Jeremy Reed at the JG Ballard Memorial, 2009. Photo: Rick McGrath.

West End Survival Kit, by Jeremy Reed. Furze Hill, Hove: Waterloo Press, 2009. ISBN: 978-1-906742-07-2.

JEREMY REED IS A HUGELY PROLIFIC poet, novelist, biographer and spoken-word musician, the author of 15 novels, 16 poetry collections and 14 works of non-fiction since 1984. Yet despite that phenomenal output, he remains an exile in British letters. According to Reed, ‘People have reacted so nastily to me and tried to airbrush me out of the picture… The establishment never forgave me, because I used to give readings in heavy make-up’. That’s not a working method that was ever going to appeal to Sir Andrew Motion, the former Poet Laureate, who famously dubbed Reed ‘that effete little pseud’. He also sledged him as the ‘David Bowie of the poetry circuit’, an especially backhanded insult, given Reed’s sartorial style and the fact that among his back catalogue are biographies on Lou Reed, Marc Almond and Brian Jones. In fact, the latter provided one very revealing insight into the mind of Jeremy Reed. Once asked what he thought was the defining moment of the 60s, he replied: ‘I’d say it was the first time Brian Jones wore a girl’s polka-dotted blouse. It had never been done before’. In the same interview, he derided ‘the barbiturate poetry of Andrew Motion and those post-Larkin poets. Very grey, very drab’. And so the stage is set.

Following the pattern of this exile, whenever there is talk about the latter-day British writers who enjoyed the friendship, patronage or thematic repertoire of J.G. Ballard, invariably the same names are mentioned: Will Self and Iain Sinclair. Not Reed. Yet Reed and Ballard enjoy a long and very intriguing relationship. Reed’s science-fiction novel Diamond Nebula (1994), set in the 23rd century, even featured a film-director character obsessed by Bowie, Ballard and Warhol:

Her eye was arrested by an open photograph album … David Bowie at the Rainbow Theatre, 1972; at the LA Forum in 1976; Hiroshima, 1973; LA Amphitheatre, 1974; Wembley, 1976: the images seeming to have been chosen for their visual diversity and metamorphoses. Over the page were weirdly angled shots of Ballard getting into his car at Shepperton after the publication of Crash; and then the publicity photographs of him that had appeared on the jackets of High-Rise and Myths of the Near Future, together with a series of solarized images in the manner of Man Ray, in which the writer’s head was superimposed on Brancusi sculptures. Cindy flicked through the obsessive preoccupations: Warhol screened by black glasses on a couch at the Factory, and then seen filming Edie Sedgwick and Gino Persicho in Beauty 2; and a few pages on, isolated, filming Chelsea Girls.

Jeremy Reed, Diamond Nebula.

These aren’t the ordinary images of Ballard (let alone Bowie) that get bandied about. They are cult snapshots, taken by a writer with a fan’s eye for obscure detail surrounding the object of worship. As an alternative biography, then, of its three avant-garde celebrities, Diamond Nebula is a tantalising work, drawing on Reed’s main obsessions: style, flashy pop, mutation (both psychic and physical), cult fame, inner space … and Ballard. In the preface to the book, Reed describes ‘Ballard as the chief proponent of the futuristic novel … seen as the person most receptive to occupying a colony that looks towards the arrival of mutants from another galaxy’. Reed talks of creating an environment in which ‘the external world provides a backdrop to the exploration of inner space, a vanishing-point rather than a structure for continuous reference’, and with further reference to the ‘geography of the unconscious’, it’s easy to realise the superficial similarities with Ballard’s own working methods and obsessions.

Jeremy Reed speaking to Nicky Singer at the ICA.

In interview, too, Reed always pays his dues, recording his writerly debt to Ballard’s ‘visionary present’ – an especial act of linguistic engagement that ‘transform[s] the universe into its imagined equivalent’ and provides an instruction manual in ‘blowing up the social structure’. He sees Ballard’s work as a hotwire to the pure, uncut imaginative spirit that also powers the work of Stephen Barber and Edmund White:

They all have that very charged language. When I began as a writer, Ballard was the writer who had a new language that I was looking for, the way he crystallised the modern world into images. It’s something that he has never lost. Ballard is not part of literature at any level, he’s got no concern about it at all. He’s a rogue gene which is what attracted me to him from the start. And work is all he is, what he writes is so integral to him. That’s all he does all day, write all day and live in Shepperton.

But the admiration cut both ways. According to Rick McGrath, Ballard provided blurbs for 12 of Reed’s books and wrote forewords to two others, more JGB endorsements than for any other writer. One of the forewords was for Reed’s latest collection of poetry, West End Survival Kit (2009), possibly the last writing Ballard had published, in which he enthuses about Reed’s ‘talent … almost extraterrestrial in its brilliance’. For Ballard, Reed is ‘Rimbaud reconfigured as the Man who fell to Earth, a visitor from deep space whose time machine was designed by Lautréamont and de Sade, and powered by the most exotic fuels the imagination has ever devised’. That’s a very dense sentence, pricking imagistic sensors of recognition in almost every one of its 36 words: Bowie, Roeg, symbolism, science fiction, surrealism, film, sadomasochism, inner space…

And so it is with these poems, which are compacted like diamonds, an intent signalled by this excerpt:

firing ideas at me like big hitters
for work we do
shape-shifting architecture into words,

the way 10 million atoms colonize
an inked full stop.

Jeremy Reed, ‘Liquid Nitrogen Ice Cream’, West End Survival Kit.

The back cover gives no real description of the contents, save for general endorsements from a stellar cast: Ballard, David Gascoyne, David Lodge and Seamus Heaney. We are led to believe that this is a collection of free-standing poems, and reading them is simultaneously exhilarating and exhausting. Reed is obsessed with both surface flash and the hidden layers of meaning inherent in modern urban life, with which we constantly negotiate and are in dialogue with: the meaning of ‘junk DNA’ and the enigma of Michael Jackson, the sigils in corporate signage, the mental cross-chatter engendered by rapid communications technology. His street-level descriptions are often as unfathomable as conspiracy theory, and shot through with a selection of barely glimpsed, constantly rotating characters (including a first-person narrator), invariably described within a mesh of techy jargon:

meditating in front of his mezzanine.
His girlfriend paints her toes
in Howard Hodgkin moods,

reads Holy Anorexia and grooves
at being air
she’s molecules wired to neuronal drive.

He’s into ‘dark matter’, lab neutrinos,
thermonuclear fusion
generating energy in the sun.

Jeremy Reed, ‘Astroparticle Physicist Chills’, West End Survival Kit.

The writing is a rush, a blur. It’s slippery, emphasised by quick-fire, three-line stanzas:

They share headphones on the new R.E.M.:
a shimmering slice of post-modern pop,
impersonal as an airport lounge,

riffy, mid-tempo anomie
for the 21st century.
He wears a Titian red Gucci jacket,

as though it’s cut out of the sun,
and she two dollops of mauve eye shadow
co-ordinating with her top.

Jeremy Reed, ‘Endgames’, West End Survival Kit.

Certain motifs begin to gestate a picture in the mind as you gradually learn through half-remembered, diaphanous glimpses that Mars and the moon have been colonised; dispossessed astronauts wander the Earth; drugs are rampant; and technological virtuality is encoded into the very fabric of everyday life. By the end, you are left with the inkling that the poems are perhaps not free-standing, but part of a continuous (albeit fractured) narrative, illuminated snapshots of a mordant near-future world seen from multiple, cross-linked perspectives. They could be interior hallucinations, or the exterior unspooling vision of CCTV cameras all over the city, but whatever they are, they are engendered by Reed’s very effective trick of repeating a motif, phrase or word from one poem to the next, but never more than two poems in a row. Subliminally, you become aware of a deep, unfolding narrative, even if consciously you assess that you are reading two poems with very different characters:

ten miles above Cape Canaveral.
He journeys back in his neurology
to pink skies over the oxygen plant,

graffiti discovered on a rock face –
RAD51D — the king’s returned —
and gantried higher up a gold statue

Jeremy Reed, ‘Red Planet Blues’, West End Survival Kit.

Someone’s got the dangling hexagonal
molecule RAD51D
under scrutiny for cell death

like a registration number
on a top security Jeep.
She’s paid to disinform. Each day

Jeremy Reed, ‘Drug Giant PA’, West End Survival Kit.

Given all the Ballard associations, it’s tempting to read Ballardian themes into the work (the damaged astronauts fit well) and the densified prose method strives to convey as much meaning as the ‘condensed novels’ in The Atrocity Exhibition. Vaughan from Crash (and Atrocity) even makes an appearance, enmeshed in a shady deal with the clone of Princess Di:

H.R.H. has a contract out
on this blonde afterlife simulacrum:
Di as an endlessly repeatable clone.

Vaughan knows he’s watched. The Jeep outside
has on-board machine guns, a snoop
positioned in it with a cold black eye.

Jeremy Reed, ‘The Reckoning’, West End Survival Kit.

Jeremy Reed – photograph courtesy Waterloo Press.

But in the end, the most obvious reference point seems to be the glistening, cypher-filled, pop-artefact worlds of William Gibson. The characters in West End Survival Kit come on like Case from Neuromancer crashlanding in London (which has merged with Tokyo, as it did in Reed’s 2008 novel The Grid), as if Case was too burnt out to even care about fixing his damaged neurosystem, too jaded to even muster up any more passion for his beloved cyberspace. In her review of The Grid, Bidisha wrote that ‘one wishes Reed would produce a scholarly work about Jacobean theatre instead of an inexpert cyber-romp. His next work should be excellent, but it shouldn’t meddle with the future. Reed’s seriousness and intelligence emerge when he drops his coolness and cleaves to the past’. But this sounds more like the kind of genre snobbery Ballard was forced to endure when he, too, dared to write science fiction. Reed does post-cyberpunk very well: he has a real feel for the imagery, the characters and the worldview, and like both Gibson and Ballard, he is interested in the next 5 minutes rather than the next 500 years. For Reed, too, science fiction is the sociological study of the present. Yet he infuses this with his own ‘extraterrestrial’ brand of theatricality, poetic sensibility and mutant, gender-bending attitude to create a hybrid form. As science-fiction poetry, it recalls the work of Robert Calvert, the late Hawkwind lyricist and lead singer, and another tortured anti-hero whose own life story could easily inhabit the Reed pantheon.

Towards the end of West End Survival Kit, Reed ties it all up with two poems about, of all things, the history of Pink Floyd. And given all of the above, it makes perfect sense. As the poem identifies, the classic-era Floyd, despite being saddled with what people assumed was an intergalactic persona, was always more about inner space than outer (like Ballard’s anomie-infested astronauts), producing a brace of albums that reflected with sensitivity on battered individuals like their founder Syd Barrett, as in Wish You Were Here, and the assorted lunatics in the cast of Dark Side of the Moon. The Floyd poems make a fitting coda to Reed’s painful folio of snapshots from a numb world. They solidify his eulogy to people too disconnected, too exiled in their own minds to ever tread ‘meaningful’ paths through life, but who nonetheless retain a unique sense of self allied to their damaged intelligence:

Barrett’s the rock astronomer
boating the Cam’s lime green spine,
wristing downriver like a water-boatman

listening to voices, his schizophrenia
big in the mix
like invasive radio.
…
Echoing slide. It’s paranoia synthesised –
their moon trip – dark side in reverse.
Barrett’s still running through a corridor

As undertow, a brain damaged psycho.
The music road maps inner space.
It’s like a river knocking at the door.

Jeremy Reed, ‘Brain Damage: a short history of the Pink Floyd’, West End Survival Kit.

It’s out there somewhere, while the London rain

slashes the light-polluted scuzz,
wacks down fried leaves, keeps me inside
this rainy, orange October day,
retrieving the Floyd’s mission to locate
the alien in the psychopath.
Outside my window a wet jay

jabs at a red berry gash.
I go out on their dimension,
beamed by the music’s escalating curve,
back to my youth and Apollo
cargoing human hardware to the moon –

their weighted boots grating on dust,
Pink Floyd the terrestrial soundtrack
to space conquest, a white plateau
opening out to three astronauts
learning by hesitant degrees to trust.

Jeremy Reed, ‘Wish You Were Here’, West End Survival Kit.

West End Survival Kit is not wholly successful (although it’s pretty close). It briefly falls flat, for example, when Reed makes reference to ‘psychogeography’, a loaded concept degraded through cultural overuse that, although undoubtedly inherent within the work, sounds inauthentic when actually named and nudged up against his own dream geographies. Yet mostly, Reed’s innate ability to explore new genres, new forms and new plans of attack in the hope of creating something extreme and unique makes the work well worth reading. As Bidisha implies, it is probably this genre slippage that is the real cause of Reed’s exile, but somehow, given the figures with which he identifies, you get the impression that on some level that’s how he likes it.

‘Video surveillance sights the street. The city leaks pathology…’ We know exactly what Jeremy means, though we may never have thought of our everyday world in these terms. The poet is our extraterrestrial visitor, calmly surveying everything, the highspeed neural networks of his poetic gift assessing the landscape, making only the most important connections, linking the present moment to the most vital possibilities of itself … Use this volume of poems as a guide-book to the present, to the real world of possibility that most of us ignore. It’s the poet’s job to be a seer, to seize us by the shoulders and force us to out-stare the mirage. Reading these poems, I find myself marvelling at their cleverness and brilliance, and saying: ‘…yes, yes, absolutely.’

J.G. Ballard, foreword to West End Survival Kit.

West End Survival Kit can be purchased direct from the publisher.

Jeremy Reed performing with Itchy Ear as The Ginger Light, ‘a progressive poetry act’.

Jeremy Reed – photographer(s) unknown.

Thanks to Shane for help with research for this article.

..:: More information:
+ Jeremy Reed
+ Waterloo Press

REFERENCES
Bidisha (2008). ‘The Grid, by Jeremy Reed’. The Independent, 28 September.
Carter, Randolph (2006). ‘Dreaming with his eyes open’. 3am Magazine.
Lachman, Gary (2006). Jeremy Reed: A supernova in orange and purple ink. The Independent, 30 July.
Reed, Jeremy (1994) Diamond Nebula. London: Peter Owen.
———- (2008). West End Survival Kit. Furze Hill, Hove: Waterloo Press.

The inspiration behind this body of work came from a growing curiosity about recent corporate developments of private space in London that apparently encourage the public to access them. Typically these environments have beautiful landscaping around a canal or lake. An amphitheatre seems to be a further prerequisite as is CCTV which monitors everything including security guards who amble around these empty places. The hustle and bustle of neighboring streets feels a world away.

In the summer of 2008 I went for a series of walks along arterial routes heading out of London. That summer I had read several of J.G. Ballard’s novels including Super Cannes, which is about disturbing behaviour amongst the inhabitants of a gated community isolated from the world. On one of these ambles I chanced upon a recently completed building development. I felt compelled to enter this beautifully landscaped glass and steel environment. It appeared as if no expense had been spared. What I encountered there helped to crystallize some vague ideas that became the photographs that are presented in this collection. The idyllic setting combined with the ever-present ’security’ got under my skin and left me wondering about a dystopian outcome for this kind of world.

I remember sitting down by the artificial lake. The sun was beating down and people casually wandered about. I gazed up at the office blocks. I thought it must be an idyllic place to work. London felt far away. I imagined that you could lift these acres up and deposit them in any city in the world and they would feel at home. This was an anti-Dickensian space, more an abstract one. It was a statement of how the world of work could be. The management ethos, proclaimed on various signs, was ‘enjoy.work’.

Enjoy.work. Arbeit macht frei. Freedom through work. I rose to the bait. Unease crept into my thoughts.

I found myself searching for the cracks. A variety of methods had been used to try to block the sun reaching the interior spaces. It appeared as if, as each building had been erected, ever more elaborate ways had been devised to keep nature out. What was it really like to work in there?

I noticed that an algae bloom threatened the lake’s plant and animal life. Peering into one building’s reception area, I saw how the appearance of leisure had been carefully arranged. Bicycles, guitars and deckchairs in neat rows. An abandoned chess game and open magazines on the coffee table. A half-finished painting-by-numbers canvas on an easel. No one about. Why had everyone had to leave so suddenly? Or, were they trying to hide something? Soon after, I was asked to leave for taking photographs without permission.

After some months I built an architectural model inspired by this corporate campus, and began photographing. I wanted a dystopian world, centred on a dark lake, that seemed to have the opposite effect on those that gazed into it than that intended by the landscape architect. So, some of the ant-like figures turn up to work, use the facilities and leave. Others seem to be employed in extracurricular activities of a more malevolent nature.

Nicholas Cobb, 2009.

The Office Park book, featuring many more images, is available at blurb as well as a number of other books by Nicholas Cobb.

Lured by tax concessions and a climate like northern California’s, dozens of multinational companies had moved into the business park that now employed over ten thousand people. The senior managements were the most highly paid professional caste in Europe, a new elite of administrators, énarques and scientific entrepreneurs. The lavish brochure enthused over a vision of glass and titanium straight from the drawing boards of Richard Neutra and Frank Gehry, but softened by landscaped parks and artificial lakes, a humane version of Corbusier’s radiant city. Even my sceptical eye was prepared to blink.

J.G. Ballard, Super-Cannes (2000).

The advertising displays in the estate office overlooking the roundabout on the RN7 had the look of museum tableaux, and the artist’s impression of a concourse as crowded as the Champs-Elysées, lined with boutiques and thronged by high-spending customers, seemed to describe a forgotten twentieth-century world. Only the cyber-cafe next door was serving any customers. The computer terminals facing the bar were out of use, but three bikers in metallized boots and Mad Max leathers sat at the outdoor tables. They formed a feral presence in the hyper-modern complex, like carrion-birds on a skyscraper cornice, filling an unplanned niche in the ecology of the future.

Ballard, Super-Cannes.

An almost drugged air floated across the lake, a rogue cloud that had drifted down the hillside, carrying the scent of office-freshener from a factory in Grasse. I walked along the water’s edge, attracting the attention of two security men in a Range Rover parked among the pines. One watched me through his binoculars, no doubt puzzled that anyone in Eden-Olympia should have the leisure to stroll through the midday sun.

Ballard, Super-Cannes.

As if to encourage the fantasies of the stranger sitting nearby, she kicked off her high-heeled shoes and hitched up her skirt to scratch her stockinged insteps, exposing a satisfying glimpse of white thigh. Despite the smart suit, her blonde hair was a little too blown, giving her the look of a nervy and intellectual tart. Was she a call-girl, computerized like everyone else at Eden-Olympia?

Ballard, Super-Cannes.

A black Range Rover clumsily straddled a flowerbed, its tyres flattening the rose bushes. Isolated figures patrolled the lawns, like shadows free to play among themselves for a few hours each night. Behind the shrubbery sounded the low-pitched murmur of radio traffic, a soft anatomy of the night.

Ballard, Super-Cannes.

Halder stood with his back to me, searching the upstairs windows, and I could see his reflection in the glass doors of the sun lounge. He was smiling to himself, a strain of deviousness that was almost likeable. Behind the brave and paranoid new world of surveillance cameras and bulletproof Range Rovers there probably existed an old-fashioned realm of pecking orders and racist abuse.

Ballard, Super-Cannes.

Crowds strolled under the palms, enjoying the warm autumn day, like citizens of another world who had come ashore for a few hours. Wilder Penrose had been right to say that there was something unreal about them.

Ballard, Super-Cannes.

Were assassins aware of the contingent world? I tried to imagine Lee Harvey Oswald on his way to the book depository in Dealey Plaza on the morning he shot Kennedy. Did he notice a line of overnight washing in his neighbour’s yard, a fresh dent in the nextdoor Buick, a newspaper boy with a bandaged knee? The contingent world must have pressed against his temples, clamouring to be let in. But Oswald had kept the shutters bolted against the storm, opening them for a few seconds as the President’s Lincoln moved across the lens of the Zapruder camera and on into history.

Ballard, Super-Cannes.

Prostitutes came out at dusk, usherettes in the theatre of the night, shining their miniature torches at any kerb that threatened their high-heels. Two of them entered the Rialto and sat at the next table, muscular brunettes with the hips and thighs of professional athletes. They ordered drinks they never touched, killing time before they set off to trawl the hotels.

Ballard, Super-Cannes.

‘There’s a remarkable need for punitive violence hidden away in the senior executive mind.’
‘And sex tends to release it?’
‘It’s meant to, for sound biological reasons. Sex is such a quick route to the psychopathic, the shortest of short cuts to the perverse. We aren’t running an adventure playground, but a forcing house designed to expand the psychopathic possibilities of the executive imagination. It needs to be carefully monitored. Sadomasochism, excretory sex-play, body-piercing and wife-pandering can easily veer off into something nasty.

Ballard, Super-Cannes.

The glass and gun-metal office blocks were set well apart from each other, separated by artificial lakes and forested traffic islands where a latter-day Crusoe could have found comfortable refuge. The faint mist over the lakes and the warm sun reflected from the glass curtain-walling seemed to generate an opal haze, as if the entire business park were a mirage, a virtual city conjured into the pine-scented air like a son-et-lumière vision of a new Versailles.

Ballard, Super-Cannes.

‘Homo sapiens is a reformed hunter-killer of depraved appetites, which once helped him to survive. He was partly rehabilitated in an open prison called the first agricultural societies, and now finds himself on parole in the polite suburbs of the city state. The deviant impulses coded into his central nervous system have been switched off. He can no longer harm himself or anyone else. But nature sensibly endowed him with a taste for cruelty and an intense curiosity about pain and death. Without them, he’s trapped in the afternoon shopping malls of a limitless mediocrity. We need to revive him, give him back the killing eye and the dreams of death. Together they helped him to dominate this planet.’

Ballard, Super-Cannes.

I needed to escape from Eden-Olympia, with its ceaseless work and its ethic of corporate responsibility. The business park was the outpost of an advanced kind of puritanism, and a virtually sex-free zone. Jane and I rarely made love. The flair she had shown during my days as a virtual cripple had been smothered by a sleep of eye-masks and sedatives, followed by cold showers and snatched breakfasts.

Ballard, Super-Cannes.

‘Places like Eden-Olympia are fertile ground for any messiah with a grudge. The Adolf Hitlers and Pol Pots of the future won’t walk out of the desert. They’ll emerge from shopping malls and corporate business parks.’

Ballard, Super-Cannes.

‘Who are the tenants? Big international companies?’
‘The biggest. Mitsui, Siemens, Unilever, Sumitomo, plus all the French giants – Elf Aquitaine, Carrefour, Rhone-Poulenc. Along with a host of smaller firms: investment brokers, bioengineering outfits, design consultancies. I sound like a salesman, but when you get to know it you’ll see what a remarkable place Eden-Olympia really is. In its way this is a huge experiment in how to hothouse the future.’

Ballard, Super-Cannes.

Between the security building and the Elf-Maritime research labs was an open-air cafeteria, a facility intended to soften the public face of the business park and give it a passing resemblance to an Alpine resort. Tired after my meeting with Zander, I sat down and ordered a vin blanc from the young French waitress, who wore jeans and a white vest printed with a quotation from Baudrillard.

Ballard, Super-Cannes.

The future was a second Eden-Olympia, almost twice the size of the original, the same mix of multinational companies, research laboratories and financial consultancies. Hyundai, BP Amoco, Motorola and Unilever had secured their plots, investing in long-term leases that virtually financed the whole project. The site-contractors were already at work, clearing the holm oaks and umbrella pines that had endured since Roman times, surviving forest fires and military invasions. Nature, as the new millennium dictated, was giving way for the last time to the tax shelter and the corporate car park.

Ballard, Super-Cannes.

Work and the realities of corporate life anchored Eden-Olympia to the ground. The buildings wore their ventilation shafts and cable conduits on their external walls, an open reminder of Eden-Olympia’s dedication to company profits and the approval of its shareholders. The satellite dishes on the roofs resembled the wimples of an order of computer-literate nuns, committed to the sanctity of the workstation and the pieties of the spreadsheet.

Ballard, Super-Cannes.

High above me, fluted columns carried the pitched roofs, an attempt at a vernacular architecture that failed to disguise this executive-class prison. Taking their cue from Eden-Olympia and Antibes-les-Pins, the totalitarian systems of the future would be subservient and ingratiating, but the locks would be just as strong.

Ballard, Super-Cannes.

I stepped from the car-park lift onto the overheated roof, a cockpit of sun and death. In the mirror curtain-walling of the office building I could see myself reflected like an unwary tourist who had strayed through the wrong door into the danger-filled silences of a bullring.

Ballard, Super-Cannes.

This was the first office building to be constructed at the business park, but after a bombastic overture the architecture that followed was late modernist in the most minimal and self-effacing way, a machine above all for thinking in.

Ballard, Super-Cannes.

‘We ought to move on. Ghosts are walking around Eden-Olympia…’

Ballard, Super-Cannes.

The Office Park book, featuring many more images, is available at blurb as well as a number of other books by Nicholas Cobb.

..:: MORE INFORMATION:
+ Interview with Nicholas Cobb about The Office Park.
+ Nicholas Cobb’s website.

He turned his attention to me, tapping the bundle of handouts in his grip.

‘Get all the paper you can, Ballard. Some of the stuff they give away — “Mechanisms of Occupant Ejection”, “Tolerances of the Human Face in Crash Impacts” …’

As the last of the engineers stood back from the test car Vaughan nodded appreciatively, and commented sotto voce, ‘The technology of accident simulation at the R.R.L. is remarkably advanced. Using this set-up they could duplicate the Mansfield and Camus crashes — even Kennedy’s — indefinitely.’

‘They’re trying to reduce the number of accidents here, not increase it.’

‘I suppose that’s a point of view.’

Ballard, Crash.

ABOVE: Recreation created in Crash Zone 8 by Neal Trantham, Nebraska Accident Reconstruction, LLC.

Do you think if Vaughan was alive today, he’d be using AutoCAD to design the optimum sex death of Elizabeth Taylor in a collision of flesh, technology, semen and engine coolant?

Two CAD programs, Crash Zone and Quick Scene, seem tailor-made (Taylor-made?) for this Maldoror of the Motorways, his penis scarred possibly due to a motorcycle accident…

For 10 years The Crash Zone has been the drawing program of choice for Accident Reconstructionists who insist on functionality, precision, and ease of use. The new Crash Zone Version 8 has even more tools for crash investigators, including easy 3D animations, a vehicle specifications database, skid analysis and momentum calculations, and an easy-to-use 3D body poser! No special training is required! Free Technical Support!

Are you looking for the easiest and fastest way to create accident diagrams? Do you want an affordable program that lets you finish a crash scene diagram in 10 minutes or less? Quick Scene is your answer!

Now you can quickly create professional-looking diagrams for all your routine collision reports in less than 10 minutes! Whether you need to create a quick sketch or an accurate, scaled diagram, then Quick Scene is for you. Version 4 of Quick Scene is easier to learn, contains many powerful features and is very affordable. Only Quick Scene has thousands of predrawn symbols AND a powerful Symbol Manager to help you quickly find the right symbol and place it at the proper rotation and size! Save hours by creating “intersection templates” for your area, then just re-use them over and over!

More at the CAD Zone.

[thanks, Geoff, for the link]

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.

Hans Ulrich Obrist. Formulas for Now.

What do you get if you multiply sex by technology? The future (according to JG Ballard, in this book). Obrist, co-director of the Serpentine Gallery, asked creatives and academics to invent a formula that summed up modern life: Jeff Koons, Richard Dawkins and Damien Hirst were among those to oblige. Out now. (Thames & Hudson).

BALLARDOSCOPE: SOME ATTEMPTS AT APPROACHING THE WRITER AS A VISIONARY

by Jordi Costa

“The Sanger villa stood across the road, windows shuttered, the surveillance camera fixed on the litter of cigarette packets and advertisement flyers in the drive. Pushed by the wind, they edged towards the graffiti-covered doors of the garage, as if hoping to be incorporated into this lurid collage.”

J.G. Ballard, Cocaine Nights (1996).

Fabulous Banksy mural. I think Ballard would approve.

From the Daily Mail:

Banksy pulled off an audacious stunt to produce what is believed to be his biggest work yet in central London. The secretive graffiti artist managed to erect three storeys of scaffolding behind a security fence despite being watched by a CCTV camera. Then, during darkness and hidden behind a sheet of polythene, he painted this comment on ‘Big Brother’ society.

..:: Previously on Ballardian:
+ The Ballardian Primer: Surveillance Cameras
+ Trompe-l’oeil corridors

Michael Z. recently wrote to me. Michael is the developer of SurveillanceSaver, the uber-Ballardian screensaver that displays live feeds from over 600 Axis surveillance-camera networks, which I wrote about here.

Michael tells me he has now released a new version for MS Windows with much more cameras, and while I would have been happy to see SurveillanceSaver remain Mac only (because I’m a snob for no good reason save habit and cliche), more cameras can only increase the potential for high weirdness, and that is good.

To celebrate this new release, here is the The Ballardian Primer to CCTV & Surveillance Technology, with all quotes lifted from J.G. Ballard’s novels. As with the Car Park Primer, I’ll have to leave the short stories until a later, less chaotic and less disorganised juncture in my life.

CCTV as a form of social control, as a fully integrated technological system, was implemented in the UK in the late 80s/early 90s, but Ballard was always aware of the power of the lens to flatten time and space and erase identity well before then. Therefore any quotes here that date from before the late 80s should be considered as CCTV’s very own becoming: an AI marshalling its forces, scanning its terrain, scouting for passive, unknowing victims. Indeterminate, invisible. Vapourous. Never quite coalescing.

Until it was defined.

All pics are screengrabs from Axis cameras.

“He moved across to the bank of TV receivers. There were six of them, relaying pictures transmitted from automatic cameras mounted in sealed concrete towers that Marshall had had built at points all over London. The sets were labelled: Campden Hill, Westminster, Hampstead, Mile End Road, Battersea, Waterloo. The pictures flickered and were lashed with interference patterns, but the scenes they revealed were plain enough.”

JGB, The Wind from Nowhere (1961).

“Sequence in slow motion: a landscape of highways and embankments, evening light on fading concrete, intercut with images of a young woman’s body. She lay on her back, her wounded face stressed like fractured ice. With almost dream-like calm, the camera explored her bruised mouth, the thighs dressed in a dark lace-work of blood.”

JGB, The Atrocity Exhibition (1970).

“Vaughan followed them everywhere with his camera, zoom lens watching from the observation platform of the Oceanic Terminal at the airport, from hotel mezzanine balconies and studio car-parks. For each of them Vaughan devised an optimum auto-death.”

JGB, Crash (1973).

“Watching him from my car, parked alongside his own, I could see that even now Vaughan was dramatizing himself for the benefit of these anonymous passers-by, holding his position in the spotlight as if waiting for invisible television cameras to frame him.”

JGB, Crash (1973).

“Without Vaughan watching us, recording our postures and skin areas with his camera, my orgasm had seemed empty and sterile, a jerking away of waste tissue.”

JGB, Crash (1973).

“Many of the women had portable radios slung from their shoulders, which they switched from station to station as if tuning up for an acoustic war. Others carried cameras and flash equipment, ready to record any acts of hostility, any incursions into their territory.”

JGB, High-Rise (1975).

“My skin prickled like over-sensitive camera film, already recording the hints of light that touched the pewter sky above London.”

JGB, The Unlimited Dream Company (1979).

“‘Take it easy…’ Paco eyed Wayne defensively, unsure about the wisdom of admitting this volatile newcomer to their private teenage domain. ‘I only saw you on film — we have a few robot cameras on the other side of the Rockies, with trip-zooms that focus on anything that moves. It’s bad about your two friends, though.’”

JGB, Hello America (1981).

“He was still wearing the safari suit, and sat in front of his TV consoles — vivid colour pictures of Las Vegas at night taken by a camera on the roof of the Desert Inn. He looked pale but alert, as if he had decided long ago to dispense with sleep by a simple executive decree.”

JGB, Hello America (1981).

“Behind him he heard the sinister clatter of the two robot gunships, these blank angels which Manson moved around the sky. They came down from the night and hung fifty feet above him as he strode along the centre of the Strip, gatlings pointed at his back, camera zooms in their empty cockpits straining to catch Wayne’s profile.”

JGB, Hello America (1981).

“Manson glared at Wayne as if he were a malfunctioning robot. He fumbled with a set of buttons inlaid into the table top, his fingers scrabbling for the familiar contours like a blind man comforting himself with a rosary. ‘Look, Wayne, you can see it! There’s your virus!’
The television screens loomed into close-up. The pictures were transmitted from a series of cameras somewhere off Interstate 15.”

JGB, Hello America (1981).

“Carter ran head on through a plate-glass window. Picked up by a lobby camera, his startled face was frozen for ever in an immense, dazed smile.”

JGB, Hello America (1981).

“They clattered down the stairs and ran along the quay, following the remote-control camera mounted between the landing rails of this chimeric machine, like the devotees of a new televised religion.”

JGB, The Day of Creation (1987).

“We had rested through the night under the roof of the hangar, where the wounds to my head and ear had dried again. But the torn muscles of my scalp set it askew on my skull, and in turn seemed to tilt my mind, so that it perceived the world at an odd angle, like a misaligned camera.”

JGB, The Day of Creation (1987).

“The pearly rectangle, scarcely larger than a light-bulb, shrank me down to size, like everything else on which the camera turned its eye, and stripped away the irrelevancies of emotion, pain, and motive. Only my obsession endured, a great dream made small by failures of nerve, but a great dream nevertheless.”

JGB, The Day of Creation (1987).

“A security guard is lying on the floor below the row of television monitors, their screens a blizzard of snow. Someone has cut the cable running from the surveillance cameras mounted all over the estate, but clearly Officer Turner had no time to reach for the telephone whose scissored cord hangs from the desk above his head.”

JGB, Running Wild (1988).

“Secure behind their high walls and surveillance cameras, these estates in effect constitute a chain of closed communities whose lifelines run directly along the M4 to the offices and consulting rooms, restaurants and private clinics of central London.”

JGB, Running Wild (1988).

“The surveillance camera, as if bored with nothing to do, began to scan the house in close-up. The superb lenses, representing the most advanced optical technology, showed every detail with unnerving clarity. The camera panned along the plate-glass windows of the lounge and dining room. The undisturbed furniture could be clearly seen, even a clock registering 8:20 on a mantelpiece.”

JGB, Running Wild (1988).

“Already I resented the camera, staring at me like a deformed robot.”

JGB, The Kindness of Women (1991).

“Drained of emotion and value-judgement, the lens of the scientific camera anatomised the world around it like a patient and pensive voyeur.”

JGB, The Kindness of Women (1991).

“Even the empty camera in whose lens we were reflected had helped to shape our sex act. As she smoothed her eyebrows Carmen was measuring her profile against the lens, preparing herself for the even more elaborate sex films in which she would appear.”

JGB, The Kindness of Women (1991).

“With its passive and unobtrusive despotism, the camera governed the smallest spaces of our lives. Even in the privacy of our own homes we had all been recruited to play our parts in what were little more than real-life commercials.”

JGB, The Kindness of Women (1991).

“The camera lens was our way of disengaging from each other, distancing ourselves from each other’s emotions.”

JGB, The Kindness of Women (1991).

“Here, under the neutral gaze of the rostrum camera, a recruited force of volunteers had explored every legal permutation of lesbian, homosexual and heterosexual intercourse.”

JGB, The Kindness of Women (1991).

“As she lay with her laboratory partner, a remote-controlled camera recorded the involuntary movements of her facial musculature, the flushing of her breasts and abdomen, the skin tremors on the backs of her thighs.”

JGB, The Kindness of Women (1991).

“We were watched by the lenses of a dozen cameras, multiplied and dismantled at the same time.”

JGB, The Kindness of Women (1991).

“When Janet Bracewell called to Neil he turned to face the camera, aware that his chief role was to provide a poignant end-credit to the transmissions.”

JGB, Rushing to Paradise (1994.

“He gestured with a long arm at the villas on the hillside, secure behind their surveillance cameras. ‘I’ve lived here for two years and I’m still not sure if the place is real…’”

JGB, Cocaine Nights (1996).

“Annoyed with myself, I set off along the narrow street, past the surveillance cameras that guarded the lacquered doorways, each lens with its own story to tell.
Hidden perspectives turned Estrella de Mar into a huge riddle. Trompe-l’oeil corridors beckoned but led nowhere.”

JGB, Cocaine Nights (1996).

“I watched him drive away, and repeated his last words to myself. No crime at Estrella de Mar, no drug-dealing, burglaries or car thefts? In fact, the entire resort was wired up to crime like a cable TV network. It fed itself into almost every apartment and villa, every bar and nightclub, as anyone could see from the defensive nervous system of security alarms and surveillance cameras.”

JGB, Cocaine Nights (1996).

“The Sanger villa stood across the road, windows shuttered, the surveillance camera fixed on the litter of cigarette packets and advertisement flyers in the drive. Pushed by the wind, they edged towards the graffiti-covered doors of the garage, as if hoping to be incorporated into this lurid collage.”

JGB, Cocaine Nights (1996).

“Crawford pointed to the crenellated wall. ‘Look at it, Charles … it’s a fortified medieval city. This is Goldfinger’s defensible space raised to an almost planetary intensity — security guards, tele-surveillance, no entrance except through the main gates, the whole complex closed to outsiders. It’s a grim thought, but you’re looking at the future.’”

JGB, Cocaine Nights (1996).

“He fixed his aviator glasses over his eyes and glanced around the car park, counting the surveillance cameras as if calculating the best getaway route.”

JGB, Cocaine Nights (1996).

“‘Town-scapes are changing. The open-plan city belongs to the past — no more ramblas, no more pedestrian precincts, no more left banks and Latin quarters. We’re moving into the age of security grilles and defensible space. As for living, our surveillance cameras can do that for us. People are locking their doors and switching off their nervous systems.”

JGB, Cocaine Nights (1996).

“Civility and polity were designed into Eden-Olympia, in the same way that mathematics, aesthetics and an entire geopolitical world-view were designed into the Parthenon and the Boeing 747. Representative democracy had been replaced by the surveillance camera and the private police force.”

JGB, Super-Cannes (2000).

“Behind the brave and paranoid new world of surveillance cameras and bulletproof Range Rovers there probably existed an old-fashioned realm of pecking orders and racist abuse.”

JGB, Super-Cannes (2000).

“Surveillance cameras hung like gargoyles from the cornices, following me as I approached the barbican and identified myself to the guard at the reception desk.”

JGB, Super-Cannes (2000).

“‘People are so immersed in their work they wouldn’t recognize the end of the world. It explains why no one saw anything unusual about Greenwood. There’s no civic sense here.’

‘There is.’ Halder pointed to a nearby surveillance camera. ‘Think of it as a new kind of togetherness.’”

JGB, Super-Cannes (2000).

“We began to climb the steep road that led towards the billionaire heights of Super-Cannes. Luxury villas as lavish as palaces stood in their groomed parks. On the wrought-iron gates, surveillance cameras crouched like hawks.”

JGB, Super-Cannes (2000).

“‘These security cameras . . . I have to be careful. I’m in Hammersmith, the King Street shopping mall. Consumer hell.’”

JGB, Millennium People (2003).

“Nothing now made sense except in terms of a transient airport culture. Warning displays alerted each other, and the entire landscape was coded for danger. CCTV cameras crouched over warehouse gates, and filter-left signs pulsed tirelessly, pointing to the sanctuaries of high-security science parks.”

JGB, Kingdom Come (2006).

“Everyone’s suffocating — too many barcode readers, too many CCTV cameras and double yellow lines.”

JGB, Kingdom Come (2006).

“Everything about him, from his large feet in a pair of unmatched trainers to the tic that pulled at an infected ear piercing, fixed him firmly as an urban scarecrow designed to frighten away any circling security cameras.”

JGB, Kingdom Come (2006).

“The riot soon began to drink itself into befuddlement, but bands of more determined ice-hockey followers joined forces with track-and-field supporters and marched on an industrial estate in run-down east Brooklands, a night-time wilderness of video cameras and security patrols.”

JGB, Kingdom Come (2006).

“‘This isn’t a suburb of London, it’s a suburb of Heathrow and the M25. People in Hampstead and Holland Park look down from the motorway as they speed home from their West Country cottages. They see faceless inter-urban sprawl, a nightmare terrain of police cameras and security dogs, an uncentred realm devoid of civic tradition and human values.’”

JGB, Kingdom Come (2006).

..:: Previously on Ballardian
+ Car Parks: The Ballardian Primer

Illustration by John Coulthart.

WINNER
Ben Slater; ‘Vista 8′

JOHN: Monochrome location scouting inside a high-rise hotel that looks half-finished. Remnants of an affair litter the piece: photographs, a high heel and the cutting to two cars so close together it would be difficult not to predict a Crash. As Christopher Brookmyre said, beware half-finished places, you know, the Death Star, Jurassic Park, Nakatomi Plaza…

SIMON: Ben’s film, shot among the Vista 8 high-rise in Singapore, seems to me like it’s recording the last moments of a suicide. You chance upon a mobile phone discarded in the high-rise’s courtyard; you press ‘play’, and this is what you find… I do like the snatched inclusion of Bowie’s man-machine classic, ‘Always Crashing in the Same Car’.

MORE ENTRIES BELOW…

I’d like to organize a Festival of Home Movies! It could be wonderful — thousands of the things… You might find an odd genius, a Fellini or Godard of the home movie, living in some suburb. I’m sure it’s coming… Using modern electronics, home movie cameras and the like, one will begin to retreat into one’s own imagination. I welcome that…

J.G. Ballard, quoted in ‘Interview with JGB by Graeme Revell’, RE/Search No. 8/9, 1984.

We had eight entries in our little competition for 1-minute-or-less films shot on cameraphones, modelled after Ballard’s 1984 call for a ‘festival of home movies’. A reminder of the requirements:

+ Shoot a film using your mobile phone’s video function, no more than one minute in duration, and using no post-production or processing — the film must be shot entirely ‘in camera’.
+ The theme: anything at all to do with either one or both of the Collins English Dictionary definitions of ‘Ballardian’:

BALLARDIAN: (adj) 1. of James Graham Ballard (J.G. Ballard; born 1930), the British novelist, or his works. (2) resembling or suggestive of the conditions described in Ballard’s novels & stories, esp. dystopian modernity, bleak man-made landscapes & the psychological effects of technological, social or environmental developments.

Mounting this exercise was hugely enjoyable for me and I was delighted to discover some real gems among the eight. I have been inspired by those Ballard ‘home movie’ quotes ever since I first read them years ago, and just the very the idea of unearthing ‘a Fellini or Godard of the suburbs’ has always excited (and humoured) me. So have we found one? Perhaps not. But we just may have discovered, finally, what lies in the angle between two walls…. (not even John Foxx, you may recall, could crack that conundrum).

To determine a winner, John Rivers from HarperCollins assigned points to each film, as did I. We then combined our rankings. The result is that Ben Slater, with ‘Vista 8′, came out on top. Ben wins a copy of Miracles of Life, plus these HarperCollins reissues: Millennium People, The Drought, The Crystal World, The Drowned World and The Unlimited Dream Company.

The runner-up is Pablo Sgarbi from Brazil, with ’120 Days of an Angle Between Two Walls’ (see below), and he receives a copy of Miracles. Congratulations to Ben and Pablo, and many thanks to all entrants and to everyone who supported and promoted the festival. Extra special thanks to HarperCollins UK for getting behind the idea, and to JGB for everything: always and of course.

Next year, who knows? Perhaps we’ll get entrants to simulate the filmed ratissages in Super-Cannes, or Bobby Crawford’s home porno movies in Cocaine Nights…

Here now are the remaining entries direct to you from BallardoTube, the Net’s only dedicated Ballard TV channel, where ‘history is just a first-draft screenplay’ (according to JGB in ‘The Greatest TV Show On Earth’), and where ‘premium subscribers can experience transexualism, paedophilia, terminal syphilis, gang-rape, and bestiality (choice: German Shepherd or Golden Retriever)’, as decreed by JGB in ‘A Guide to Virtual Death’.

RUNNER UP
Pablo Sgarbi; ’120 Days of An Angle Between Two Walls’

JOHN: A voice simulator spews forth graphic prose like a poetry machine from Vermillion Sands. Juxtaposed with images of ordinariness, a ceiling corner, a kettle, a cup of coffee. Reminding us what lies in the dark psyches of people everyday.

SIMON: Beautiful and hilarious: a robot reads a passage from the Marquis de Sade’s The 120 Days of Sodom, dispassionately intoning squirting buttocks and jets of blood, while common household objects ‘star’ on the screen: those elusive wall angles, a coffee cup, and so on. In its juxtaposition of extreme and violent sex with banal home appliances, this is perhaps the most ‘Ballardian’ film of them all. I love this entry a lot.

..:: Remaining entries (not ranked; in alphabetical order)

Shahin Afrassiabi; ‘Home’

JOHN: A static shot, half composed of white, with red material intruding beneath. A seemingly random collection of sounds from talk radio or television are heard, slowly snatches emerge. Mopeds, a body found on a golf course. Murder on the roads, in the suburbs. “They shouldn’t be here,” claims a politician or letterwriter and as if to answer the listener appears to move away.

SIMON: An effective study in boredom, the psychological blank slate against which all manner of deviant behaviour is exposed and spontaneously generated, like flyblown maggots on rotting meat…

Mike Bonsall; ‘Day of Creation’

JOHN: Machine noise, loud and abrasive. A tool kit, saws, cutting tools. The slow reveal of a pile of Ballard titles leads you to wonder if here JG’s works are being recut, sliced, diced and served again. The Day of Creation is the final title to appear. The maker has taken Ballard and chopped him up.

SIMON: Mike B. is the creator of the JG Ballard Short Story Concordance, and he is currently working on a concordance of Ballard’s novels. These projects required him to buy extra copies of Ballard books and to razor their pages for easily digestible scanning under the all-powerful OCR software, before they could emerge out the other side as digital mulch. This film, then, is a delightful little in joke aimed squarely by Mike at his own obsessiveness, but it also functions as a sly and clever appraisal of Ballard’s entire ouevre, which has always relied on repetition, recycling, détournement, collage, bricolage…

Julian Gough; ‘Flesh Frame’

JOHN: Micro-entertainment, as flesh is exposed on a computer screen. That it only takes up a quarter of the screen makes it look like the body has been filmed and is being edited. Only to blur into a sunset. Consumerism takes over as the computer screen turns and pulls away to a credit card rectangle ready to accept your chip and PIN.

SIMON: This film chases its own tail, eventually disappearing into the black hole of inner space. Utterly beguiling.

Russell Miller; ‘A Journey Through A Distant Land’

JOHN: Concrete, bleakness, a travelator that moves vs. a river refusing to run. CCTV-positioned footage of a seemingly empty street lined by lock-ups hiding ephemera, memory junk, yesterday’s crashes. Daylight as harsh as the artificial strip lighting. In a denial of creation we return to the water from which we emerged.

SIMON: Classic Ballardian imagery, here: the flyovers, the apartment blocks, the obsessive stalking of nothing in particular. An artificial eye scanning the ruins of a humourless Earth, perhaps…

Jack Strain; ‘Ballardian’

JOHN: An urban warrior applies his warpaint in slow-mo before a projection of traffic is destroyed in a deliberate act of vandalism. The whole process seems to be watched or logged.

SIMON: A fabulously evocative film, menacing and dark, and making full use of the competition’s ‘in camera’ editing stipulation. The burning frame is a wonderful touch, and the glimpse of madness at the very end is bizarre and unsettling, behaviour that is perhaps the only response to the crushing insanity of the outside world.

Supervert; ‘Superego’

JOHN: Big Ballard is watching you! And joined by a smaller version of himself. Ballard argues with himself over an unheard question. As we watch, we are given permission only to be refused a second later. We are eventually told ‘no’ twice and our audience is over. That the responses are from Sam Scoggins’s movie about The Unlimited Dream Company and the ’90 questions from the Eyckman Personality Quotient test’ give the film a different meaning, that you’re being fed the results of a psychological experiment, while appearing to participate in one yourself.

SIMON: This film manipulates footage from the Scoggins film and is just a little disconcerting. It’s like being given a glimpse into a malfunctioning brain, with its psychopathology unashamedly on show, brandished like a weapon. Ultimately the synaptic process is unfathomable and the viewer, like all readers of Ballard, is left on the outer, able to only impotently guess at the intent, forced to fill in the dots herself…

..:: Previously on Ballardian…

+ J.G. Ballard Pastiche Competition

Everybody will be doing it, everybody will be living inside a TV studio. That’s what the domestic home aspires to these days; the home is going to be a TV studio. We’re all going to be starring in our own sit-coms, and they’ll be strange sit-coms, too, like the inside of our heads. That’s going to come, I’m absolutely sure of that, and it’ll really shake up everything…

J.G. Ballard, quoted in ‘Interview with JGB by Andrea Juno and Vale’, RE/Search No. 8/9, 1984.

The mobile phone can be seen as a fashion accessory and adult toy as well as a break-through in instant communication, though its use in restaurants, shops and public spaces can be irritating to others. This suggests that its real function is to separate its users from the surrounding world and isolate them within the protective cocoon of an intimate electronic space. At the same time phone users can discreetly theatricalize themselves, using a body language that is an anthology of presentation techniques and offers to others a tantalizing glimpse of their private and intimate lives.

J.G. Ballard, ‘Impressions of Speed’, in Speed : visions of an accelerated age / / edited by Jeremy Millar and Michiel Schwarz (1998).

Have we found a ‘Fellini or Godard of the suburbs’? Decide for yourself, as I’ll also be hosting all entries on Ballardian’s YouTube channel.

More soon.

All the details are here.

By the way, if any more piquing of interest is required, here’s a quote from Ballard on mobile phones that I’ve just discovered, courtesy of the invaluable RE/Search volume, J.G. Ballard: Quotes:

The mobile phone can be seen as a fashion accessory and adult toy as well as a break-through in instant communication, though its use in restaurants, shops and public spaces can be irritating to others. This suggests that its real function is to separate its users from the surrounding world and isolate them within the protective cocoon of an intimate electronic space. At the same time phone users can discreetly theatricalize themselves, using a body language that is an anthology of presentation techniques and offers to others a tantalizing glimpse of their private and intimate lives.

J.G. Ballard, ‘Impressions of Speed’, in Speed : visions of an accelerated age / / edited by Jeremy Millar and Michiel Schwarz (1998).

Illustration by John Coulthart.

I’d like to organize a Festival of Home Movies! It could be wonderful — thousands of the things… You might find an odd genius, a Fellini or Godard of the home movie, living in some suburb. I’m sure it’s coming… Using modern electronics, home movie cameras and the like, one will begin to retreat into one’s own imagination. I welcome that…

J.G. Ballard, quoted in ‘Interview with JGB by Graeme Revell’, RE/Search No. 8/9, 1984.

The mobile phone can be seen as a fashion accessory and adult toy as well as a break-through in instant communication, though its use in restaurants, shops and public spaces can be irritating to others. This suggests that its real function is to separate its users from the surrounding world and isolate them within the protective cocoon of an intimate electronic space. At the same time phone users can discreetly theatricalize themselves, using a body language that is an anthology of presentation techniques and offers to others a tantalizing glimpse of their private and intimate lives.

J.G. Ballard, ‘Impressions of Speed’, in Speed : visions of an accelerated age / / edited by Jeremy Millar and Michiel Schwarz (1998).

In 1984 J.G. Ballard called for a ‘Festival of Home Movies’ and 24 years on we’re happy to oblige: announcing our latest competition, to promote JGB’s forthcoming autobiography, Miracles of Life. Presented by ballardian.com and HarperCollins UK, the competition will utilise ‘modern electronics’ as specified above, of an especial type that Ballard with his prodigious clairvoyant powers came close to envisaging: the mobile phone (or cell phone, for our North American cousins).

THE PREAMBLE
As Ballard writes, the minor, continual, subliminal modifications we make to our bodies on a day-to-day basis add up to something else:

a continuing authentication of [our] physical selves, a non-vocal gossip…that no kinaesthetic language, beyond those provided by the instructions on a deodorant or a lady-shaver, has yet been found to express.

J.G. Ballard, ‘The 60 Minute Zoom’, 1976.

Fully calibrated with the user’s personality, the mobile phone sticks to the skin like a third ear, a wearable, affordable prosthesis grafted to the cochlea. It’s as banal and as integrated as his deodorant or her personal lady-shaver, and yet it’s something else again, something even more Ballardian. Moral panics scream that the mobile phone turns people into self-enclosed zombie pods, that it turns its users inwards and against each other. Horror films (and Stephen King) are cashing in on its unseen malevolence. Scientists scream that it causes tumors and brain lesions; it’s the absinthe of technological instruments. And throughout it all, the core power of the thing grows apace as it becomes more and more like a super-powerful micro computer: able to not only receive, beam and transmit, but to record your every move in sound and vision, unnoticed, silent, cloaked.

It’s an unprecedented window into inner space.

REQUIREMENTS
+ Shoot a film using your mobile phone’s video function, no more than one minute in duration, and using no post-production or processing — the film must be shot entirely ‘in camera’.
+ The theme: anything at all to do with either one or both of the Collins English Dictionary definitions of ‘Ballardian’:

BALLARDIAN: (adj) 1. of James Graham Ballard (J.G. Ballard; born 1930), the British novelist, or his works. (2) resembling or suggestive of the conditions described in Ballard’s novels & stories, esp. dystopian modernity, bleak man-made landscapes & the psychological effects of technological, social or environmental developments.

+ Email your footage to ballardianfilm at ballardian dot com.
+ Closing date for submissions: February 11 February 20.

Entries will be judged by myself and John Rivers from the HarperCollins digital wing.

THE PRIZE
Selected entries will be hosted on the site and the winner will receive a copy of Miracles of Life along with the forthcoming HarperCollins reissues of Ballard’s Millennium People, The Drought, The Crystal World, The Drowned World and The Unlimited Dream Company.

My sincere thanks to HarperCollins for generously sponsoring this event. And as always, special thanks to J.G. Ballard for continual and ongoing inspiration.

Everybody will be doing it, everybody will be living inside a TV studio. That’s what the domestic home aspires to these days; the home is going to be a TV studio. We’re all going to be starring in our own sit-coms, and they’ll be strange sit-coms, too, like the inside of our heads. That’s going to come, I’m absolutely sure of that, and it’ll really shake up everything…

J.G. Ballard, quoted in ‘Interview with JGB by Andrea Juno and Vale’, RE/Search No. 8/9, 1984.

Recently, Rick McGrath was in the process of wooing Toronto’s Merril Collection of Science Fiction, Speculation and Fantasy with his extensive collection of Ballard first editions, which the Collection might archive. Sensing his keen collector’s eye, the head of the Collection passed on a binder containing a slew of Canadian JGB reviews, Ballardian esoterica and the jewel in the crown: a long, unpublished interview with Ballard from 1974. According to McGrath: ‘It was conducted by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation for a radio show called Ideas, with this specific series featuring science-fiction writers discussing Doomsday scenarios. The interview is 8,000 words long, and covers a wide range of topics.’

Rick has now onlined the transcript and it’s an absorbing read. Today we are well familiar with Ballard’s riffs and routines, but imagine how utterly alien his pronouncements must have sounded back then. An indication of this is the difficulty the interviewer, Carol Orr, sometimes has with Ballard’s concepts. When talking of the isolation that results from surrounding ourselves with technological systems, Ballard says, ‘We tend to assume that people want to be together in a kind of renaissance city if you like, imaginatively speaking, strolling in the evening across a crowded piazza…’ In response Orr says, ‘No, I can’t agree with you there. I think it is not a question of conscious decision to people’s psychological needs, since that was industrialization, that was….’

Then Ballard, with this: ‘These are the sort of dreams these are — I don’t think people want to be together, I think they want to be alone. People are together in a traffic jam or in a crowded elevator in a department store, or on airlines. That’s togetherness. People don’t want to be together in a physical sense, in an actual running crowd on a pavement. People want to be alone. They want to be alone and watch television.’

Protesting, Orr says, ‘Well, if you want to make that kind of statement. I don’t want to be in a traffic jam, but I don’t want to be alone on a dune, either’. To which Ballard replies:

JGB: One is not living in…an 18th-to-19th-century city where, as it were, metaphorically speaking, like a crowded noisy tenement, where we knew every neighbour, where we were surrounded by relations of many generations. Where we were in an intimate sort of social context made up of hundreds of people. This isn’t the case. Most of us lead comparatively isolated lives. That being alone on a dune is probably a better description of how you actually lead your life than you realize. Oh sure, you may…

Orr: … as far as you are trapped within your own body…

JGB: No, no, compared with the life you would have lived 50 years ago, or 150 years ago, where you would have been surrounded in a large tenement or a large dwelling in an overcrowded city, say. If you think a mediaeval town, well, probably every inhabitant knew every other inhabitant intimately, or at least knew something of them. One’s not living in that world any more. The city or the town or the suburb or the street — these are places of considerable isolation. People like it that way, too. They don’t want to know all their neighbours. This is just a small example where the conventional appeal of the good life needs to be looked at again. I don’t think people would want to have the sort of life that was lived 100 years ago or 200 years ago.

I do get a sense that Orr is a little out of her depth, and it’s no surprise that after this exchange she suddenly says, ‘On that note we’re going to have to close up shop’, ending the interview. I’m not having a go at her by saying this, just pointing out that Ballard was thinking through technological relations and scenarios in a rather unique fashion back then. Picture it: he’s a science-fiction writer, whose ostensible job is to predict the future, but who undercuts that by suggesting that there is no future, that ‘the present is throwing up so many options, so many alternatives, that it contains the possibilities of any future right now. You can have tomorrow, today. And the notion of the future as a sort of programmatic device, I mean a direction, a compass-bearing that we can look forward to, a destination that we are moving toward psychologically and physically — I think that possibility is rather outdated.’

I’m especially blown away by the following statement, in response to a question from Orr about the likelihood of nuclear holocaust. Not only does Ballard seriously undermine the nuclear hysteria and paranoia that would reach a frothing peak in the 80s, but he also accurately foretells the role of networked technology and identity theft as much greater threats. All from the ‘primitive’ vantage point of 1974:

JGB: I wouldn’t have thought if there were any danger to life on this planet it would come from the possibility of nuclear warfare. Far more from the misuse of, say, antibiotics, the misuse of computers, [or] of overpopulation as a product of better health, better nutrition and the like, and a general lack of control. What I’m concerned with is that people, by reacting against technology, by taking a very Arcadian view of what life on this planet should be, may no longer be able to deal with the real threats when they begin to come from technology, which they probably will.

Threats to the quality of life that everyone is so concerned about will come much more, say, from the widespread application of computers to every aspect of our lives where all sorts of science-fiction fantasies will come true, where bank balances will be constantly monitored and at almost any given time all the information that exists about ourselves will be on file somewhere — where all sorts of agencies, commercial, political and governmental, will have access to that information. Now, I think that’s much more of a danger.

The potency of Ballard’s prophecy is especially relevant when you consider that Alvin Toffler’s very popular Future Shock was published around the same time, and was considered to be a frightening and all-too-real vision of the future, with its warnings of a ‘massive adaptational breakdown’ unless ‘man quickly learns to control the rate of change in his personal affairs as well as in society at large’.

In this interview, by contrast, while Ballard might be concerned about the effects of networked technologies, he discerns a rather different outcome that derives from a belief in the evolutionary, affirmative possibilities of this rapid rate of change:

JGB: I’m absolutely convinced now people are morally and psychologically stronger and healthier than they’ve ever been before. There’s no reason why they shouldn’t be. I think they’re strong enough and healthy enough to begin to, in a sense, play with their own psychologies, to be able to play games with themselves. In the sense that one goes out to one’s tennis court and plays a set of tennis with a friend. One will be able to play psychological games, one will be able to assume psychological roles of various kinds. One will be able to devise situations, the dramatic kind if you like, which won’t upset us, which won’t damage the mind in any way, which won’t lead to a nervous collapse. I think people are strong enough to begin to play all kinds of deviant games, and I’m sure that this is to some extent taking place.

I think the future is going to be angular, rather hard geometrically, stripped of ornament. Unpredictable, with rapid temperature changes from black to white in the sun. I think the future will be very lunar, and people will behave in a very lunar way, very isolated from each other. Does that appeal to me? Yes, it does, because I think people will have more freedom there. I mean, the freedom of isolation, the freedom of complete choice in one’s behaviour. It’s the difference of being in an empty city or being in a resort out of season or being on a crowded beach…

I can’t help thinking of the whole FaceSpace phenomenon when reading this passage, and while in my mind the jury’s out on the ‘affirmative’ nature of that particular interface, I have no doubt that, as a futurist, Ballard has the edge over Toffler. Very simplistically (I’m no Toffler expert), the difference seems to be that Toffler insists we must impose our will on technology, whereas Ballard is positive that we must, to a certain extent, accept the inexorable logic of technological growth and adapt accordingly.

And now, one final quote, and then you must read the whole 8,000 words for yourself over at Rick’s site. I like this passage for the insight it gives into the Ballardian aesthetic, and the sense that aesthetic standards are really just another form of control (what Fredric Jameson has termed ‘the domination of political form over matter with the imperatives of aesthetic modernism’):

JGB: I feel that a modern high-rise building or a concrete seven-storey car park, or a cloverleaf roadway junction, reflects and embraces within itself the aesthetic laws, all the laws of good design that we apply to the sorts of things we regard as beautiful in our lives — the well-designed cutlery and kitchen equipment. I mean, they embrace all the aesthetic standards of modern sculpture.

The last 100 years have led us toward industrial design, have consistently led us towards the set of standards, the set of aesthetic yardsticks, which we apply in our everyday lives — to our judgment of which washing machine we buy, which motorcar we prefer, which coffee percolator we like. But we must apply these yardsticks right across the board. They’re the same yardsticks, the same criteria that you see in the design of motorway junctions. They are motion sculptures of great beauty. Now, to say “my God” automatically, because to say something is a road, it must therefore be ugly, is illogical. I simply accept the logic of the world in which I live.

In the meantime, here’s my last word on CCTV. This is rather fitting, actually. When I first wrote about the SurveillanceSaver software, I imagined people watching for me watching for them watching for me etc etc in an endless feedback loop. Then in the comments section, a reader said that the byproduct of surveillance tech is more M John Harrison in Nova Swing (“one mother of an interzone”) than it is Ballard. Now I discover through my site stats that M John Harrison is watching me watching him, from his blog Uncle Zip’s Window, where he tries out SurveillanceSaver only to abandon the experiment due to boredom…which is precisely what’s happened to me (plus the work and mad dreams got in the way).

But MJH is naturally more eloquent:

Surveillance Saver: after a bit, the narrative possibilities collapse, the intensity of your gaze subsides & these are just empty corners of the world again. It’s a bit like hitch-hiking & not getting a ride. I can understand the Ballardian imperative to usurp & undermine the ideology & aesthetics of surveillance by turning it into a game. But this [the Surveillance Camera Players] looks like a more entertaining way to do it, a lot more hands-on.

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.

Annoyed with myself, I set off along the narrow street, past the surveillance cameras that guarded the lacquered doorways, each lens with its own story to tell. Hidden perspectives turned Estrella de Mar into a huge riddle. Trompe-l’oeil corridors beckoned but led nowhere…

J.G. Ballard. Cocaine Nights (1996).

Every good Ballardian needs this: SurveillanceSaver, a screensaver that displays live feeds from over 600 Axis surveillance-camera networks (found via Boing Boing).

Surveillance cameras by necessity record interzones, the hot spots where crime might breed or deviance might spontaneously generate, in locations beyond the reach of our unenhanced optic nerves, or where everything and everyone has simply shut up shop. Business parks at night, city squares cast in gloomy shadow, empty swimming pools, the hooded entrances of hospitals, the city-like scale of airport perimeters, motorway feeder roads where human interaction is factored out of the landscape and the only transaction occurs between speed and machinery. Ballard’s work precisely records such territory, a rich topography inset with mysterious ley lines, weaving a grid to support shadowy lifestyles enacted far away from mainstream thought.

This screensaver is your privileged window onto Ballardian space.

It cycles through the feeds, lingering for around 3 minutes on each. The action is jerky, frame by frame. At times it takes on the quality of a La Jetee-style photo roman: frozen scenes, no movement, absolutely still, until the glare of a sodium light almost imperceptibly flickers on and off in the foreground. On the occasion that someone walks across the ‘set’, their movements are rendered like some stop-motion Harryhausen creature. In a city square somewhere very late at night in Eastern Europe, the scene is empty except for two motionless civic statues; only one isn’t. Within a second, this man’s legs move, then freeze, then move…trapped in the molasses-like gravity of CCTV time sickness. Behind him, there’s actually only one statue and it remains behind, rooted to the spot.

Every time I return to my computer to find the screensaver in action, I’m transfixed. Versed in Ballard’s work, when a grey and forbidding car park appears, I hope for a Lincoln Continental to cruise into view, with a ‘hoodlum scientist’ in a black leather jacket receiving a blow job in the back seat, watched passively by the blank gaze of a man in the driver’s seat, his lack of affect matching the camera lens precisely. Or a porno shoot on a construction site on the far edge of town, the camera watching the cameras. I find myself scanning the feeds, examining every inch of the grainy black and white image, to locate some kind of deviation from the norm: waiting, perhaps, for a casually dressed urban professional to scope the aisles in a video store, a mysterious brown package under his arm; or an office worker staying back late in her cubicle, injecting some unknown substance into her arm, unable to bear the thought of returning home to whatever it is that awaits her there. I watch mannequins in store windows, wondering if they’ll ever break the window and go into a club, where they’ll start to dance. I stare at what looks like frozen tundra, hoping for a Tunguska-like object to explode… And then I am jerked from my reverie: the next feed is a pig pen on a remote farm. A huge snout fills the screen, and then the software cuts to a new feed, a dolphin swimming in a zoo, then yet another feed, the underwater underside of a woman’s body doing laps in a pool.

But most of all, I am alert for the offices and the university computer labs and the library reading rooms that randomly cycle through, waiting for the uncanny shock of catching someone I know watching a screen, wondering if they are watching this screensaver, too, watching for me, under the passive gaze of this camera behind me, above and to my right, somewhere out in space.

Far from installing SETI software on our computers to assist in the search for life in outer space, we should be installing this wonderful screensaver, scanning the farthest reaches of inner space, where it is even less certain than in the cosmos that intelligent life exists.

A-bomb explosion, Bikini Atoll, 25 July, 1946.

I’m a scholar, I teach Brit.Lit. professionally at the University of Warsaw. My PhD (1999) was on Angela Carter and it got me a job there as assistant professor. But in my country, to be a scholar you need one more degree — you need to write something like a post-doctoral thesis — and you have about ten years to write it. To cut a long story short, one day in 2000 I said to myself: ‘J.G. Ballard’.

Which brings us to the introduction from Grave New World, presented here as a sampler of my work.

Dominika Oramus, 2007.

For more information on the book, please contact Dominika at dominika dot oramus at neostrada dot pl.

NOTE: Part Two is now available.

Are we living in the happy times of a social utopia where everybody can participate equally in the blessings of advanced technology, modern science and sophisticated communications systems? Are we witness to the true ‘Brave New World’ the human race has dreamt of for generations? Or is our contemporary reality yet another ‘Grave New World’ [1] — a dystopian land of social manipulation and hegemonic mass media? Is ours a world that denies free will, breeds psychopathologies and supplants first-hand experience with simulacra? In 1932 Aldous Huxley published his Brave New World as a warning against what the future might bring. And indeed, throughout the last century numerous philosophers, historians, sociologists, and fiction writers repeated similar concerns and fears. In that same year, 1932, the first one-volume English translation of Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West was published, thereby introducing to English literary culture the idea of an inevitable end to every civilization, ours included. His study prompted Arnold Toynbee to begin work on his monumental opus A Study of History, wherein he discusses a host of past human civilizations and points to the causes of their fall, indirectly suggesting that our own Western culture is well advanced on its own way to disintegration. Arnold Toynbee writes:

The self-inflicted wounds from which civilizations die are not these of a material order. In the past, at any rate, it has been the spiritual wounds that have proved incurable (Toynbee 1949: 135).

It seems appropriate to me to start the present study of J.G. Ballard by quoting the above passage from Toynbee’s lecture ‘The International Outlook’; coming in the wake of World War II, it reveals the sad truth about civilizations in general: they are universally threatened with decline and demise. Whatever may precipitate the West’s fall will involve external factors (waves of immigration, dangerous weapons in irresponsible foreign hands, terrorism, alien cultures and religions filling in the spiritual vacuum, etc.), but these matters will be allowed in only because of the internal spiritual damage that is already underway. In both his fiction and non-fiction J.G. Ballard describes the dire spiritual changes that have been taking place since the war and have transformed the West. Though Western civilization has apparently succeeded in perpetuating itself to the new millennium in having overcome communism and avoided the threat of a Third World War, nuclear catastrophe and internal collapse, for Ballard Huxley’s [2] vision remains uncanny in the way it is coming true. At least in some of its key aspects.

In this book I read Ballard’s fiction (and some of his non-fiction) as a record of the gradual internal degeneration of Western civilization in the second half of the twentieth century. In sundry ways and styles Ballard’s ostensibly very heterogeneous oeuvre depicts the same intangible catastrophe that has happened to the world. Contemporary reality is thus presented in his late prose as ‘post-apocalyptic’: though we are not literally living amidst the ruins, the golden age is far behind us and we are witnessing the twilight of the West. It is difficult to pinpoint the exact moment in the past when things went wrong [3], but that fateful turn has undeniably taken place and wrought grave spiritual change. Thus do we hear the death knells of our civilization, one growing increasingly hostile to individuals and erecting a cult of violence.

I hope to achieve two aims in this study. Firstly, I hope to show ‘Grave New World’, the imaginary territory Ballard describes in his books, which is a combination of the turn-of-the-millennium world, intertextual allusions to both fiction and non-fiction, and Ballard’s projections for the near future with its sociological idiosyncrasies. I would like to prove that irrespectively of the literary conventions Ballard applies in a given text (science fiction, speculative fiction, detective story, thriller, war novel or any other), he charts the very same territory and remains throughout primarily interested in the reaction of the human mind to the post-World War II reality which is the common denominator of his diverse obsessions. Secondly, I would like to shed some light on the spiritual condition and social problems of contemporary Western civilization as seen by its ever so inquisitive member. [4]

‘Continuously creating his own image’: J.G. Ballard self-portrait, double exposure, 1950 (photo via RE/Search Publications).

My technique in approaching Ballard is mostly that of textual analysis and close readings of passages of his texts that best show his exuberant stylistics; sometimes I also point out his references to literary and cultural theories. As far as said theories are concerned, I shall follow Ballard’s own readings. He very often alludes to critical schools and makes his characters discuss fashionable notions and ideas. Therefore, I will refer to the same sources: mostly psychoanalysts (many Ballardian characters are psychiatrists), but also historians and recent cultural theorists.

There are two problems with discussing Ballard’s fiction, and they need be dealt with at the very beginning. The first concerns the generic classification of his books — the second is posed by Ballard’s continuous attempts at auto-creation. As far as classification goes, the critics in different decades have described Ballard as a science fiction writer, a mainstream writer, a surrealist, a representative of the avant-garde, and an author who defies any classifications. To portray these controversies, in the next part of this Introduction (‘The Critical Response to J.G. Ballard’) I will briefly present the most important critical approaches to Ballard, at the same time showing how his oeuvre alludes to many different literary conventions. As for myself, I am not going to deal with this problem and give my opinion about, for example, the precise moment when Ballard left science fiction behind and started writing ‘serious’ books. Rather, I will discuss all his works on the same plane: moreover, I will not follow the chronology of Ballard’s long and generically diverse literary career, opting instead to treat all of his oeuvre synchronically, as descriptions of different vistas of his ‘Grave New World’. To provide the reader with relevant dates and the order of Ballard’s works I have included a calendar of his life and career at the end of this thesis (Appendix II).

In the last part of this Introduction (‘J.G. Ballard’s Auto-creation) I will deal with the second problem the Ballardian critic has to face. Over the fifty years of his career Ballard was continuously creating his own image. His quasi-autobiographies, numerous articles and memories present a persona or rather a number of personas that he constructed in different moments of his life. Such a self-fashioning should not be mistaken with any kind of ‘historical truth’ and in a study concerned with the intellectual history of the twentieth century it is important not to take the fictitious ‘James Ballard’ for a person who really witnessed the war in Asia and the atomic bombing of Nagasaki. Therefore, I will briefly discuss the images Ballard constructed in different decades of the last century and later, in the main body of my thesis, I will, to quote D.H. Lawrence, ‘trust the tale not the teller’ and try to avoid the auto-creation fallacies.

In my first chapter, before the focused discussion of Ballard’s own oeuvre, I will succinctly present those thinkers who are most important to the understanding of his works. Such a spiritual map of the (mainly) twentieth century as sketched by following Ballard’s favourite philosophers and scientists will help to place his fiction in the proper intellectual perspective, as his works are deeply informed by theories that, from differing points of view, discuss the alarming state of our civilization. This chapter does not aim to present on its but few pages a grand critique of the century and the path our world is taking (as that, of course, lies far beyond the scope of the present study). Rather, I will confine myself to pointing out those books and essays that Ballard directly refers to. This chapter will therefore give a theoretical frame to the subsequent discussion and will allow me to avoid repetitive summaries of cultural theories in the rest of the study. Thus, in the following chapters I will refer back to this theoretical frame numerous times, owing to the fact that Ballard often alludes to the very same set of critical essays and enters into intertextual discussions with their authors from changing vantage points.

J.G. Ballard: photo via RE/Search publications.

As far as my own approach to his fiction is concerned, I will start by discussing, in Chapter II, the war narratives: Empire of the Sun, The Kindness of Women and some short stories devoted to both World War II and imaginary military conflicts of the future. These texts describe events which for Ballard are the very beginning of cultural decline, as it is after the war that Western civilization turned into ‘Grave New World’. Though these books play with the reader by giving the origins of events from Ballard’s other fictional works and might be treated as a conscious mythologizing of his life and career, they nevertheless do reveal the crux of Ballard’s historiosophy.

In the following chapters I try to map ‘Grave New World’ and chart its diverse territories. In Chapter III I show cityscapes in Ballard’s books and discuss contemporary urban civilization — the cause of psychological traumas. Chapter IV is devoted to mediascapes and the influence of modern communication technology on the way people live, think and dream. Life in a world full of highly developed technologies makes people indulge in escapist fantasies and thus Chapter V describes the mindscapes of contemporary Man: the end of the world fantasies, death-drive utopias, and wish-fulfilment catastrophic scenarios. Chapter VI, the final one, deals with the plexus of the contemporary world and the near future, picturing the decadent decline of Western wastelands: life in gated communities, secluded enclaves and luxurious resorts home to psychopathologies, deviations and terminal boredom enlivened only by acts of pointless violence.

In the autumn 2006, long after the first draft of this thesis had been completed, the newest of Ballard’s books, Kingdom Come, was published. Though it was too late to incorporate analysis of that novel into the main body of my work, I do discuss the novel in Appendix I and examine how it adds to the description of ‘Grave New World’. Therefore, September 2006 marks the close of my research and no books published later are discussed.

INTRODUCTION. 1 THE CRITICAL RESPONSE TO J.G. BALLARD

J.G. Ballard’s literary career started in the nineteen-fifties. His early stories were published in the popular magazines promoting a new, unique type of science fiction, one that differed from the pulp space fiction from America, which after the war flooded the British market. In the early sixties the need to reform the genre of science fiction and start a new thoroughly British artistic movement was all-pervasive. A small group of young writers, who later were dubbed the ‘New Wave’, looked for a periodical that would publish intellectual SF, or ‘speculative fiction’, as they insisted on calling it. Speculative fiction was to be a medium to discuss current social and cultural issues in an experimental, and often dramatic way.

Cover: New Worlds #179, Feb. 1968.

The periodical they finally found was New Worlds, a magazine published since 1946, but which in its long history had many times changed publishing houses and its artistic profile. In 1967 the post of editor-in-chief was given to Michael Moorcock, an ambitious young writer and a friend of Ballard — together they prepared a number of artistic manifestos defining speculative fiction and setting the goals for British avant-garde science fiction. The term ‘speculative fiction’ was soon abandoned, as the critics and columnists preferred to call the New Worlds group the ‘New Wave’, which is a literal translation of the French nouvelle vague. [5] Christopher Priest, a writer and a journalist, and Judith Merril, an influential US-born anthologist and columnist, popularized the phrase ‘New Wave’ among readers in Britain and the US.

Although the avant-garde tendencies in British science fiction are in fact older than the late-1960s term, and stories written by Ballard, Moorcock and Brian Aldiss a few years earlier are now subsumed under the ‘New Wave’ label. Peter Nicholls writes in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (1993):

By 1965, then, science fiction was ripe for change. In fact many of the so-called experiments of the period were not experiments at all, but merely an adoption of narrative strategies, and sometimes ironies that had long been familiar in the mainstream novel. In the event, some of the science fiction writers who felt they now had the freedom to experiment, especially Ballard, were to add something new to the protocols of prose fiction generally (Clute and Nicholls 1993: 866).

Therefore, from the very beginning of his literary career Ballard is considered an in-between writer oscillating between ‘low-brow’ and ‘high-brow’ literature. Sometimes he is called a postmodernist, sometimes an avant-garde author. [6] The critic who as early as the nineteen-sixties writes about him passionately and is partly responsible for his being dubbed an experimental ‘New Wave’ writer is Judith Merril. Merril is an author of a number of well-known disaster stories describing nuclear catastrophes, but only in the nineteen-fifties when she began editing anthologies did she become one of the most influential figures in American science fiction. Always experimental and eager to revise the clichéd standards of American pulp magazines, she swiftly became an advocate of the ‘New Wave’, and especially of Ballard. As a columnist in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction she presented speculative fiction to American readers and discussed the books of the New Worlds writers.

New Worlds today is an altogether unique publication: and the astonishment of some of the stuffier intellectual circles in London when the Art Council announced an annual grant of 1800 pounds for a science fiction magazine… was probably no greater than the shock experienced by American fans attending the 1967 World Science Fiction Convention in New York when they had their first look at the transformed magazine of Speculative Fiction… The new magazine is quarto size, non-glossy… with cover art, interior illustrations and (increasingly) page design to match the most experimental of the fiction, and to suit the sophistication of Chris Finch’s articles on avant-garde art and graphics (Merril 1968: 344-345).

In 1968 Merril edited an anthology of the ‘New Wave’ writers: England Swings SF. Stories of Speculative Fiction. Apart from stories and poems Merril presents in this book her opinion on every writer in original fashion. England Swings SF tries to match the ‘New Wave’ fiction in graphic experiments and narrative strategies. The very beginning of the anthology resembles an avant-garde poem:

You have never read a book like this before, and the next time you read one anything like it, it won’t be much like it at all.

It’s an action-photo, a record of process-in-change,
a look through the perspex porthole at the
momentarily stilled bodies in a scout ship boosting
fast, and heading out of sight into the multiplex mystery of inner/outer space.

I can’t tell you where they are going, but
maybe that’s why I keep wanting to read what they write. The next time someone assembles the work of the writers in this … well, ‘school’ is too formal
and ‘movement’ sounds pretentious… (ibid.: 9-10).

The anthology contains works of over twenty young and ambitious writers — Ballard is the only one who has three of his stories reprinted: the other authors boast but one. Given the prominent position of ‘guru of British avant-garde’, he is presented to American readers (the anthology was meant to introduce the new literary fashion in America) as an often misunderstood, intellectually challenging writer. Merril chooses the newest stories, ones which are written is the present tense and use the collage technique: images, bits and pieces of commercials, psychiatric studies and TV newsreels are juxtaposed to show the prevailing violence of the contemporary mediascape.

Merril also decides to characterize Ballard (and other writers) in collages. Her introductions to stories are combinations of different texts cut into pieces and glued together. According to Peter Bürger’s Theory of the Avant-Garde (1974), collage technique challenges the readers expectation of a synthetic, singular meaning. Diverse passages, graphically rearranged quotes of interviews, reviews and Merril’s own opinions do not give a unified picture but rather show, at least in the case of Ballard, discussions and quarrels concerning his person and his place in the British literary world.

One can only hope that for Ballard too the worst misunderstanding is over, so that he will be free to create in a more intelligent atmosphere.

And so it was … in England, where the earlier work had finally been digested.

Freud pointed out that one has to distinguish between the manifest content of the inner world of the psyche and its latent content; and I think in exactly the same way, today, when the fictional elements have overwhelmed reality, one has to distinguish between the manifest content of reality and its latent contents.

And his sponsorship of the Ambit contest for the best prose or poetry written under the influence of drugs (ibid: 104-105).

Though Merril’s style is far from critical exactness [7] (she does not give the sources of the texts used in her collages, not all sentences are complete), it very well reflects the atmosphere of the 1960s discussions of the ‘New Wave’ and Ballard’s place in it. Juxtaposed with other experimental writers he is discussed within the science fiction movement, with the strong suggestion that his literary goal was to uplift, renew and meliorate science fiction. Ballard at that time was praised not only by science fiction critics [8] — and the general tone of his reviewers is similar to Merril’s: this writer is the best and the most interesting of the speculative fiction writers.

Gradually, speculative fiction writers were either absorbed by the literary mainstream or stopped writing experimental prose and turned to pulp fiction. Harlan Ellison, the editor of an influential American anthology of speculative fiction, Dangerous Visions, complains in his Introduction that: ‘despite the new interest in speculative fiction by the mainstream, despite the enlarged and variant styles of the new writers, despite the enormity and expansion of topics open to these writers, despite what is outwardly a booming, healthy market, there is a constricting narrowness of mind on the part of many editors in the field!’ (Ellison 1983: XXIII). In his attempt to revive this ambitious kind of popular fiction, Ellison decided to create an anthology ‘intended as a canvas for new writing styles, bold departures, unpopular thoughts’ (ibid., XXVIII). And although he did not manage to ‘save’ speculative fiction, his Dangerous Visions remain an important book in the history of science fiction.

Ellison is a very intrusive anthologist: to every one of the thirty-two stories in the book he writes a separate introduction and epilogue, wherein he gives his opinions, suggestions and remarks concerning both the meaning of the story and its author. It is interesting to see how he describes J.G. Ballard, whom he presents to his American readers as a leader of the young English writers. Indeed, it is Ballard’s Englishness, his upper-middle-class origins and colonial past that appeal to Ellison the most, while he in fact cannot define Ballard’s literary style:

Yet in totality [Ballard's books] present a kind of enriched literacy, a darker yet somehow clearer — perhaps the word is ‘poignant’ — approach to the materials of speculative writing. There is a flavour of surrealism to Ballard’s writing. No, it’s not that, either. It is, in some ways, serene, as oriental philosophy is serene. Resigned yet vital. There appears to be a superimposed reality that covers the underlying pure fantasy of Ballardian conception (ibid., 459).

I am quoting Ellison to show how Ballard was received in the United States, for the American market is the most important (if not hegemonic) as far as science fiction goes. Ellison completed his anthology in the late 1960s, in the last days of the British ‘New Wave’ in science fiction. James Gunn, the editor of probably the most important single anthology/history of science fiction ever written, the multi-volumed The Road to Science Fiction, produced his book in the following decade. At that time in the US nobody well remembered what the ‘New Wave’ was about. So, while presenting Ballard and his story ‘The Terminal Beach’ to his readers, Gunn had to lecture on this movement. He discusses it from the perspective of America in the late 1970s, treating it as a very remote phenomenon. He calls Ballard the leader and guru of the New Worlds group, compares his enigmatic symbolic style to James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake and John Dos Passos’s U.S.A. and explains the nihilism of his writing by claiming that Ballard wrote against Americans in Vietnam, about drugs, the Beatles, pop-art, pop-music, political assassinations and terrorism. And this is probably how Ballard is read by fans of science fiction to this day.

Although Ballard’s career stretched well beyond the ‘New Wave’ movement, which ended by the early nineteen-seventies, his early fiction is often discussed in the context of its poetics. The ambitious artistic programme of the movement and the fact that many of its representatives became well-known and important writers [9] attracted the attention of literary critics. One of the first scholars to study the output of the group was Colin Greenland, who in the late 1970s was a postgraduate student at Oxford. A great fan of New Worlds and science fiction in general, he dreamt of writing serious criticism about this literary genre, which at the time was considered too ‘low-brow’ to study. [10] Tom Shippey [11], then Fellow of St John’s College, Oxford, an author of criticism about J.R.R. Tolkien and a contributor to Patric Parrinder’s critical anthology Science Fiction. A Critical Guide agreed to supervise Greenland’s work.

Finally, in 1980 a thesis entitled The Entropy Exhibition. Michael Moorcock and the British ‘New Wave’ in Science Fiction was accepted for a doctorate in English Literature at the University of Oxford. Greenland, thanks to a grant from the Arts Council of Great Britain, reworked his thesis and in 1983 a book of the same title was publish. The Entropy Exhibition is a superb criticism of science fiction, as Greenland shows the literary output of the ‘New Wave’ in the context of cultural and artistic life in the nineteen-sixties. And although only one chapter is devoted exclusively to Ballard, it remains to this day an important item in Ballardian criticism.

Greenland describes the social situation in the sixties, the emergence of youth culture, the influence of the Space Race [12] on popular imagination, the Vietnam War and the stormy history of New Worlds — a magazine that tried to reflect current cultural phenomena. Additionally, he inserts in his book three monographic essay-chapters presenting the works of Ballard, Aldiss and Moorcock.

As far as Ballard’s output is concerned, Greenland discusses his early disaster novels and some of the stories he wrote in the fifties and sixties. The books High-Rise and Concrete Island (written in the seventies) are but mentioned, and Ballard’s later works are of course absent from the study. His general approach to both Ballard and the ‘New Wave’ is to read their output as a new kind of fiction growing out of traditional science fiction and characterized by its fascination with entropy: the universal and irreversible decline of energy into disorder. This fiction is in intimate connection with other cultural experiments of the epoch. Ballard, according to Greenland, is first of all a masterful stylist whose metaphors and allusions recreate the pessimistic attitude of the times and show a Universe doomed to death, one already frozen in its final stage. Ballard’s early prose is described as pictorial and portrayed in the context of visual arts — Pablo Picasso, Paul Delvaux, Salvador Dali, René Magritte — Greenland points to colours, shades and figures borrowed by Ballard from concrete paintings.

Greenland also proves to what extent Ballard is indebted to Surrealism as far as his language is concerned, the poetic character of his early prose being an effect of a highly associative style:

The Surrealist techniques that Ballard has used involve deliberate dissociations and mystifications. The object is taken from its usual context and dismantled, or put in a new context, or confused with other objects. But the result of the process is not mere nonsense, but a revaluation. The elements acquire new significance from the reorganisation, so that we sense more about the object than we knew or felt before. Surrealism can thus be said to have both a synthetic and an analytic aspect; it consists not only of inspiration, but also of inquiry. This duality Ballard has inherited (Greenland 1983: 104).

LEFT: J.G. Ballard: Illustration by Carol Gregory, from J.G. Ballard: The First Twenty Years (eds. James Goddard & David Pringle).

Such a characterization of Ballard’s early style strikes as being very apt, as it accounts for Ballard’s fascinations with Lautréamont, Alfred Jarry and André Breton, numerous visual intertextual allusions in his stories, as well as for Ballard’s obsessive returns to the same or similar figures of speech. What Ballard and the Surrealists surely have in common is the belief that an apocalypse had already taken place, both in the intellectual sphere and in daily life. Ballard’s prose shows the contemporary world abundant in fictions whose only connotations are the fantasies of their authors. Our environment is fragmented and coded, the popular imagery of posters and commercials needs deciphering — hence, Ballard’s indebtedness to semiology and Roland Barthes. In other words, we live in the nightmarish world of the Surrealists.

Greenland describes Ballard’s style and his specific figures of speech in an attempt to show why Ballardian prose is immediately recognizable and ‘unmistakable’. He analyzes Ballard’s habit of introducing a story with a stylized tableau and his conscious use of what he calls ‘pseudo-simile, one in which there is no discoverable parity between the terms. Ballard’s version of it employs a literary sleight commonly used by ironists: he keeps the relation but blurs the distinction, so that the two halves of the simile, the actual and the virtual, can be swapped over’ (ibid.: 103).

Greenland’s book is still, after over twenty years, the best critical analysis of the ‘New Wave’ movement, for among other reasons because it allows us to look at Ballard’s early works from the perspective of the literary life in England at that time. It shows Ballard’s involvement in the editing of New Worlds, his views on art and civilization in the 1960s, and his ambiguous position on the literary scene. Greenland (just like Merril) is very much interested in categories such as science fiction, mainstream literature, modernist writing, and the avant-garde. He shows the difficulties in pigeonholing Ballard and presents diverse opinions about how to classify his works. His major achievement as far as critical appraisal of Ballard’s fiction goes is the discussion of his style in the context of the Surrealists: painters and poets alike.

In the nineteen-seventies many writers and critics discovered Ballard and came to highly prize his unique style and remarkable literary achievements. Among them were Kingsley Amis (a great advocate of ‘New Wave’ prose), Graham Greene, Anthony Burgess, Susan Sontag and William S. Burroughs. They wrote reviews and introductions, but no monograph was published till the end of the decade [13]. Ultimately, David Pringle decided to work on a serious study of Ballard and in 1979 he published Earth is the Alien Planet. J.G. Ballard’s Four-Dimensional Nightmare, a brief (sixty-one page) but important monograph. His ambition in the book is to present Ballard’s literary output to both science fiction fans and the general reading public. Moreover, Pringle offers them a key to Ballard: he defines the place Ballard has on the market, divides his career into periods and classifies Ballardian characters and motifs.

Pringle starts by comparing Ballard to Ray Bradbury and Kurt Vonnegut, who also started their careers as science fiction writers, but subsequently transcended that category. Pringle describes Ballard as being less acclaimed, but equally worthy of being published ‘without the SF label’ (Pringle 1979: 3). He pins Ballard’s lack of popularity on the fact that, unlike Bradbury and Vonnegut, he does not write for big and glossy magazines such as Playboy, but for the ambitious low-circulation press. This ‘courting of the avant-garde’ (ibid.: 3) wins him a new but limited audience. Nevertheless, Pringle is sure that in the future Ballard will be fully appreciated and the book ends in a prophesy:

Nevertheless, Ballard’s reputation will grow in the decades to come, and he is likely to become recognized as by far and away the most important literary figure associated with the field of science fiction. More than that: he will be seen as one of the major imaginative writers of the second half of the 20th century — an author for our times, and for the future (ibid.: 61).

J.G. Ballard: photo by Eamonn McCabe.

The division of Ballard’s career into periods is also based on the genre of criticism. Here Pringle distinguished an early ‘romantic’ stage, when Ballard published in the science fiction press stories concerned with the inner landscapes of characters’ minds, and the post-science fiction period. It was then that Ballard shifted his interests to outer landscapes, abandoned science fiction conventions and embraced the avant-garde and literary periodicals. This is a ‘dark’ period of formal experiments and of bitter criticism of the violence intrinsic to contemporary life. Pringle also suggests that Ballard is at the beginning of yet another period, one of writing present-oriented fiction describing technological environments: ‘he has also made larger concession to social realism — he is trying to become more of a novelist‘ (ibid.: 50).

Pringle explains that last statement by saying that Ballard is trying to construct rounded characters, while in his early prose his characters are symbolic ‘figures in an inner landscape’ (ibid.: 51). He classifies these symbolic figures according to Jungian archetypes as the lamia, the jester and the king — and most Ballardian characters are demonstrated to belong to one of the categories. A similar symbolic key is used to deal with Ballardian themes (the categories are: Imprisonment [14], Flight, Time Must Have A Stop And Superannuation) and to classify his obsessively recurrent images [15]. Ballardian mythology is four-fold: Pringle distinguishes four groups of symbols representing mythical meanings of water, sand, concrete and crystal. Water stands for the past and the return to previous stages of evolution, sand and dryness are in the future of the human race when only the exhausted shell of the planet will remain. Further, concrete is the world of the present day — the urban culture, while crystal, like a Jungian mandala represents oneness with the Universe.

Generally speaking, Pringle’s book represents Jungian criticism (though once he very rightly remarks, albeit in passing, that Ballard’s references to Jung and Freud are mixed), and as such is it usually quoted. Pringle is also the first critic to mention Ballard’s biography in the context of his fiction and to announce Ballard’s affiliation to the avant-garde. In the following years Pringle remained Ballard’s major critic, but more and more scholars interested in both science fiction and mainstream literature began to approach Ballard’s books, often trying to ascribe his writing to some larger cultural frame. In The Hidden Script (1985), for example, David Punter discusses Ballard’s fiction in the section ‘Narratives and the Unconscious’, showing (in reference to psychoanalytic theories) the interrelation of the internal and the external spheres in his fiction.

The short chapter ‘J.G. Ballard: alone among the murder machines’ is an excellent analysis of the metaphoric space Ballardian characters inhabit (e.g., in Atrocity Exhibition, High-Rise, Concrete Island, Hello America and The Unlimited Dream Company). This territory is nightmarish and ruled by man-made machines, ‘the lurking engines of destruction which keep us pinned down’ (Punter 1985: 11), and people strive to regain a spiritual hold on objects, but they are in fact helpless victims of their own psychopathologies. Surrounded by technology and advanced communication systems, Man loses the ability of expression: ‘the areas of language already colonised by the public media too developed to allow for more than the slightest insertion of a discourse of individual desire’ (ibid.: 10). Punter goes on to define Ballard’s oeuvre in relation to contemporary culture and, although his analysis was written a quarter of a century ago, it is still very illuminating:

Where character is concerned, Ballard is one of the few writers who can be sensibly termed post-structuralist: the long tradition of enclosed and unitary subjectivity comes to mean less and less to him as he explores the ways in which a person is increasingly controlled by landscape and machine; increasingly becomes a point of intersection for overloaded scripts and processes which have effectively concealed their distant origins in human agency (ibid.: 9).

In Twentieth Century Science Fiction Writers (1981), edited by Curtis C. Smith, a lexicon of those authors whose work goes beyond realism (even if they usually are not referred to as science fiction writers), the entry ‘J.G. Ballard’ presents him as an original and distinctive writer whose style is described as idiosyncratic ‘as a signature’ and shaped by the painter’s eye of the author. [16] The stress falls on Ballard’s intellectual fascinations: ‘masterpieces of literature (from Homer and the Bible through Shakespeare to Coleridge and Melville) and the arts (from Bosch to Dali and Leonor Fini)’ (Smith 1981: 31). His early fiction is called romantic and exuberant science fiction rich in intertextual allusions, where bizarre landscapes ‘reflect and amplify the inner and mutual conflicts of glamorous lamias and their suicidal wooers, in a baroque symphony of art, love, and death’ (ibid.: 31). 1966 is given as the turning point after which Ballard abandons science fiction and starts to describe the contemporary world and to criticize its technology, violence and perverted entertainment. Such a present is just a fossil of the future, and his interest in science fiction gives Ballard an ability to look at social life in a detached, scientific way. Beyond that, Ballard’s style changes abruptly: all exuberance is gone and instead we read about people like us, with popular names, living in real cities and made to cope with an inhuman urban existence.

It is interesting to juxtapose this entry with a later one hailing from the prestigious The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (1993, revised 1999), edited by John Clute and Peter Nicholls. ‘J.G. Ballard’ by David Pringle is a long entry and, for the first time, the author is presented not primarily as a science fiction writer (despite the very character of this Encyclopedia). Indeed, stress falls on those aspects of Ballard’s output which transgress the standards of the genre. Even the earliest stories are shown as eschewing traditional science fiction themes and instead concentrating on ‘near-future decadence and disaster’. We learn that Ballard was severely criticized by fans as a pessimist and a life-hater, that the science fiction world wrote him off, and that he never won a single science fiction award. Pringle also describes the hostility with which editors treated his later prose (the entire Doubleday edition of Atrocity Exhibition was printed only to be pulped just before publication) because he used people such as Ronald Reagan, the Kennedys and Marilyn Monroe as characters. Pringle ends by presenting Ballard’s psychological war novels and by briefly characterizing his biography — these are the beginnings of the legend of J.G. Ballard, his war and the impact it had on his imagination. Pringle concludes:

J.G. Ballard: photo by David Levenson.

Although most of his longer work of the past decade has been outside the field, the originality and appropriateness of his vision continue to ensure JGB’s standing as one of the most important writers ever to have emerged from sf (Clute and Nicholls 1993: 85).

When in 1994 Simulacra and Simulations (1981) by Jean Baudrillard was translated into English, the prose of J.G. Ballard found a new and influential advocate. In a chapter devoted to Ballard’s Crash (which had previously been translated and reprinted in Science Fiction Studies) Baudrillard calls Ballard’s book one of the masterpieces of contemporary literature, one which shows the world of today as it really is, the simulated, unreal projection of mass culture and sophisticated hi-tech. Science fictionalizes reality, the world of cyber-technology is by nature fictitious and Ballard’s prose is a rare example of the conscious exposure of the simulacra-ridden mediascape.

Generally, in the late nineteen-eighties [17] the status of ambitious science fiction changed. On the one hand some of the very good science fiction writers elevated the genre to the status of intellectually provoking, erudite reading, yet on the other hand many postmodernist writers began to apply science fiction conventions. Used as sophisticated literary trope, science fiction was no longer associated solely with an adolescent male audience and acquired the ambiguous status of ‘a game with the reader’ or ‘a play with a convention’. ‘The Angle Between Two Walls’ The Fiction of J.G. Ballard (1997) by Roger Luckhurst, the best critical book on Ballard to date, is devoted to the role Ballard’s output plays in the contemporary discussions about literary genres. Luckhurst’s major thesis is that Ballard evades any and all classifications and that, moreover, his writing produces an effect of unease just because it exposes the binary, opposition-based categories we apply when reading. Ballard’s books (especially Crash and Atrocity Exhibition; other works are either but mentioned or discussed in brief subchapters) are for Luckhurst a pretext to expose contemporary reading protocols defining what is post-modern, what is modern, what is science fiction and what is avant-garde.

Luckhurst begins by showing Ballard as a fringe writer living literally in the suburbs of London and figuratively outside literary London and outside the Academia of English studies (a little like Ian Sinclair and, once, Angela Carter). His key to Ballard is the notion of la brisure (according to deconstruction, this is the point in any structural system that makes the working of the system at once possible and impossible), and in his analyses he most often refers to Derrida [18]. The choice of deconstruction as his approach is dictated by Ballard’s paradoxical proliferation in recent criticism:

The mainstream post-war novelist of increasing import; the aberrant foreign body within science fiction; the belated voice of a science fiction modernism; the anticipatory or timely voice of a paradigmatic postmodernism; the avant-garde writer of extreme experimental fictions; the prophet of the perversity of the contemporary world (Luckhurst 1997: xii).

Deconstruction exposes binary oppositions we constantly use while thinking and thus allows Luckhurst to subvert generic codes and frames of recognition that allow readability, and to ‘speak from a structurally similar space of the between‘ (ibid.: xiii). Such a critical standpoint sometimes makes his text a little enigmatic and focused not on Ballard’s output but on the reader’s (and critic’s) response to it. Nevertheless, Luckhurst’s study is very erudite, well grounded and full of insights into Ballard, the most valuable of which is the observation that Ballard’s text anticipates its interpretations. ‘His work at once constantly activates theoretical models, but it is also awkward, didactic, and overtheorized, tending to evade or supersede the theories meant to ‘explain’ it’ (ibid.: xvii).

Luckhurst proves his thesis on Ballard’s fiction as exposing reading conventions by discussing in subsequent chapters the disaster story convention, surrealist writing, postcolonial writing, and theories of avant-garde and of contemporary reality as simulation. In each case Ballard’s books are shown as both transgressing genres and subverting the oppositions they are based on. The conclusion is, expectedly, that Ballard’s ‘oeuvre will not give up its irreducible core’ (ibid.: xix), which very well sums up over forty years of critical discussion of Ballard’s place on the twentieth-century literary map.

Nowadays Ballard is recognized as a major contemporary English novelist by the critical establishment and he is usually referred to as an author writing across high and low, literary and popular paradigms. His website page in the Internet, www.jgballard.com, is frequently visited by numerous fans from all over the world and apart from publicity material — book covers, offers, etc., one can find links there to numerous texts originally written for various newspapers and magazines, forming a complex body of inter-related discourses to do with Ballard and his career. A closer look at the website shows that the more ambitious texts might be categorized into four groups: reviews of novels, longer articles summarizing Ballard’s oeuvre, interviews, and Ballard’s own press articles dealing with issues such as war in Iraq, terrorism, urban architecture and consumerism. [19]

Photographer unknown. Details welcome.

Some of the reviews offer interesting insights into Ballard’s prose. For example, Chris Hall in ‘Future Shock’ discusses Crash in a text written just after David Cronenberg made his film based on it and points out that the novel defamiliarizes the violence omnipresent in the Hollywood convention of family films [20]. ‘White Line Fever’, by David B. Huingstone, shows that Cocaine Nights is an exposition of our cultural unconscious, while Marcos Moure in ‘Desert Island Disaster’ compares Rushing to Paradise to William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. It is also worth mentioning two reviews by L. J. Hurst: ‘The Dark Side of the Equinox’, which interprets The Crystal World as a metaphysical thriller, and ‘Through the Crash Barrier’, which is a Shakespearean reading of Concrete Island.

To give samples of longer presentations of Ballard’s literary output, Richard Behrens’s ‘J.G. Ballard’ concentrates on surrealism in his writing and Gary Evans in ‘J.G. Ballard: a Crash Course in the Future’ analyzes the future psychology of Ballardian characters. The most comprehensive in this category of texts is Roger Bazzeto’s ‘J.G. Ballard L’écrivain, auter de Science-Fiction ‘, an academic account of Ballard’s prose comparing Ballard to Andy Warhol. Bazzeto claims that the world in Ballard’s novels is three-fold: mythologies of media legends, everyday life in post-modern society, and urban nightmares.

The most interesting articles are perhaps interviews with Ballard, who often speaks about contemporary phenomena as reflected in his novels. In ‘Flight and Imagination’ he shares with Chris Hall his opinions on the relation of late capitalism, psychopathology and violence, and in ‘Not a Literary Man’ (by Marcos Moure) he discusses the decline of science fiction. To David Gale’s ‘Grave New World. Interview with J.G. Ballard’ I am indebted for the title of my thesis; in this very revealing interview Ballard explains what his radical vision of the future is.

Even a short look at these texts about and by Ballard shows that his name is no longer associated with ‘fringe’ or ‘marginal’ literary life, but is a part of the legitimate centre — he has found his way into the histories of contemporary literature. Currently a number of theses devoted to Ballard are being written at English universities by doctorate students, some of whom, like Sam Francis from the University of Leeds, publish their papers in international reviews of science fiction. A good example of critical evaluation of Ballard is a monograph published in the prestigious British Council-sponsored series Writers and Their Work, which is meant to briefly present the most important British authors to the reading public. J.G. Ballard (1998) by Michel Delville is a very good, concise account of all his most important works. Arranged in chronological order, it retraces subsequent stages in Ballard’s career and attempts to show this diverse oeuvre as an example of artistic evolution. Delville is aware that critical assessment of Ballard is very heterogeneous:

At least three J.G. Ballards have so far been championed in critical studies and literary histories: the science fiction writer, famous for his disaster novels and stories of entropic dissolution; and admirer of William S. Burroughs and author of scandalous tales remarkable for their sexual frankness and eccentric violence; and the Booker Prize nominee, whose account of a boy’s life in Japanese-occupied wartime Shanghai in Empire of the Sun was published to great acclaim in 1984 (Delville 1998: 1).

Delville is aware of the temptation to draw a clear-cut line between Ballard’s ambitious popular fiction and his mainstream novels. He is also careful not to reduce Ballard to a case of the prolonged artistic maturation of a science fiction writer who finally manages to disentangle himself from the immature genre. Instead he treats Ballard’s obsessive and imaginary writing as a means to reflect the violent paradoxes of life in the twentieth century that escape less anxious discourses.

In 2005 another monograph under the same title, J.G. Ballard, was published in the new series ‘Contemporary British Novelists’ by the Manchester University Press. Written by Andrzej Gasiorek, this book (second in the series, after Aaron Kelly’s Irvine Welsh) is a presentation of Ballard’s oeuvre and a critical response to it. Like the whole series, it aims at disclosing controversies in contemporary literary life and theory. Just like Luckhurst, he reads Ballard in the context of surrealism, Pop Art and science fiction. Gasiorek’s book is very recent and marks the growing critical interest in Ballard’s writing. He shows Ballard’s output as ‘a symbolic rejection of the familiar heritage’ (Gasiorek 2005: 2), writing against the tradition, against ‘Englishness’, against ‘a socially rooted fiction based on psychological realism’ (ibid.: 3), and against legitimate traditional literary genres.

The way the above critics approach Ballard seems to me very fair and it is quite similar to my own critical standpoint (I side especially with David Punter and Michel Delville). But as there have been so many exhaustive studies devoted to assimilating Ballard to generic categories (or abolishing the notion of genre fiction), I would rather refrain from repeating their arguments, and discuss what to my knowledge has not yet been discussed — the picture of The Decline of the West seen from the perspective of both his fiction as a whole and that of theorists of civilization. Before embarking on that intellectual voyage, we need first look at the way Ballard constructs his own persona.

..:: Part Two is now online.

Previously on Ballardian:
+ Review: Grave New World, by Rick McGrath

ENDNOTES

[1] This phrase comes from an interview Ballard gave to David Gale: ‘Grave New World. Interview with J.G. Ballard’, BBC Radio 3, 10 November 1998 ( www.jgballard.com, on: 20 August 2006).

[2] As late as in 2004 in an appendix to his novel Millennium People J.G. Ballard gives Huxley’s Brave New World at the very top of the list of books he advises to read for those who have liked his novel (Ballard 2004: Appendix 16).

[3] For Ballard the plausible candidate is the invention and use of the nuclear bomb. For the first time in history the human race acquired the means to realize its latent propensity for self-destruction. Men have always been violent creatures unconsciously dreaming of death and war, something which culture has tried to cover up for thousands of years. Once the true human nature was revealed, there is no turning back and human destiny — destruction for internal reasons — is going to happen sooner or later.

[4] In one of Freud’s essays that Ballard often quotes, Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud calls human civilization a mistake. Ballard’s fiction is devoted to the descriptions of this mistake.

[5] An experimental artistic movement in the French cinema associated with the films of Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut.

[6] It may be interesting to note that in 1993 Ballard wrote a review of this Encyclopedia. Published in the Daily Telegraph, that article was re-printed in Ballard’s collection of journalism, A User’s Guide to the Millennium. Ballard speaks in favour of the Encyclopedia and science fiction in general, noticing that in the second part of the 20th century more and more mainstream writers (such as Angela Carter, Anthony Burgess, Doris Lessing and Kingsley Amis) turn to science fiction, which is the true folk literature of the century, with ‘folk literature’s hotline to the unconscious’ (Ballard 1997b: 193). Science fiction has the power to design the future, and to tell us what life might be like in some years’ time. He also writes that in the mid-century, after the Moon Landing and during the space race, everybody was interested in the future and the conquest of space and in trying to imagine what the year 2000 would bring, while at the real end of the Millennium People forget all about that. Certain crazy millenarian cults are treated in the same way, such as fitness fanatics, or animal-rights activists and New Agers — and they in fact deserve no better, which is a telling sign of our spiritual deterioration.

[7] As one can see in the quote above, Merril’s technique is to cut into pieces different texts and mix the cuttings irrespectively of syntax., the only differentiation between them is in the shape of print (I preserve Merril’s bolds and margins to show how difficult it is to read her).

[8] In 1973 Brian Aldiss published Billion Year Spree, a history of science fiction. In the last chapter, devoted to the newest phenomena in the field, Ballard is described in the following way: ‘His ferocious intelligence, his wit, his cantankerousness, and, in particular, his extraordinary rendering of the perverse pleasures of today’s paranoia, make him one of the grand magicians of modern fiction. His is an uncertain spell, but it spreads; far beyond the stockades of ordinary science fiction’ (Aldiss 1973: 343).

[9] Ballard is the most prominent among them, but there are many others, for example: Michael Moorcock, Brian Aldiss, D.M. Thomas.

[10] Greenland is now a prominent science fiction scholar and an author of highly regarded fantastic books.

[11] Many years later Shippey remembers how science fiction critics were treated in the 1960s and 1970s by Academia: ‘A further way of putting this is to say that during my science fiction ‘lifetime’ (1958 to now) being a science fiction reader was rather like being gay. In both cases, one could say, drawing out the similarities: *there was a definite pressure, especially in the 1950s and 1960s, not to admit the fact; *there were social penalties if you did; *you got used to hiding the fact’ (Slusser and Westfall 2002: 8). Note: Volumes of criticism containing the essays, papers, and interviews which are quoted in the text of the present study are identified in the footnotes and then listed in the biography in alphabetic order under the name of the editor. The same is true for the prefaces and introductions which precede books written by some other author: in the footnotes the edition is identified and listed in the biography under the name of the author.

[12] Disappointed by the space programme and disinterested in conquering the Universe, the ‘New Wave’ writers produced anti-space fiction and were much more interested in the inner space of the human psyche.

[13] In 1973 David Pringle, a scholar specializing in writers associated with the field of science fiction, together with James Goddard edited J.G. Ballard — the First Twenty Years, a book which is not a monograph but a collection of texts consisting almost entirely of previously-published material by notable figures.

[14] Pringle is the first to explain Ballard’s obsession with imprisonment by his personal experience of the three years spent in the Japanese prison camp. Such explanations in the nineteen-eighties became critical cliché.

[15] Pringle enumerates typically ‘Ballardian’ images: ‘concrete weapon-ranges, dead fish, abandoned airfields, radio telescopes, crashed space-capsules, sand-dunes, empty cities, sand reefs, half-submerged buildings, helicopters, crocodiles, open-air cinema screens, jewelled insects, advertising hoardings, white hotels, beaches, fossils, broken juke-boxes, crystals, lizards, multi-storey car-parks, dry lake-beds, medical laboratories, drained swamps, motorway flyovers, stranded ships, broken Coke bottles, vegetation, high-rise buildings, predatory birds and low-flying aircraft’ (Pringle 1979: 16). This list is highly insightful; indeed, Pringle succeeds in pinpointing what the critics all vaguely describe as Ballard’s unmistakable style.

[16] The entry is written by George W. Barlow and in its bibliography all critical essays are by David Pringle. Currently (summer 2006) Pringle is preparing a new edition of J.G. Ballard: A Primary and Secondary Bibliography, which is going to be very important to every Ballard scholar.

[17] In 1983 Ballard was contacted by V. Vale and the rest of RE/Search group, avant-garde publishers from San Francisco who became advocates of Ballard in the USA. In 1984 a special Ballard issue of their magazine RE/Search was published. In the following years they also re-published other of Ballard’s works in America. For instance, RE/Search published an annotated version of The Atrocity Exhibition. Ballard wrote commentaries to each chapter of this difficult but very important book. In recent years they published two important Ballardiana: J. G. Ballard Quotes and J.G. Ballard Conversations. The first is a collection of one-line aphorisms taken from Ballard’s books, the latter is a compilation of interviews given by him to different journalists (mostly from the RE/Search group).

[18] Jacques Derrida has the largest number of references (of course after Ballard) in the index and the bibliography.

[19] A good example of such an article is ‘Going Somewhere?’ (www.jgballard.com, on: 20 August 2006). Ballard writes about the role airports have in contemporary life and city architecture. Himself an inhabitant of Shepperton, a distant London suburb near the London airport, he describes the unreal landscape of post-modern concourses and by-ways in his neighbourhood and then generalizes and writes about tourism, the cosmopolitanism of the affluent West and aircraft. This short text is therefore informed by subjects recurrent in his prose: futuristic enclaves, a nation of people in the air, and global culture.

[20] For all Internet sources in the following text www.jgballard.com, on: 20 August 2006.

John Carter Wood sent me this link to vintage German crash-test photos. These shots evoke the footage in the Crash! short film, where Ballard notes, ‘I remember seeing some films on television of test crashes a few years ago. … They filmed them beautifully because they wanted to know what was happening. They weren’t interested in the aesthetics of the thing. … One could see four feet of metal suddenly become one foot. Filmed in slow motion, these crashes had a beautiful stylised grace. The power and weight of these cars gave them an immense classical dignity. It was like some strange technological ballet.’

This German shoot, featuring classic Mercedes, is from the same era as that crash-test footage — the 50s — a time, as Ballard says, when ‘the styling of Mercedes cars [was] at once paranoid and aggressive, like medieval German armour’. (When I look at this Frankenstinian machinery, with weird engines strapped to the rear, I can’t help thinking of animal testing — and specifically that mouse with a human ear grafted to its back.)

Subjugating the confidence of a machine may have a serious knock-on effect down the line, when, like Frankenstein’s monster, the machine turns on its creator. This time around, though, assimilation is the goal, as ‘modern technology [reaches] into our dreams and [changes] our whole way of looking at things, and perceiving reality … drawing us away from contemplating ourselves to contemplating its world’ (as Ballard observes).

I await Jeff Bartlett’s verdict.

Photo: Eamonn McCabe.

Lee Rourke at the Guardian’s book blog has posted on Ballard, casting his vote for JGB as Britain’s ‘greatest living author’ and Crash as the ‘most prophetic novel written by a British writer in the last 50 years’.

Lee has some sharp observations:

Crash is the definitive novel of technocentrism: where the blurring of our technologies and functionality is evoked through a cultural and political desert in the urban environment, revealing a society governed by the car and the – mostly sexual – violence we are left with. A crumbling world where we are dwarfed by a new machine age that has no real need for us – a world we are ill-equipped to understand as it leaves us standing – forcing us to worship its gleaming by-products and ignoring its manipulation of us. To put it simply: Ballard understands that modernity has left us to our own basal needs – and we’re not coping too well.

Interesting, too, are the reader reactions.

Some get it:

* ‘Even ‘Empire of the sun’, his most biographical novel, reads like a forensic report written by visiting aliens.’
* ‘Empty cities and stuff. Cool.’
* ‘Yes, he is kind of unreadable, but the ideas and narratives are obviously super.’
* ‘The emotional distance from which he observes often means that the full horror only dawns on you after you’ve finished the book and taken a step back.’
* ‘I think the problem I have with Ballard is that I read Atrocity Exhibition first, and everything else was something of a let down. Not really a criticism of the other books, more a compliment of how utterly brilliant I think Atrocity Exhibition is.’
* ‘Reptilian coldness is not always the best attribute but Ballard at his best begs to differ.’

Some don’t:

* ‘Millennium People by JGB – i did find the experience of reading the novel’s first few pages extremely painful. i’ve read nothing else by Ballard and am proably being unfair – but i’m afraid of the pain coming back.’
* ‘Ballard: great as a conceptualist, lousy as a novelist. Sorry J.G, if you read these things, but all reviews send me rushing to your books only to give up after about 10 pages.’
* ‘I can’t stand him – I’ve read about three or four of his books and they all bored me to tears. The characters were utterly unconvincing and lacked any kind of psychological depth.’

Read the rest.