APOLLO ROULETTE, PART 1

by Brian Baker

In this sequel to ‘Iterative Architecture: a Ballardian Text’, an ‘auto-displacement’ Ian Fleming/J.G. Ballard mashup, Brian Baker applies the method to desert imagery in Ballard’s work.

Finally, Baker uncovers the hidden logic at play in the American ‘nuclear state’ – a deadly game of APOLLO ROULETTE!

Tune into Ballardian.com for Part 2: the final thrilling instalment of Brian Baker’s Apollo Roulette!

Double Zero Wheel. He clicked the cartridge into the chamber of the service revolver, carefully closed the cylinder, and placed the mouth of the barrel against his temple. What was it he had said to Markham? ‘I understand that double-O’s have a very short life expectancy.’ He wondered now how many of those deaths were suicides. Somehow the service revolver seemed right, for doing the decent thing. He had killed too many men with the Walther, and didn’t want to be a notch on his own gun.

The Gernsback Continuum. At the beginning of Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971), the narrator and his attorney are on the way to cover the ‘fabulous Mint 400’ in Las Vegas. The text famously begins: ‘We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like “I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive…” And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas’ (3). Thompson is driving along the former Route 66, now known as Interstate 15. To the west of Barstow is Edwards Air Force Base. Edwards was the site of the X-plane testing program in the 1950s, which eventually gave way to the ‘spam in a can’ astronautics of the Friendship, Mercury and Apollo programs. The men of Edwards Air Force Base, ‘folk heroes of our time’ according to Lyndon Johnson,[1] inhabited a variant of frontier masculinity appropriate to Edwards’s desert setting, and was exploited in Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff and its screen adaptation.

Thompson, driving east of Edwards towards Barstow, experiences an hallucination, a fata morgana, a common desert phenomenon. Brought on by the desert light and psychotropic drugs, Thompson hallucinates what William Gibson, in ‘The Gernsback Continuum’, would call ‘semiotic ghosts’, ‘semiotic phantoms, bits of deep cultural imagery that have split off and taken on a life of their own’.[2] In this story, the narrator encounters a vision of ‘the air thick with ships: giant wing-liners, little darting silver things [...], mile-long blimps, hovering dragonfly things that were gyrocopters [and] smooth silver shapes like beads of running mercury’ (8-9). He sees Tucson as ‘a dream Tucson thrown up out of the collective yearning of an era’ (9), ‘an idealized city that drew on Metropolis and Things to Come’ (8). Thompson sees not a fascist utopia, but bats; and not bats, but UFOs; and these UFOs are the semiotic phantoms of the American Space Program made manifest by a cocktail of narcotics and desert speed.

One, Two, Three. No, not yet. He lowered the gun and placed it gently on the glass-topped table by his right hand, where it settled with a hard double click. His hand went automatically to the shaker and poured the last of the vodka martini, but he already felt nauseated by the two glasses he had downed before. Dutch courage? He shuddered. He really was finished if he needed help to pull the trigger. Some of his fellow agents, he knew, had descended into a whiskey-sodden fugue before the inevitable end had come, a danger to themselves and to others and their deaths ultimately something of a mercy. When the instrument begins to feel, he thought, it’s past time for the Service to hone the edge of a new blade.

Algebras of chance. In Hello America, the roulette wheel becomes the means by which the deranged President Manson decides which of the ruined cities of America to target with the remaining stockpile of cruise missiles and ICBMs. In the words of President Manson, Ballard diagnoses the ‘American dream’ of migration and aspiration as a gamble, with Las Vegas the latter-day cradle of the modern USA. ‘Europe doesn’t exist for me any more, Wayne – except that I see that it is waking now like an old dog, smelling us here and trying to get its snout into this new America I’ve built. It was a gamble, Wayne, a gamble with my own life. I put everything on the one spin of the wheel each of us is given, a small stack of dreams and hopes’ (153). Manson’s is a materialist vision, lacking the transcendent: even hopes and dreams are but small chips in an unwinnable game.

Clouds. Doctor Bluffield stood at his office window and gazed across the piazza of the clinic, which opened towards the saucer-shaped water tower that blazed white in the southwestern sun. The clinic was a plate-glass spacecraft fallen among the green knolls of the science park. The sculpted gardens reflected the serenity of purpose of the bio-medical corporation under whose aegis the clinic operated. The clinic’s main building incorporated a heat-reflective skin which maintained a carefully-controlled temperate environment within. Outside, the heat was well over a hundred degrees, according to the monitor on Bluffield’s desk. In the piazza, by the fountain – an indulgence in this climate, as were the lawns – a man in a loose-fitting, white tracksuit was calmly proceeding though a T’ai Chi warm-down sequence,  like some kind of swaddled and articulated mannequin.

Fata Morgana. Vermillion Sands is a desert resort that is the location of a sequence of short stories that were collected in the 1971 volume Vermillion Sands.[3] In the fantastical desert space of the resort and its outlying desert villas, Lagoon West and Lizard Key, glider pilots carve cloud formations into mobile sculpture, flying ‘sand rays’ are hunted akin to the Albatross in Coleridge’s ‘The Ancient Mariner’, and the pathologies of the resort’s inhabitants – movie stars, poets, glitterati – are made manifest. In ‘The Thousand Dreams of Stellavista’, a psychotropic house, in which a film star murdered her husband, ‘recalls’ these emotions and causes the relationship of the new inhabitants to disintegrate. In a sense, ‘Stellavista’ is a ghost story, a haunted-house narrative. The emotional ‘ghosts’ are technological revenants; the house itself takes on the psychosis of its owner as a kind of pathological prosthesis, and itself becomes murderous. The pathology of the male narrator also becomes aligned with the trauma encoded in the house’s psychoactive circuits and the phantasmal ‘presence’ of the femme fatale/ murderess, Gloria Tremayne. 99 Stellavista is a classic Ballardian pathologised technology that threatens but ‘beckons more and more persuasively from the margins of the technological landscape’.[4]

Two Tribes. In the morning B hired an open-topped Corvette Sting Ray and put the hiking gear in the trunk, using the Swiss passport and a sheaf of soft dollar bills he had won at blackjack two nights before. It certainly wasn’t baccarat at the Royale, but the sharp spike of adrenalin, even dressed in casual clothes among these holidaying Midwesterners, so anxious to lose their roll, as they called it, was gratifying. It was even something of a relief. If it wasn’t the pleasures of the roulette wheel in the warmth of a Mediterranean evening, at least it wasn’t sitting alone with a loaded revolver at his right hand. The heat was oppressive on Highway 15 as it spooled north from the city limits. The resort shrank like a discarded postcard in the rear-view mirror, and like those other desert cities, Phoenix and Reno, seemed as unreal as a fata morgana once left behind. Runnels of sweat slicked his white linen shirt to his back, and he had to blink away salty droplets behind the incognito of his glasses. The desert called to him, but the still-rational remainder of his mind worried that the Corvette might not prove reliable. He didn’t like the idea of buzzards and coyotes picking at his bones. It reminded him too much of what he did for the Service.

Image: ‘Las Vegas Club’ by Troy Paiva.

Synchronoclasmique. ‘The secret affinity between gambling and the desert: the intensity of gambling reinforced by the presence of the desert all around the town. The air-conditioned freshness of the gaming rooms, as against the radiant heat outside. The challenge of all the artificial lights to the violence of the sun’s rays. Nights of gambling sunlit on all sides; the glittering darkness of these rooms in the middle of the desert. Gambling itself is a desert form, inhuman, uncultured, initiatory, a challenge to the natural order of value, a crazed activity on the fringes of exchange. But it too has a strict limit and stops abruptly; its boundaries are exact, its passion knows no confusion. Neither the desert nor gambling are open areas; their spaces are finite and concentric, increasing in intensity toward the interior, toward a central point, be it the spirit of gambling or the heat of the desert – a privileged, immemorial space, where things lose their shadow, where money loses its value, and where the extreme rarity of the traces of what signals to us there leads men to seek the instantaneity of wealth.’[5]

Three Days of the Condor. He awoke in the passenger seat of the Corvette, parked under some scrub out of sight of the highway. He had tried to limit his water intake in order to preserve his supplies for his hike to Groom Lake, and had taken the salt tablets, but still he felt drained by the sun. The relative coolness of the evening revived him slightly as he climbed out of the automobile and retrieved his gear from the trunk. Night was falling over the Range like a soft rain. A bar of gold light at the horizon faded as he looked up at the enormous sky, the constellations seemingly close enough to touch. He had heard that other lights, other shooting stars, had been seen in the Tikaboo valley and by motorists on Route 375, but he dismissed these reports as black propaganda. Since the demise of the Sky Flash program, British involvement in advanced aeronautics had been limited to client status, and the Service would dearly have liked to obtain hard information about what research was being pursued at NAFR. His trespass would not be the first by a British agent, and he often wondered what side he was meant to be on. This intrusion, however, had its own agenda.

Survival Kits. Throughout The Atrocity Exhibition (1969), a collection of experimental short-story ‘condensed novels’, there are references to a group of items (photographs, documents, physical objects) called a ‘kit’: there are eleven in total.[6] Kits are also found in ‘News from the Sun’ and ‘Myths of the Near Future’. In ‘News from the Sun’, the kit is a ‘shrine’ left for the doctor Franklin by Slade, the would-be astronaut whom Franklin refused to allow on the space program on psychological grounds.  The kit consists of: a fragment of lunar rock; a photograph of Marion Franklin in the shower; a faded reproduction of Dali’s Persistence of Memory; a set of leucotomes; an emergency brain donor card (1016). The function of such a kit is made much more explicit in ‘Myths of the Near Future’, where Sheppard suggests that the kit is a ‘machine, of a kind. A time-machine’ (1077). It consists of: ‘a framed reproduction of Magritte’s The March of Summer, a portable video-cassette projector, two tins of soup, a well-thumbed set of six Kamera Klassic magazines, a clutch of cassettes labelled Elaine/Shower Stall I-XXV, and a paperback selection of Marey’s Chronograms’ (1068).This ‘survival kit’ (‘of a special kind’) is quite typical in its references to Marey, Surrealist art, sexual experimentation or transgression, and visual technology. These are themselves condensed representations of key Ballardian icons and concerns: time, sex, vision.

The Four Horsemen. It had been simple enough to evade the guards in their pick-up, though the warnings about the use of deadly force on the ‘Restricted Area’ signs had given him some pause. Trespass was one thing, but shooting dead an American serviceman, even an armed one, was something else entirely. He kept tramping in the cool desert air, his body responding as of old to exertion and deprivation. He felt the straps of the backpack on his shoulders, but the discomfort was familiar and welcome. The first fingers of dawn light were haloing the horizon off to his left, and so he had perhaps an hour until he needed to find a hide, from the sun and from surveillance. He wasn’t far from Groom Lake now, but would wait until tonight to try to penetrate the area proper. Until then, he would manage his body’s needs, and his thoughts.

Signs of the mineral. ‘Why [...] are the deserts so fascinating? It is because you are delivered from all depth there – a brilliant, mobile, superficial neutrality, a challenge to meaning and profundity, a challenge to nature and culture, an outer hyperspace, with no origin, no reference points.’[7]

Space/Time Crisis. As he walked down the main staircase, Bluffield could see the man in white framed in the large windows that let polarised light into the atrium of the clinic. The man was a rather troubling patient, but there was little enough to distinguish him from either his fellow patients or the clinicians. Bluffield left the building by the large plate-glass doors and immediately began to perspire. He stepped across the paving to where the man went through his warm-down exercises.

‘How are you with muscle strains, Professor?’ asked the man. ‘Do they come under your area of expertise?’

‘I’m afraid not,’ said Bluffield.

‘So you can mend complicated machines,’ said the man, indicating his forehead suggestively, ’but not simple ones?’

‘I don’t really consider myself an engineer,’ said Bluffield.

‘The metaphysical rather than the material?’ asked the man. ‘Well, never mind, I’ll persevere.’ He continued with his slow, graceful articulations.

‘Two o’clock,’ said Bluffield brusquely, somewhat nettled by the man’s self-possession. He resumed his walk across to the car park. The water tower cast a dark shadow in the morning light. The fronds of the palms, moving in the slight breeze, whispered some secret arboreal language to the desert air.

Image: Atomic fireball, Trinity test, White Sands, 1945.

Alamagordo. ‘The first atomic-bomb test against the backdrop of White Sands, the pale blue backcloth of the mountains and hundreds of miles of white sand – the blinding artificial light of the bomb against the blinding light of the ground.’[8]

Saturn V. His chest screamed as he ran in ballooning strides down the scree slope, a tiny avalanche of dust and gravel ploughing ahead of him. The hammering blades of the helicopter broke waves of pulverizing sound upon his head as he dashed sideways out of the searchlight beam, a jack-rabbit fleeing the hunter’s gun. He felt he was being flushed towards a trap, but exhaustion and terror dulled his reactions. Time became a chain of moments as he hopped from rock to rock, scuttled from brush to brush in a vain attempt to deceive his pursuers. He ran up a cleft in the rocks, a small island on the desert floor, hoping for some crevice into which he could push himself, some tunnel into which he could bolt. As he jumped down the other side, he saw several guards standing in the beams of their pick-ups, and he knew the chase was over. He stumbled towards them, heaving for air, and then fell to his knees. After a few seconds, he found a small, scratchy voice. ‘Where are you going to take me?’ he asked. A man in a dark suit came forward through the blinding beams of light, offering a hand to help him onto his feet. ‘We’re going to take you to our leader,’ he said, smiling.

A simultaneous structure. In the 1971 film The Andromeda Strain, directed by Robert Wise, a ‘crystalline’ alien virus lands in the American desert attached to a meteorite, and causes catastrophic effects on the human circulatory system, The focus of the narrative is to find a solution for this virus through scientific means: by understanding why a very young baby and an alcoholic old man did not fall victim to the virus that devastated a small desert town. A group of scientists descend 5 ‘biologically cleaner’ underground levels of a top-secret base until they arrive at a secure and sterile environment in which to study the alien life form. This base is located at Lake Mead, Nevada, south-east of Las Vegas and on the opposite point of the compass to the Groom Lake testing grounds. Its location places the base in a clear relation to both underground nuclear missile silos and secure Cold War ‘bunkers’ used to protect military chains of command in the event of a nuclear war.

Still from The Andromeda Strain (dir: Robert Wise, 1971).

The security of biological hygiene is short lived in The Andromeda Strain, however: the virus also corrodes the flexible seals that close off ‘secure’ spaces. It is not by human agency that the virus is rendered harmless: it mutates into a non-lethal form, and it is the failure to ‘destroy’ the virus by a nuclear detonation (that would have caused exponential mutation and growth and widespread dissemination of the virus) that is the major human achievement therein. The Andromeda Strain is a diagnostic text for Cold War science fiction in its discourses of hygiene and security, and its near-phobic coding of the alien as biological other. In Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove (1964), the insane SAC General Jack D. Ripper’s paranoia migrates from Reds-under-the-bed rhetoric to phobias about his own body: he avoids fluoridated water (and sexual orgasm) as he is concerned to protect the integrity of his own ‘precious bodily fluids’ from contamination. This discourse informs The Andromeda Strain, as it does Ballard’s Hello America (1981), where the (again, insane) ‘President’ Charles Manson reveals to the protagonist Wayne his use of the remaining American nuclear stockpile after an environmental catastrophe has rendered the USA half desert, half jungle:

‘I had to take them out, Wayne, there was a threat of plague in the east. I used the old cruise missiles. Before his breakdown my partner renovated the warheads and guidance systems. They’re slow but reliable, like homing pigeons going back to a hot supper. Think of it as a necessary prophylactic measure.’[9]

The ‘plague’ is the threat of the eastern seaboard of North America being re-colonised from Europe: the discourses of infection and ‘cure’ are deployed to rationalise the destruction of a threat of invasion.

Six of One. The dark-suited man offered little in the way of conversation as they sped along Groom Lake Road in the pick-up, but his body language was unthreatening, even friendly. The other guards had gone about their business, leaving him alone with the suited man, although he had been asked, politely, to hand over the Walther. The police-band radio squawked occasionally on the dash, but there seemed little else going on in the Range. The sun was coming up behind and to the left of them, and the desert was emerging from the night in grey and blue and ochre. The pick-up slowed as it approached what seemed to be an abandoned desert diner, a dusty roadside shack with wooden porch and lettering on the roof, an old Burma-Shave sign out front, and long dark shadows painted across the blacktop. Parked at an angle to the porch was a clean, black government-issue Cadillac, the kind of car that Agency officers drove, not without a sense of irony, around Langley. As they pulled up in a volume of dust, he wondered who the driver could be.

Ballard’s short-story collection ‘Memories of the Space Age’ (1988), with Ernst’s ‘Europe After the Rain’ on the cover.

L’Amerique sidereal. The military-industrial complex, a phrase coined by President Eisenhower in a jeremiad delivered on his leaving office, is crucial to the post-war economy of Southern California. According to Dale Carter:

Simultaneously, by transferring over $17.5 billion to the southern and western United States between Fiscal years 1962 and 1969, the space agency’s budget made a proportionally greater contribution to what was ultimately the more painful mechanism, not only of the Rocket State’s growth but also of its eventual succession. The contribution itself had two distinct yet related dimensions. On the one hand, the more than $13 billion worth of prime contracts and subcontracts which initiated the rapid growth of the Cape Canaveral region and secured the prosperity of the Houston and Los Angeles industry and commerce during the 1960s indirectly helped elevate new generations of Florida real estate speculators, California construction firms, and other Sunbelt entrepreneurs and financiers: a new community  of interest born of the Vietnam war boom whose relative independence from the power elite’s east coast operational core would allow them to ride out the recessions of the early 1970s and underwrite the rise of the New Right during the rest of the decade.

On the other hand, vast prime contracts awarded to companies like Boeing and North American Rockwell by NASA during the 1960s directly fuelled corporate giants which, while more closely aligned with the Republican establishment or pro-military Democrats than with the New Right’s highest circles, were nevertheless integral to Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980 (234-5)

The American ‘rocket state’, in which the space program (and especially Apollo) acts as the spectacle element in the economic system of the Cold War, is most in evidence in the prosperity of Southern California and Florida, both critical sites for Ballard’s short fictions.

***

Now: Zero. On an American roulette wheel, there are 36 numbers, 18 red and 18 black, from 1 to 36. There are also two green sections of the wheel: Zero (0) and Double Zero (00). Both pay the house.

***

Seven Days to Noon. Strangely, the dark-suited man used some kind of electronic card-reader and keypad to open the door of the diner, which led directly down a short flight of steps. He blinked in the bright overheads as he took in a modern institutional canteen, in brushed steel, white melamine and glass. Several men, Special Agents by the cut of their jackets, were collecting food at a self-service counter, while others sipped coffee, chatted or scanned documents at an archipelago of small tables. At one, a tall chestnut-haired woman in a midnight-blue trouser suit stood up and faced them, as the dark-suited man guided him by the elbow to her table. Now he knew he the driver was. ‘Felicity Vespertine,’ he said, smiling. ‘Why are you here?’ ‘B,’ she said warmly, clasping his hand firmly and pulling him toward her, kissing him on both cheeks. ‘Howard,’ she said to his companion, could you grab a couple of coffees for us before you go, and a sandwich? B here looks famished.’ ‘I think the word you’re looking for, Felicity,’ said B, ‘is finished.’

Macrocosmic Null-X. In Hello America, the young protagonist Wayne finds himself, towards the end of the narrative, in a mocked-up ‘War Room’ at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas, in which the deranged President Manson spins a roulette wheel to determine which ‘infected’ North American city will be targeted by what remains of the Cold War nuclear arsenal. Reluctantly, Wayne throws:

Zero.

Wayne watched the ball circle the illuminated bowl, safe and defused in its empty niche. No city was marked against it!

With relief he blurted: ‘Mr President, there’s nothing there, no city – ’

Manson laughed affably, the chuckle of a conjuror who has just deceived a small child.

‘Zero pays the house, Wayne.’ (215-6)

In his article ‘”Zero Pays the House”: The Las Vegas Novel and Atomic Roulette’, Ken Cooper suggests that Las Vegas and ‘the bomb’ are inextricably intertwined, not only by the city’s proximity to the Nevada testing grounds, but through metaphor: ‘everyone is a subject of the nuclear state; we are all in the same casino. So, to extend the metaphor, How do we get out of the casino when we’re tired of playing atomic roulette?’[10] The ‘game’ of MAD is a game of chance, but all outcomes are ultimately that of defeat. Wayne in Hello America, however, flees the city by ‘Sunlight Flier’, a fleet of crystalline human-powered aircraft that provide an irresistibly surrealist gloss on Ballard’s motif of flight as transcendence. The dream of Las Vegas inhabited by Wayne, that of a ‘past America [and] city of antique gamblers’ (236), is itself the final victim of the logic of the Cold War.

Vapours. Patient B had arrived at the clinic in Vermillion Sands some three months ago, after a long convalescence in Geneva. The Swiss clinicians had performed exemplary work on B’s physical injuries – on cursory examination, one would hardly notice the fractured tibia, cracked hip, two broken patellas and contusions around sternum and ribcage – but B’s physical condition was of less concern to Bluffield than the psychological. B was clearly a highly intelligent individual, but his strongly practical cast of mind caused him to disengage from Bluffield’s approaches, or even reject them outright. B had no interest in the problem, it seemed, no insight into his own psychological processes, and Bluffield had failed to interest his patient intellectually in the clinical models at work. B seemed content to live in a quotidian world of regular exercise and small-scale concerns. To explain that, Bluffield knew, there was no need for recourse to deep theoretical structures.

Helios. Apollo, the Greek and Roman god of the arts, but also of rationality and architecture, became increasingly identified with Helios, the sun god, in Hellenic times. Why is Apollo, the sun-deity, named for the NASA moon programme? Perhaps the reason is that Apollo is patron of the arts and of philosophy, of music (of the spheres) and science. Apollo is also an oracular god, implicitly a deity of what is to come. More troublingly, perhaps, Apollo was the centre of a cult of masculine youth. With goddesses Artemis/ Selene more properly identified with the moon, is the NASA Apollo program a conquering, or erasure, of the cosmologically feminine?

Tune into Ballardian.com for Part 2: the final thrilling instalment of Brian Baker’s APOLLO ROULETTE!

[1] Dale Carter, The Final Frontier: The Rise and Fall of the American rocket State (London: Verso, 1988), p. 153
[2] William Gibson, ‘The Gernsback Continuum’, Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology, ed. Bruce Sterling (London: Paladin, 1988), pp.1-11 (p.7).
[3] J.G. Ballard, Vermillion Sands (1971) (London: Phoenix, 1992).
[4] J.G. Ballard, ‘Introduction’ to Crash (1973) (London: Vintage, 1995), unpaginated.
[5] Jean Baudrillard, America, (1986) (London: Verso, 2010), pp.137-8.
[6] J.G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition (1969) (London: Harper Perennial, 2006).
[7] Baudrillard, America, p.133.
[8] Baudrillard, America, p.4.
[9] JG Ballard, Hello America (1981) (London: Flamingo, 1993), ch.20, p.154.
[10] Ken Cooper, ‘”Zero Pays the House”: The Las Vegas Novel and Atomic Roulette’, Contemporary Literature 33:3, Fall 1992, 528-544(p.534)

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.

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

Translation by Dan O’Hara.

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

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

Dan O’Hara

Many thanks to Michaela Pape for proofing these interviews.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And of course the nascent space age.

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

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

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

What about Philip K. Dick? And Theodore Sturgeon?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then what are these novels and tales?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A very trenchant thesis.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Many thanks for the chat, Mr. Ballard.

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