I was 7 when Kennedy was assassinated, and my school pulled an all-out nuclear war drill (just like we’d practiced, duck ‘n cover, assemble outside the building for roll-call) to send us home early. I was certain that the Kennedy Assassination was a prelude to a Russian nuclear attack. I dreamt of huge nuclear flashes just visible over the horizon, terrified by the knowledge that nothing after that would ever be the same, no more food and comfortable homes and cars, no easy life and schools and visits to Grandma’s. Like Ballard’s early-learned lesson in Shanghai, I felt and SAW how even the adults around me knew that “Reality can be snatched away like a stage set.”. The adults were obviously worried about these things but never spoke of them to children, and that INCREASED my unspoken fears..

And there I was not yet in my teens, watching films like *On the Beach* and its unforgettable lonely, doomed Australian submarine discovering a deserted America, where only a loose window blind flapping in the wind mimicked Morse radio signals. And Ballard was right there in my hand, his first new works blossoming up in my beloved pulp SF Magazines at that age too – the Wind from Nowhere, the Drowned World, the Crystal World, Vermilion Sands. All closed-end apocalypses of their own sort. The lurking national uneasiness was all-pervasive…. The Twilight Zone was dominating TV, and the B&W TV news was NOTHING BUT these fears (I can just BARELY remember seeing Eisenhower as President on B&W TV.)

Projected outward: I feared the outbreak of nuclear Apocalypse (it seemed likely, even imminent then), and the (quite plausible to me at that age) Landing of Conquering Aliens (*The Day the Earth Stood Still, The Mysterians*). Even one’s neighbors could be a threat – as in the epic Twilight Zone episode where a happy neighborhood 1950s yard picnic turns into a deadly struggle over possession of the host’s fallout shelter when a false-alarm CONELRAD (how many of you in the USA remember THAT?) alert is broadcast..

Projected INWARD- I was a child, I wasn’t quite sure there even WAS a firm line between apocalyptic SF and the blazing nuclear dangers of real life. UFOs were being seen en masse all over the world for the first time, starting in 1947. Since childhood I have been haunted by endless yet always different dreams of nuclear fireballs on the horizon, plane crashes, world disaster, the end of everything familiar. And Ballard’s early work was nothing BUT that – dark, introspective, and – well, what IF the wind started blowing harder and harder and never stopped? What IF the seas began to rise and cover the planet…? What of NO rain EVER fell anymore.. Ballard’s finger was right on the pulse of that time’s Zeitgeist.

And the steady flow of apocalyptic fiction and films continued. The message was clear that our whole society and world was at a tipping point, where it could slide into unimaginable global disaster overnight… Ballard continued his work, veering away from straight-up SF and venturing to explore this Zetigeist internally and psychologically, as it exists behind superficially calm, wealthy gated communities and high-rises. The movies continued – from Dr Strangelove to Mad Max, their message was that we couldn’t continue like this, SOMETHING Terrible WAS going to happen that would regress us all to savagery. But Ballard identified the real culprit – he pointed not at H-bombs nor climate disaster nor out-of-control technology: he pointed at YOU and your Id.

Oddly, there WAS a movie in 1973 that VERY ACCURATELY predicted the worst dangers of the world of 2022…. *SOYLENT GREEN*. A B-movie with Charlton Heston, based on Harry Harrison’s great SF novel *Make Room! Make Room!*
see: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0070723/

In this film, people are packed, many to a flat, in a wildly overpopulated, searingly CO2-overheated world. All natural resources are gone, synthetic food rations are Gov’t-distributed, and that government is 100% Totalitarian/Fascist. You want electricity or light, you have to pedal a bicycle for it yourself. Endless effort is necessary just to obtain food and even a space for your bed. (Lunghua, anyone?) Food riots are viciously suppressed. The plot is a bit flimsy, revolving around the recycling of human corpses for food rations, but the setting is turning out to be very disturbingly, accurately predictive.

And the Ballardian Answer is always there – TRUE Apocalypses aren’t created by aliens or nuclear wars or weather (yet): the REAL Danger – the danger of regressing to savagery, the Triumph of the Id- is always lurking in your mind. Or your neighbor’s. The Apocalypse is ALREADY IN YOU – and the bindings holding it are loosening… The REAL danger is- and has always been- Man.

By the time I was 11, JGB had taught me that.