‘Later, as he sat on the balcony eating the dog, Dr Robert Laing reflected on the unusual events that had taken place within this huge apartment building during the previous three months …’
Never let it be said that JG Ballard, who died of cancer in April at the age of 78, didn’t know how to write an opening sentence. That was from 1975’s High-Rise, the last in the ‘urban disaster’ trilogy which commenced with the still-notorious Crash, filmed by David Cronenberg and the most spectacular imaginable contrast with Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of Empire Of The Sun, Ballard’s best-known book. Crash concerned itself with the erotic implications of motoring accidents: its author always considered that a publisher’s reader’s report which claimed that Ballard was ‘beyond psychiatric help’ to be the finest compliment he and his work ever received. In a literary career spanning half a century, commencing in SF and encompassing both the mainstream and the avant-garde, he became a one-man genre: ‘Ballardian’ is as resonant an adjective as ‘Orwellian’ or ‘Burroughsian’ , and William Gibson once told me that the only significant categories in SF were authors who had absorbed Ballard and Burroughs and authors who hadn’t. Late-’60s short stories like The Death Of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered As A Downhill Auto Race and Why I Want To Fuck Ronald Reagan didn’t so much burst SF’s boundaries as regally refuse to acknowledge their existence.
The basics: James Graham Ballard – ‘Jim’ to his friends, ‘JG’ to the reading public – was born in Shanghai in 1930. When he was 13, he and his parents were interned by the invading Japanese forces, an experience he transformed into literature in his 1984 semi-autobiographical novel Empire Of The Sun (interestingly enough, the ‘Jim’ in the novel is separated from his parents – which the real-life Jim wasn’t – because the author felt that this represented a greater psychological truth). Finally arriving in a strangely alien England in the aftermath of World War II, he studied medicine at Cambridge. Discovering the joys of avant-garde fiction, he ditched his medical studies in favour of literature before briefly serving with the RAF in Canada and discovering science fiction, with New Worlds magazine publishing his first professional story in 1956. By 1960, he was a full-time professional SF writer alongside raising his three children after the death of his wife, from pneumonia, in 1964.
His relationship with SF was always slightly dysfunctional: with both his prose (limpid, glacial), and his preoccupations (abandoned artefacts, passive protagonists) defiantly at odds with genre conventions. In later life he considered himself to be no longer an SF writer, but in 1983, when I interviewed Ballard at his Shepperton home for the NME, in his epically cluttered study boasting the mildly incongruous feature of a pair of very fine silver-foil coconut trees, he declared himself still to be one.
‘I am! Of course I am! I’m practically the only one left!
‘Star Wars isn’t science fiction. It’s pure space fantasy, which has nothing to do with SF. The great authority which SF had in the 1940s and ‘50s and even before that was that it opened a window onto the immediate future, with a cautionary view. Its claim to being taken seriously was that it was looking at the immediate future.
‘If you look at the American magazines like Astounding, Galaxy, If, Fantastic Universe and [the British] New Worlds of the ’50s and the novels written by their authors, there was an enormous amount of straightforward cautionary fiction looking seriously at a changing world. All those stories about the dangers of nuclear war and overpopulation, the threat posed by computers… that was classic ‘50s SF. Giant advertising corporations and their threat to freedom as in Frederick Pohl, the effects of pollution, what television would do to our lives… science fiction was looking seriously at the near future and holding up warning signs, but now it’s abandoned that, and I find it deplorable.
‘American SF in particular has veered right away from that into fantasy. It’s ignored the immediate future; it’s no longer interested in what may happen. In fact, this terrible thing has happened: if you now write fiction that concerns itself with the near future — or with the future at all — then it is no longer by definition SF. If you want to write about the future, and to write a genuinely cautionary tale about the next ten or 15 years’ trends … you would find difficulty in being accepted and having that accepted as science fiction. Whereas if you write a complete fantasy, a bit of deeply nostalgic medieval futurism perhaps set in the distant past as Star Wars is set, nothing to do with the world we inhabit… that is what commercial SF, sadly, has become.
‘It’s a damn shame. SF has got to look at the present and the near future again, but that’s my bias. I consider that I am a classic mainstream SF writer who is interested in the near future.’
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