the evidence. In both cases, they decide to burn the notebook.
4. Surprise “meta” twists at the end.

Then combine the company that shuts down, and…can there be any doubt? It seems like the only really new thing in the Pilot is the idea of different people using the notebook in different ways. One policeman says he’d use it to rise in the ranks (like in Ballard’s story) and one says he’d use it to improve the world, the way Light attempts to in Death Note proper. It’s presented as a flawed idea — but it seems like the author has to think about it for a moment, which is honestly kind of scary.

The comments provide further hardcore analysis and plot detail of both works, even if a good deal of the readers hadn’t heard of Ballard before. That’s OK, I hadn’t heard of Death Note either, but those comments almost had me convinced that Tsugumi Ohba knows his Ballard.

Luckily, I’ve found an online archive of all Death Note manga, including the pilot story, which is apparently the one with all the “Now: Zero” protein. I’ve flicked through the pilot and I can tell you that there are definite similarities, even though the nerd is now a Japanese schoolkid who is bullied and the supernatural elements have been enhanced to include a demon from the netherworld who lost his “book of the dead”, which the schoolkid finds and which she believes to be a blank diary someone has lost. It could be influenced by Ballard, or it could be a coincidence. I’m not positive there’s conclusive evidence either way, especially given that, as sub_divided points out, Death Note focuses on the eerie quality of the notebook whereas:

“the focus in Ballard’s story is not really the notebook (it’s an old one the narrator digs out of his closet). The focus is really the concentrated resentment of the narrator — what if his outlet, his written fantasies, really did have the power to kill people. So, although the narrator himself eventually concludes that the problem lies with the notebook, and resolves to burn it, you can say that the notebook isn’t really the issue at hand.”

I’ll get back to you after I’ve read Death Note‘s pilot in full.

But for now there’s one bizarre assertion that sub_divided makes that I feel I must set to rights to preserve Ballard’s good name. Sub_divided claims that “One of the websites I was reading observes that Ballard was an alcoholic and that this is reflected in his characters’ relationships, which are generally ‘pleasant in the morning, argumentative in the afternoon, and abusive at night.’”

Hmmmmm, I know Ballard likes a Scotch but he’s no alcoholic from what I’ve read. And can you imagine his passive cypher-characters getting into an abusive argument? After digging I find that in fact sub_divided is referring to crime writer Jim Thompson, who, according to Wikipedia:

“drank heavily; the effects of alcoholism often featured in his works… Donald E. Westlake, who adapted The Grifters for the screen, observed that alcoholism had a great role in Thompson’s literature, though it tended to be inexplicit. Westlake described typical personal relationships in Thompson novels as pleasant in the morning, argumentative in the afternoon, and abusive at night; behavior common to the alcoholic Thompson’s style of life, but which he ellided from the stories.”

Sort yourself out, sub_divided!

Damme, Ackroyd just keeps pumping them out doesn’t he? He must have a whole crew of cheeky culture vulture mudlarks and fey, fettlesome and febrile Oxonians slaving away in the secret cellars of his Limehouse Penthouse. He makes James Michener look like some lollygaggin’ Yankee.

I always liked what the real magus of secret London, Iain Sinclair, said about Peter Ackroyd. “He’s Colonel Mustard and he did it in the library with a research assistant.” And Ackroyd does look a lot like the good Colonel Moutard.

Yes, Ackroyd’s written some brilliant books. Hawksmoor, The House of Dr Dee, Chatterton, are all superbly written and psychically charged tales about the hidden human bones of London. And Albion: History of English Imagination is the best book ever about a subject no one realised existed until he wrote about it.

But both Ackroyd and the other strange geomancy warlock of English letters, JG Ballard, are now in their own deadpan, sly and slightly bitchy english way, sorta coughing and nudging their audiences towards Iain Sinclair.

It’s like a quincunx (cue Durrell, Fowles and Golding. Fellow magicians but self-imposed exiles from Old Lud). Currently you have Ackroyd, Ballard, Amis fils (although his batteries are ebbing a bit) and Alan Moore setting up the four points of blokish energy (This is a male incantation thing. I’m sure you chicks are up to equally weird shit with the London Energy. Looking at you in particular Miss Angela Carter. Death is no excuse) and in the centre is Iain Sinclair assome kind of lightening rod cum Leyden Jar for it all.

Fuck it. FDB, just read Downriver for starters. Imagine if Burroughs was a Londoner with Blake’s gift of transcendental vision. Whether you love it or hate it, you’ll know you’ll have read something by someone really plugged into that big grim green secretly exuberantly and dourly surrealistic metropolis spawning ever outwards from a river named after time.

A city where a statue of a (Darkest) Peruvian bear greets you at the Heathrow train terminus at Paddington Station while it’s biggest folk hero is a mass murderer.

Image from Diet Soap #1.

+ Following on from my rapture at discovering the SurveillanceSaver software, here are some more portals onto mediated inner space.

Chris Nakashima-Brown brings news of issue 1 of the fabulous zine, Diet Soap. The theme is Surveillance and there are poems, palindromes, fiction, reportage and lots of excellent collaged art, including (so says the editorial) ‘a piece on the history of cake making, a story about super heroes, a panopticon, and one soiled wig.’

Already, from Darin C. Bradley, I’ve picked up some excellent advice on how to inwardly counter CCTV the next time it traps me in its gaze:

We’re sort of comically frozen like this. No one is really sure what to do next, so I think to myself, What would Borges do?

And via Diet Soap #1, the Surveillance Camera Players, a group that performs plays in front of security cameras. What an excellent idea!

According to Diet Soap’s Doug Lain:

The police, who kept tabs on the organization before the Republican convention of 2004, describe the SCP as “a self-described anarchist group” that is nonetheless apolitical as it aligns itself with “no political party, citing the belief that democracy should be direct, not ‘representative.’” The SCP, again according to the police, encourages people to perform for security cameras. What the cops call “Surveillance Camera Theater” is both art and protest, but the SCP does not necessarily recruit members. The cop’s report concluded “the actual number of persons involved in this sort of activity can be significantly greater than actual membership.”

+ Away from Diet Soap, hardcore Ballardian Mike Bonsall has used images from the same feeds that the SurveillanceSaver software churns to provide a remarkable illustration of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus ‘in a suitably Ballardian way’

According to Mike:

It was in the trenches of the first world war that Wittgenstein developed his ‘picture theory’ of propositions which is central to the Tractatus … Wittgenstein could hardly have forseen the flowering of pictures on the internet, although proposition 6.341 might presage the invention of digital images. Sometimes by design and sometimes by accident, thousands of webcams are constantly ‘depicting reality by representing a possibility of existence and non-existence of states of affairs.’ (2.201)

Now watch and read on …

+ And finally, via Posthuman Blues, a ‘typically idiotic local news piece about a “ghost” visible in gas-station surveillance footage.’ It’s clearly a digitally generated animation. I reckon the petrol station is trying to drum up business, as one of PB’s readers suggested.

Watch the footage and listen to the news android: ‘Too bad it’s not the ghost of cheap gas-station prices. They’re also gone with the wind’. Ho ho.

Interview by Simon Sellars

Cousin Silas is a producer of dark-ambient soundscapes. He has five albums to his name and a few EPs, spiking the vein of glacial electronica. His work evokes Edward Artemiev and Brian Eno. In fact, for afficionados drawing inspiration from Eno’s most influential ambient works (Music for Airports, say, through to Thursday Afternoon), pleasure may very well be derived from the work of Silas. These textured pieces can be gently iterative, building ambience and atmosphere systematically; they can be as tenuous as ectoplasm, barely there; and they can be dramatically reductive, sloughing layers to reveal roiling depths beneath, echo sounding in waves of sound.

I spoke to Cousin Silas about Ballard, Lovecraft, Forteana, Moorcock, Eno, Tarkovsky — all the essentials.

Simon Sellars

SS: What inspired you to create two volumes of Ballard Landscapes?

CS: I’ve read a lot of fiction over the years, mainly science fiction. I began with Mike Moorcock’s Stealer of Souls, and then it was the odd name-dropping of Ballard that intrigued me. My first Ballard book was The Atrocity Exhibition, and I haven’t looked back, really. Out of all the authors I’ve read, Ballard is the only one who consistently hits the mark when it comes to events, situations and descriptions that I can relate to. A good example is his story, ‘Low Flying Aircraft’. When I read that, I think I was — still am — more impressed with the colours rather than the full picture. I was totally enmeshed — it didn’t take any imagination whatsoever to go deeper into the landscapes of that story, due to my childhood.

As a kid I spent a lot of time at my Grandma’s caravan. Being an only child, much of that time was spent playing on the dunes and beach. Out of season, the local Lido pool was always empty. There were always busy shipping lanes off the beach, mainly oil tankers, and on the way to and from the caravan we passed a place called RAF Binbrook, an air force base which had been abandoned. Empty caravans and beach huts, disused coastal railways, the fog drifting in from Immingham — it made isolation a byword. Also, in the Colne Valley, a lot of the textile industry went into slow decline. As a result the valley became full of empty mills, stagnant canals and rusting equipment — all the Ballardian icons were there. Plus the M62 was being built around the time I began to take notice of things happening off my street!

The short answer is that there’s something that inspires me in almost every paragraph of Ballard, let alone the chapters or novels, and the hard part was making a conscious decision to stop (maybe) at two volumes.

SS: Why not ‘Lovecraft landscapes’, after another of your literary influences?

CS: Lovecraft can’t be read quite the same. Sure, there’s the odd story that contains some marvellous moods — for example, his description of Innsmouth, or the landscapes he describes in ‘Dagon’ or ‘Dunwich’. Damn, those things inspire some amazing images. But a lot of Lovecraft’s imagery has dated — well, it’s his writing style — whereas Ballard’s is just so ‘now’, and yet so retro in some respects.

Lovecraft was a writer I really had to work at. A few years ago I used to write SF, and among the circle of friends and co-writers I became involved with, some were always going on about him. I eventually read a Lovecraft short-story collection and found it pretty damn good, and then I read At the Mountains of Madness, which took some time to get going. I think it was my third or fourth attempt. I kept saying that there simply MUST be something here… Anyway, I did eventually finish it and I really did enjoy it. Since then I’ve read more or less all he wrote. Some of it is terribly dated, but when Lovecraft was on form, he was simply astounding. Like Ballard, though, it was the geography and landscapes that inspired me, rather than the characters. Unlike Ballard, Lovecraft’s hit rate isn’t as high.

Image from Ballard Landscapes cover art.

SS: Your online bio says, ‘When the occasion arose, he found that sound alchemy was more expressive and exploratory than writing.’ That’s intriguing — can you elaborate?

CS: As I said, I used to write a few years back, same as I still (try) and play the guitar, but I found that the Silas material was far more expressive and creative. With Silas there’s only one real limitation, and whilst it might sound pretentious, it’s imagination. With writing there are certain basic rules and with a guitar, to be good, you have to be absolutely brilliant. With ‘sound alchemy’, you don’t even have to know the first thing about writing music, or even reading music, only ‘does it sound ‘right’ for what you’re doing?’ If the answer is ‘yes’, go for it. Obviously having a basic understanding of chords and pitch with the guitar does help, but it’s not essential. Much like the punk ethos, get up and have a go!

SS: Was your SF writing influenced in any way by Ballard?

CS: Initially I was inspired by Moorcock, but gradually I drifted into Ballard territory. I did two stories that were directly influenced by J.G., one was called ‘The Song Of The Shapes’ and I can’t remember the title of the other one. ‘The Shapes’ was basically about floating sounds, like bubbles. The other story was basically an exodus of humans going back into the sea. And to my credit, they were both published. To be fair, though, it wasn’t ‘strictly’ Ballard, but the whole New Worlds thing. I loved the freedom and no-holds-barred that existed in the fiction. I haven’t really written fiction for years now. I find I don’t have the imagination for actually writing like I had, or the time.

SS: It’s no surprise to learn you also draw inspiration from Fortean events. Listening to your soundscapes is very much like tuning into some kind of spectral presence, or even something less metaphysical but still intensely dislocating, like voices drowned in static. There’s that steady hum in your work, and then something unsettling going on in the background, hustling in at the edge of consciousness.

CS: I’ve always had an unhealthy interest/curiosity in most things Fortean. I’m an avid reader and subscriber of Fortean Times, and I’ve even got two CDs worth of material currently being considered/reworked and going under the working title of The Fortean Project. There’s material there that’s been inspired by unidentified underwater objects, objects landing in remote woods, Borley Rectory, poltergeists, strange sounds, EVP, all the usual suspects. Also, ‘Necropolis Line’, the title track on my Earthrid CD, was inspired directly by an article in Fortean Times. There are quite a few other tracks of mine that have been inspired either directly or otherwise by Forteana.

I’m inspired by the strangeness, the mystery, and the downright weirdness of all these unexplained and odd happenings. I don’t especially enjoy reading about the whole world of Forteana, but I am interested in things like Electronic Voice Phenomena, strange moorland lights, places where ill feelings occur, anomalous artefacts. Some stuff I find a little tedious and totally uninspirational, like crop circles and UFO abductions. Even though I inherently know that some of the topics and situations that come under the slowly expanding umbrella of Forteana is bollocks, it can still create certain feelings. The inspiration is rather difficult to describe really — again, it’s moods and feelings and trying to convey these into sound. Naming these pieces does hopefully help the listener to ‘attune’ to what I’m aiming for.

SS: The presence of the paranormal in Ballard is something I’ve been taking an interest in.

CS: Oddly, I’d never really seen the parallel. Then again, thinking about it, these Fortean themes crop up in any number of SF stories, they’re not the exclusive domain of J.G. People out of place, or displaced momentarily in time, visions of Godlike entities, time travel, and even resurrection can be found all over the place. I suppose it’s because of the way these ‘ideas’ are presented. If they’re presented as fact, then it opens all kinds of doors for discussion, study and speculation. However, if they’re in fiction, then, well, it’s fiction! Perfect example is War of the Worlds. Anyone who’s read the book hasn’t rushed out to find if they’re there, or packed the family and belongings into a car and set of for the hills. And yet, when Orson Welles and the Mercury Theatre did a ‘play’, and produced it for radio in a documentary, on-the-spot news type thing, there was mass panic. Same story, different presentation.

SS: With the tracks on Ballard Landscapes 1 & 2, did you choose the title first and fit the music to suit, or did the music suggest a title?

CS: If I remember rightly, I think with the majority of the Ballard tracks I had an idea of the titles first. Some are direct, others less so. It was a case of trying to convey in sound what these images mean to me. Obviously the titles are like an aide memoir, and it could be argued that if ‘Rusting Gantry’ had been called, oh, I dunno, ‘Formless Clouds’, then the imagery and imagination of the listener would be taken somewhere else. I like to think that the titles and the pieces work well together.

Image from Ballard Landscapes cover art.

SS: Judging from those titles, it’s clear you place equal importance on Ballard’s worth as a short story writer. There seems to be as much, if not more, reference to his shorts than his novels.

CS: Probably more. Being inspired by Ballard’s short stories is easier than novels. With a short story, they’re usually on one level, and get to the point and conclude relatively quickly. A novel is obviously longer, and has a lot more going on. But for me, Ballard’s short stories are more essential than his novels for a variety of reasons — from the late 50s to the early 90s they are just stunning and contain some of the most powerful, experimental and genre-melting fiction this side of the Big Bang. A lot of the ideas that went into his novels were played out in short story form. Plus, in some short story collections such as Vermilion Sands and The Atrocity Exhibition, the boundaries between shorts and novels are somewhat blurred.

Unfortunately, since Empire of the Sun, which put Ballard firmly in the ‘general’ public arena, especially after the film arrived, his short stories seem to have been somewhat ignored. Plus, his actual output of short stories has abated over the last decade. Mind you, there isn’t really the market now that there was back then.

SS: An oft-stated criticism of Ballard, especially his later novels, is that they would have worked better as short stories.

CS: Short stories and novels are two quite separate forms of story telling. Some would argue that a short is never ‘allowed’ to develop, whereas a novel requires more skill in keeping the reader interested. For me there’s just as much skill if not more with a short story. You have to have more acute pacing, deviations from the ‘main’ story aren’t as flexible and there’s not as much time for full character-building as such. As I said above, some of his short stories were developed into novels, so in some respects you can judge the two mediums and the difference between them.

SS: When I interviewed Simon Reynolds, he said that Ballard and Brian Eno are ‘the two greatest British thinkers of the second half of the 20th Century.’ Given that Ballard and Eno are two of your major influences, do you agree with him?

CS: I’ve never really considered Ballard or Eno as thinkers. To me one writes incredibly atmospheric music, the other writes incredibly atmospheric fiction. Both Ballard and Eno are probably my strongest influences, but their influence is very tenuous, difficult to explain. They both invoke that certain mood of isolation. Isolation is a funny thing: it can be forced upon one, or be self-invoked. It seems in today’s world, the last thing you’d really expect is isolation, and yet even in the busiest of places, there are attributes and situations where one can feel it totally. Self-invoked isolation is where the person chooses to step back, away from all the social interaction and so on, to become, in some respects, a suburban exile. I can relate to a lot of Ballard’s fiction and it’s much the same with Eno’s music, although to a lesser extent — Eno isn’t as consistent, and his vocal albums are something else. I don’t mind them, but for me it’s stuff like Music for Films, Apollo, Another Green World, plus a couple of his ambient albums and the two he did with Harold Budd that contain some of the most moody and atmospheric music there is.

SS: You have two albums available for purchase at Fflint Central and one at Earthrid, but Ballard Landscapes is available for free through Earth Monkey. Do you occupy similar ideological ground to Cory Doctorow, who makes his stories and novels available for free online, justifying it like so: ‘Most people who download the book don’t end up buying it, but they wouldn’t have bought it in any event, so I haven’t lost any sales, I’ve just won an audience.’

CS: Simple answer: he’s hit the nail on the head. A while back I got an email from Earth Monkey, basically asking for contributions to a new net label. I simply thought, ‘why not’? If accepted, it would underline the fact that there’s not just maybe six people who like Cousin Silas, but also, it may well bring in a few more sales for the guys at Fflint and Earthrid. Plus, I’m not exactly in it for the money, but for the simple fact that even if one person ‘got’ or enjoyed Silas, then for me that’s a good return. It does sound awfully clichéd, but it’s how I feel.

SS: Tell us about the process of making the Ballard Landscapes. Do you use field recordings? I hear water drips, factory sounds, electrical hums and glitches.

CS: On some of the material I’ve done, I’ve used the odd field recording: a steam train on ‘Necropolis Line’, a dog barking on ‘John Wayne Gacy Contemplates’, plus a few tracks here and there have had either rain, or drops or a gunshot. The glitches, machinery and hums are all created with synths, editing or processing. You’d be quite surprised at what some of these sounds started as!

SS: A bit like Ballard, then, where you’re never quite sure what’s simulation, what’s ‘authentic’.

CS: I guess I could try and be clever by saying that there are a lot of real vs. artificial oppositions in his fiction, but again, it’s the geography, the ‘feel’, the atmosphere, moods and landscapes I try and convey. A kind of aural texture.

Image from Ballard Landscapes cover art.

SS: I’ve absorbed a lot of Ballard-inspired music and I see two distinct strands in sonic interpretations of his work. There’s the world-music camp that picks up on the lush, exotic, jungle tropes. Then there’s the ominous, insidious, unsettling, isolationist elements that appeal to a whole other subset of musicians. You’re aligned with the latter: do you see Ballard as an essentially dystopian, dark fantasist? Or do you, like Ballard himself, see something affirmative in this darkness — a willingness to ‘embrace the catastrophe’ in order to fulfil personal psychological needs?

CS: Maybe I’m just a superficial reader, maybe I don’t really go too deep in what writers are ‘saying’. Then again, if I did, would I lose that certain magic that writers like Ballard give me? I certainly pick up on the isolationism, and the alienation. With Ballard I think he totally disseminated the phrase ‘One Man Against The World’. He created situations where the man was turning his back against the world, or the world was turning its back on him, many variations that basically culminate in isolation. And sure, there are many dark areas in Ballard’s writing — that’s what inspires! To me, though, there’s a point where fiction and music (indeed, most of the ‘arts’) become lost in translation, as it were. I think when ‘deep’ questions are asked about the whys and wherefores, and ‘what does he really mean’, the whole point seems to become lost and diluted.

SS: Do you have a favourite Ballard novel or short story?

CS: That’s a really difficult question to answer. It’s like favourite music and albums — they change weekly, if not daily. Plus, due to his developing writing style, it would be unfair to choose. His earlier period was pretty different and whilst some of his icons and fixations were there, books like The Wind From Nowhere are more akin to John Wyndham. More often than not, I can rest assured that anything by Ballard will get my attention. I have recently been digging out a load of his novels to reread, some I haven’t read in over twenty years. At the time I bought it, I wasn’t too taken with Hello America, but after reading it again I realised what a fine book it is. I was probably overdosing on Ballard back then. I guess, if pushed, I’d have to pick either The Atrocity Exhibition and/or The Terminal Beach, purely for nostalgia, as they were the first ones I read and perhaps had the biggest impact. Then again, The Unlimited Dream Company was a voyage through one hell of a strange landscape… Must read that again soon.

SS: As far as your compositional style goes, were you inspired in any way by Ballard’s experimental techniques, for example, the cut-up nature of Atrocity, or the collages and fake ads he produced around the same time?

CS: I have done the odd cut up, using a variety of sounds. I must be honest, though, I was probably thinking of Burroughs rather than Ballard, although I’ve never been too happy with the results. My new CD on Earthrid is a collaboration with Kevin Busby, recorded under the name Abominations of Yondo, named after a short story by Clark Ashton Smith. I used isolated and combined phrases from that story as inspiration when recording, and I guess that could be classed as a kind of cut up (although I left the ‘cutting up’ to Kevin!). However, I have often been accused of writing pieces which are too short. In my defence I have always maintained that these pieces say it all — any longer and it would lose its way. I guess the same could be said for the pieces in The Atrocity Exhibition: any longer and they wouldn’t be condensed novels. It wouldn’t be The Atrocity Exhibition!

SS: Is the composer Edward Artemiev an influence? You have a track called ‘Leaving Solaris’ on the Necropolis Line album, plus the Ballard track ‘Flight over Abandoned Village’ reminds me of that very displaced feel that Artemiev achieved in his soundtracks for Tarkovsky.

CS: Edward Artemiev hasn’t inspired me as much as his son, Artemiy, who has a label called Electroshock — I keep threatening to send him some material! Solaris was a film that did kind of inspire. I remember Brian Aldiss saying it was one of his fave films so I made a note and can remember watching it many years ago late one night. Stalker was on around the same time as well but I find it difficult sometimes with films like these, especially Stalker. The imagery is just outstanding, but you’re flitting between that and the subtitles so the full impact isn’t what it should be.

SS: You take your name from a Pete Sinfield lyric for King Crimson (‘Cousin Silas grew a beard, drew another flask of weird’). But you’re such a minimal stylist — so how did you name yourself from one of the most bloated songbooks in rock?

CS: It goes back to my mid-teens. I’d picked up a copy of (I think) Sounds, a music mag. With it came a free flexi disc, featuring Emerson Lake & Palmer. The first track was called ‘Brain Salad Surgery’, and then there was a fairly long piece with a load of cut ups/highlights of tracks from the actual album. It was my first foray into ‘proper’ rock music. I bought the album a couple of weeks later and then began a quest! I read up all there was on ELP, and began buying their previous albums. Along this voyage of discovery it came to light that Emerson had been in The Nice, Greg Lake in King Crimson and Carl Palmer did a brief stint with Arthur Brown. I bought some Nice, and Crimson, and then discovered Sinfield had been involved with early Crimson. These days I still listen to Crimson, and still reckon that those first few albums, In the Court of the Crimson King through to Islands, are peerless. I even bought Pete Sinfield’s only solo album, Still. Halcyon days! So, because I am an avid Crimson fan, and one of my fave albums is Lizard (which contains ‘Happy Families’, the song featuring, albeit briefly, Cousin Silas) it was a natural choice. To be fair it wasn’t me who chose the name. I had been ‘named’ something else, I can’t remember what it was but I know I wasn’t too keen on it. Cousin Silas was mentioned and I thought what the hell!

SS: I like Crimson, but I’ve never been able to get on with Sinfield’s imagery. A bit too pompous for me.

CS: Ironically enough, a few mates and myself were on about this the other night! Comparing Sinfield’s lyrics to Jon Anderson’s on ‘And You And I’ and Topographic Oceans, we wondered what ‘really’ was going on in those songs. I always think of Sinfield along the same lines as Fred Frith. On some releases, at face value, Frith ‘sounds’ like he’s not quite got the grip of how the guitar works, and yet on others he plays like a genius. Both of them experiment with their art (indeed, like Ballard in his condensed novels). And, to be fair to Sinfield, he has been behind some incredibly beautiful lyrics. His first foray, In The Court Of The Crimson King, has some great ones, In the Wake of Poseidon less so, and then we get Lizard, which is an album of opposites: some make sense, some don’t. Islands is kind of back on track again. Out of context (sometimes even in!) some make very little sense, but it’s the ‘whole’ that works. And don’t forget, he did write lyrics for Bucks Fizz and Cher!

SS: He even made an album with Eno, based on a Robert Sheckley book.

CS: Here, did you know Brian Eno has only ever acted once, and it was in Father Ted! He played, originally enough, Father Brian Eno.

SS: He did not!

CS: He did. I was watching a batch of Father Ted (the whole three series, actually) and in the last episode, ‘Going to America’, I saw his name on the final credits. I ran it back, and there he is, very briefly. I thought, well, I know he’s done a lot of soundtracks, I wonder how many times he’s actually acted. And if you go on IMDB, there’s only the one entry for him, in Father Ted. I was going to say that this was another thing that Ballard and Eno shared: that they’ve only ever acted the once. But with Ballard, on IMDB, there’s no entry for ‘acting’. However, I remembered the early Crash! thingy… it isn’t even mentioned on IMDB. I was sure he appeared (maybe as himself or a very, very close character) in an old black and white film. I remember him stood near a car, and an actress slightly out of shot in the background. So I looked on YouTube, and there it was. Followed the link, and had a good read on some website or other… Ballardian.com, I think it was. Tee hee.

SS: Will there be a Ballard Landscapes 3?

CS: Don’t tempt me! I honestly could spend the rest of my Silas years doing nothing but pieces inspired by Ballard. I feel as though I’ve only scratched the surface. Trouble is, where do you stop? With folks wanting more, and with no more on offer, would that enhance the stuff that’s already there? It’s the Fawlty Towers/Father Ted question: would more have diluted the lasting impact?

..:: TOP 5 BALLARD-RELATED TRACKS FROM COUSIN SILAS, AS CHOSEN BY SILAS HIMSELF

CS: When asked to name a top 5, I chose two and picked three others that are the most popular, judging by Last.fM and other download sites.

‘Vermilion Drift’ (from Ballard Landscapes 2)

CS: Obviously inspired by Vermilion Sands. I loved the way that you could go from the large dunescapes to being shut away inside one of those beach properties.

‘Concrete Islands’ (from Ballard Landscapes 2)

CS: The whole obsession with roads, motorways and cars has featured a lot throughout Ballard’s fiction. As I mentioned, I can remember them building the M62, and once in Madame Tussauds in Blackpool, as a kid, I went into the horror section and saw a mock up of an accident. It left a terrible impression on me for years. I think a motorbike had come off a flyover and hit a car. Nasty… For all that, there is a dark beauty about major roads and motorways when they’re quiet.

‘Empty Airport’ (from Ballard Landscapes 1)

CS: If I remember rightly, there are only two ‘sounds’ on here. I felt that any more would destroy the mood. Indirectly inspired by Ballard’s obsession with airports, and my idea of what one would be like when it’s empty.

‘Bikini Atoll’ (from Ballard Landscapes 1)

CS: I was well into the whole mystique of atomic bombs as a kid, where the results were contrasting in complete opposites: the destruction, with the strangely beautiful blast clouds (check out the mushroom blast of the first H bomb). The secrecy, the technology, the complete warping of nature was fascinating. It was only afterwards when the dust, literally, had settled, that it was revealed how these early tests had totally devastated these small islands of paradise. Earth Monkey put visuals to this track and it’s on Youtube. They did a phenomenal job.

‘Crashed Bomber With Weeds’ (from Falling: An Earth Monkey Sampler)

CS: Okay, so this isn’t on either of the Ballard albums. However, as you might gather from the title, it does have links with ol’ J.G. The Pennines run close to where I live, and from Sheffield, over towards Manchester, that whole backbone has, like iron filings to a magnet, attracted hundreds of air crashes over the years. In the valley, one of these sites witnessed the crash of a flying fortress. I remember looking at the crash site on a web page, and it was literally, a crashed bomber with weeds.

Also, it might be worth mentioning the Geographics album on Earth Monkey [also a free download]. I feel there is a definite link between the Ballard albums and Geo. As I said in the interview, a lot of the empathy I have towards Ballard’s landscapes (airports, airfields, roads, dune, beaches, etc.) come from my own experiences and memories. I try and ‘realise’ these on Geographics. Tracks like ‘The Fog From Immingham’, ‘Abandoned Airfield’, and ‘Cathedral Arch Of Trees (Lincolnshire)’ are all in effect realities, whereas by definition, the Ballard soundscapes are fictions…of a kind.

..:: MORE INFO
+ Cousin Silas at MySpace, including six unreleased tracks.

Ridgewell WWII Airfield: ‘Now little more than a collection of old huts, the area is haunted by the sounds of crashing WWII aeroplanes, shouting airmen, and other noises.’ (from paranormaldatabase.com).

Heuristic England is an interesting new blog exploring dreams, parapsychology, spectral presence, Freud, Jung … and Ballard. In a couple of recent posts, the blog’s convenor, Dr. Champagne, voiced something that has long intrigued me, too: paranormal symbolism in Ballard’s work.

According to the good doctor:

I am always struck by the fact the JG Ballard refutes the significance of the paranormal while his stories are replete with the spectral presence of dead airmen and military personnel (most explicitly perhaps in a piece like “One Afternoon at Utah Beach”).

The post then goes on to detail a ‘strange database of aviation ghosts which reads like a rather Ballardian catalogue of dead airmen’, found at paranormaldatabase.com, which includes these chilling apparitions:

Headless Airman Wanting Lift
Location: Hadstock – The B1052 leading into Hadstock
Type: Haunting Manifestation
Date / Time: Unknown

Further Comments: After losing his head in a flying accident, the apparition of an American pilot has been seen thumbing a lift on the roadside.

Hitchhiker
Location: Felixstowe – Crossroads controlled by lights
Type: Haunting Manifestation
Date / Time: Unknown

Further Comments: For several days, a car driver found himself giving a lift to a World War 2 pilot, who would suddenly appear in the back seat of his car when he reached a certain point of his journey. This stopped once the driver started taking a different route.

Dr. Champagne compares the database with a passage from “You and Me and the Continuum”, one of Ballard’s Atrocity chapters, stating that “my feeling is that this excerpt would fit seemlessly into the aviation ghosts database”.

Here’s the Atrocity excerpt:

Lieutenant 70. An isolated incident at the Strategic Air Command base at Omaha, Nebraska, December 25th, 197-,when a landing H-bomber was found to have an extra pilot on board. The subject carried no identification tags and was apparently suffering from severe retrograde amnesia. He subsequently disappeared while being X-rayed at the base hospital for any bio-implants or transmitters, leaving behind a set of plates of a human foetus evidently taken some thirty years previously. It was assumed that this was in the nature of a hoax and that the subject was a junior officer who had become fatigued while playing Santa Claus on an interbase visiting party.

Of course, there’s plenty more of the same in Ballard, along with a rich catalogue of dead, dying and ghostly astronauts, plus explicit communion with the dead in the short stories ‘The Terminal Beach’ and ‘The Dead Time’. Then there’s The Unlimited Dream Company, which on one level can be read as the dying-brain fantasy of the crashed airman, Blake, and on another level as his spiritual rebirth.

The doctor’s assertion that JGB ‘always refutes the significance of the paranormal’ also intrigues me. Is this strictly true? I can’t recall an interview in which either Ballard or the interviewer mentions such concerns, but if anyone knows of anything please do let me know. Having said that, I do recall that Ballard touched upon ‘the occult’ in the interview I conducted with him last year:

The earliest horror films I saw were Dracula movies — never liked those. The whole idea of horror, particularly wrapped up in touches of the occult — ugh. They’re saturated with the fear of death and displaced sexual anxieties. No, thank you. Not for me.

But back to Dr. Champagne: I really hope s/he goes on with this line of enquiry, as it is yielding intriguing cross-chatter, such as this latest post:

It’s interesting to note in Ballard’s condensed chapter “Lieutenant 70″, that the isolated incident at the strategic air command takes place on December 25th, 197-. Of course the allusion is that the mysterious figure is Christ, “with the set of plates of a human fetus evidently taken some thirty years previously”. But also are there not some neat correspondences with the Rendlesham incident, which took place on December 25th 1980… another example of JGBs precognitive powers. Further, the human fetus could also relate to the ufo abductee experience. Michael Persinger has suggested that the fetal like appearance of aliens in ufo encounters might be as a result of the neurophysiological phenomenon of self proprioception of memories of the womb. Further doesn’t LAM also exhibit fetal like qualities. Finally, JGB just misses the Qabalistic figure of LAM by 1, LAM being 71 and his lieutenant being 70, though no doubt with a little bit of creative qabalistic accounting we could make sense of that too…

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
————————————————————————————————————–