Extreme Metaphors

On the early works

BALLARD: I believe that SF is important because it is the sole form of literature we have today that looks forward. All forms of literature other than science fiction are oriented towards the past. Their character is backwards-looking, whereas SF concerns itself with the future and interprets the present day in terms of the future, rather than of the past. It uses a vocabulary that is on the whole exclusively oriented towards the world of tomorrow, with all its science, its technology, and with all its developments in politics, sociology, advertising and so forth.

I have written three novels – The Drowned World, The Drought and The Crystal World – which form a trilogy dealing with the topic of time. In The Drowned World I deal with the past, and employ water as the central metaphor. In The Drought I deal with the future, taking sand as the central image. In The Crystal World I am concerned with the present, the symbol of which is the diamond or the precious stone which – so I believe – possesses a timeless structure.

In The Drowned World I describe the return of the entire planet to the era of the great Triassic forests, which covered the earth some 200 million years ago. I tell how human beings likewise regress into the past. In a certain sense, they climb down their own spinal column. They traverse down the thoracic vertebrae, from the point at which they are air-breathing mammals, to the lumbar region, to the point at which they are amphibious reptiles. Finally they reach the absolute past, which on one hand represents the birth of life itself in the hot womb of the primeval jungle, and which in another sense represents their own origins and birthplace in the mother’s womb. I show humanity face to face with the difficulty of making sense of this decline in their status to non-entities.

I use this portrait of the spinal column as a vessel containing a reflection of the memory of the past, and the details of the entire evolutionary development of the human race, as a literary device, as I was dissatisfied with the traditional forms used by SF writers to realise time travel. It seems to me that the method of investigating the imaginative capacities of the central nervous system gives a more reliable and more precise account of how the human race has evolved in time, and of how we as individuals have evolved in our own time, than Wells’ time machine.

In my novel The Drought, I see the future as a world dominated by sand. It is the end of the planet, and the few people who survive on the planet are governed by perfectly abstract relations, through an entire geometry of space-time, of emotion and action. It is a completely abstract world, as abstract as the most abstract of painters or sculptors one can imagine.

On SF

I believe that SF will become more and more an aspect of daily reality. It has migrated from the bookshelf to daily life. One sees the landscapes and imagery of SF, one sees their contents playing a part in the world of pop music, of film, even that of psychedelic experiences. The reason being, that SF was always concerned with psychological perceptions, and the world of pop music, film and psychedelic experience is now greatly concerned with the senses, with perspectives of our own psychological space-time, and has not so much to do with questions of individual histories, the past and so forth, as were the prejudices of the literature and cinema of the past.

I believe that in the last ten years the entire basis of SF has changed rapidly. Modern SF began at the end of the 1920s and the beginning of the thirties, and was at that time an authentically vernacular vision of the future, a future seen through the lens of science and technology and, above all, in the light of outer space, so I believe. Now in the last ten years SF as I see it has turned full circle. The physical sciences now play less of a major role than do the biological, inner space, the world of the mind – which once more reflects the altered attitudes of people towards science in general. After Hiroshima, the whole magic and authority of science was called into question. Now, I don’t think that the authority of biologists was attacked to such an extent, and to a considerable degree the biologist and the psychologist took over something of the functions of a lay church, in exploring man’s place in the universe.

On inner space

I define inner space as an imaginary realm in which on the one hand the outer world of reality, and on the other the inner world of the mind, meet and merge. Now, in the landscapes of the surrealist painters, for example, one sees the regions of inner space; and increasingly I believe that we will encounter in film and literature scenes which are neither solely realistic nor fantastic. In a sense, it will be a movement in the interzone between both spheres.

1968: Jannick Storm. An Interview with J.G. Ballard

Originally published in Speculation 21, 1969

Jannick Storm, a Danish publisher and writer, visited London in the late 1960s and became involved with the key players in the British New Wave of science fiction. He had a short story published in Michael Moorcock’s New Worlds and in 1970 founded Denmark’s first fanzine, Limbo, inspired by New Worlds. Storm was close to New Wave figurehead Brian Aldiss, who dedicated his book Billion Year Spree to him, and to Ballard. Throughout the sixties, Storm translated many of the individual Atrocity Exhibition pieces for Danish publications almost as soon as Ballard had written them. Subsequently, he was responsible for the world first edition of The Atrocity Exhibition, convincing Rhodos of Copenhagen to publish Grusomhedsudstillingen (1969), Atrocity in Danish, with Storm’s translations.

The following interview was conducted at Shepperton on 5 July 1968. It was originally recorded for a Danish radio programme on science fiction, and the transcript appeared in Peter Weston’s fanzine Speculation in 1969. It covers Ballard’s thoughts on the New Wave, his experiments in graphic design, his admiration for the work of William Burroughs, the media landscape of the sixties and, as a controversial parting shot, his withering views on science fiction fandom. The latter got Ballard into hot water with Speculation readers who took umbrage in hostile letters to the editor, in turn provoking Ballard to tell Weston he no longer wished to receive further copies of the ’zine. Weston lamented this in a later editorial, although Moorcock leapt to Ballard’s defence in Speculation 25: ‘I sympathise with Jimmy Ballard’s remarks, and, at times, find myself close to agreeing with them.’ [SS]

STORM: How did you start writing?

BALLARD: I was studying medicine at Cambridge University. I was very interested in medicine, everything I learned there I put to very good use. All the anatomy and physiology and so on. It seemed an enormous fiction. They have an annual short story competition at the University, and I wrote a story for that and won the competition that year. I suppose that was a green light, so I gave up medicine, and after a few years I had my first story published. I’d tried originally to write stories for English literary magazines like Horizon and that sort of thing. Just general fiction of an experimental character. And then I thought that science fiction, which in those days was all Asimov and Heinlein and Clarke – this was in the middle fifties – I thought, those writers were not really making the most of what science fiction could be. I felt that a new kind of science fiction should be written.

STORM: Your kind of science fiction, you say, is different from the old science fiction. In what way?

BALLARD: Modern American science fiction of the 1940s and 1950s is a popular literature of technology. Anybody who can remember reading magazines in the thirties, or looking at books published in the thirties, will know what I mean – they are full of marvels, the biggest bridge in the world, the fastest this or the longest that – full of marvels of science and technology.

The science fiction written in those days came out of all this optimism that science was going to remake the world. Then came Hiroshima and Auschwitz, and the image of science completely changed. People became very suspicious of science, but SF didn’t change. You still found this optimistic literature, the Heinlein–Asimov–Clarke type of attitude towards the possibilities of science, which was completely false.

In the 1950s during the testing of the H-bomb you could see that science was getting to be something much closer to magic. Also, science fiction was then identified with the idea of outer space. By and large, that was the image most people had of science fiction. The spaceship, the alien planet. And this didn’t make any sense to me. It seemed to me that they were ignoring what I felt was the most important area, what I called – and I used the term for the first time seven years ago – ‘inner space’, which was the meeting ground between the inner world of the mind and the outer world of reality. Inner space you see in the paintings of the surrealists, Max Ernst, Dali, Tanguy, Chirico.

They’re painters of inner space, and I felt that science fiction should explore that area, the area where the mind impinges on the outside world, and not just deal in fantasy. This was the trouble with SF in the early fifties. It was becoming fantasy. It wasn’t a serious realistic fiction any more. So I started writing. I’ve written three novels and something like seventy short stories over the last ten years – I think that perhaps in only one story there’s a spaceship. It’s just mentioned in passing. All my fiction is set in the present day or close to the present day.

STORM: Well, this is why your landscapes are not real, I suppose. They are sort of symbolic?

BALLARD: Well, they are not real in the sense that I don’t write naturalistically about the present day. Though, in the latest group of stories I’ve started to write, these stories written in paragraph form, which I call ‘condensed novels’, there I’m using the landscape of the present day. The chief characters in these stories are people like Elizabeth Taylor, Marilyn Monroe, Jacqueline Kennedy and so on. There I’m using present-day landscapes. Obviously if you’re going to set most of your fiction several years ahead of the present, you’re going to have to use an invented landscape to some extent, because you can’t write naturalistically about London or New York twenty years from now. It must be an invented landscape to a certain extent.

STORM: You seem to be quite hostile towards science, like Ray Bradbury, for instance, but not in the same way, I suppose?

BALLARD: I’m not hostile to science itself. I think that scientific activity is about the only mature activity there is. What I’m hostile to is the image of science that people have. It becomes a magic wand in people’s minds, that will conjure up marvels, a kind of Aladdin’s lantern. It oversimplifies things, much too conveniently. Science now, in fact, is the largest producer of fiction. A hundred years ago, or even fifty years ago, even, science took its raw material from nature. A scientist worked out the boiling point of a gas or the distance a star is away from the Earth, whereas nowadays, particularly in the social, psychological sciences, the raw material of science is a fiction invented by the scientists. You know, they work out why people chew gum or something of this kind … so the psychological and social sciences are spewing out an enormous amount of fiction. They’re the major producers of fiction. It’s not the writers any more.

STORM: What do you think of the so-called New Wave, as it manifests itself in New Worlds, for instance?

BALLARD: I am the New Wave! Well, the New Wave … I think it’s only at the beginning. Having knocked my own head against a brick wall for ten years … you know, it’s only now that people begin to accept that I’m not a deliberate fool, which a lot of people thought I was when I first started writing. It’s taken so long that I don’t expect any miracles to happen overnight, but already you see a group of younger writers coming along. People like Tom Disch, John Sladek, Michael Butterworth, Pam Zoline, the young American painter over here. They’re starting to write a different kind of science fiction, but whether they will stay within science fiction long enough to consolidate the so-called New Wave or whether – as I think will happen – they’ll just move out of science fiction altogether and begin writing a speculative fiction that doesn’t owe anything to science fiction, I don’t know.

STORM: Well, the same applies to you. You don’t consider yourself a science fiction writer?

BALLARD: I don’t consider myself a science fiction writer in the same sense that Isaac Asimov or Arthur C. Clarke are science fiction writers. Strictly speaking I regard myself as an SF writer in the way that surrealism is also a scientific art. In a sense Asimov, Heinlein and the masters of American SF are not really writing of science at all. They’re writing about a set of imaginary ideas which are conveniently labelled ‘science’. They’re writing about the future, they’re writing a kind of fantasy-fiction about the future, closer to the western and the thriller, but it has nothing really to do with science. I studied medicine, chemistry, physiology, physics, and I worked for about five years on a scientific journal.

The idea that a magazine like Astounding, or Analog as it’s now called, has anything to do with the sciences is ludicrous. It has nothing to do with science. You have only to pick up a journal like Nature, say, or any scientific journal, and you can see that science belongs in a completely different world. Freud pointed out that you have to distinguish between analytic activity, which by and large is what the sciences are, and synthetic activities, which are what the arts are. The trouble with the Heinlein–Asimov type of science fiction is that it’s completely synthetic. Freud also said that synthetic activities are a sign of immaturity, and I think that’s where classical SF falls down.

STORM: You’ve been running some advertisements in New Worlds. What do you think of them, what is the meaning of them?

BALLARD: It occurred to me about a year ago that advertising was an unknown continent as far as the writer was concerned, a kind of virgin America of images and ideas, and that the writer ought to move into any area which is lively and full of potential. It occurred to me I had a number of ideas which I could fit into my short stories, my fiction general, but they would be better presented directly. Instead of advertising a product I would advertise an idea. I’ve done three advertisements now, and I hope to carry on. I’m advertising extremely abstract ideas in these advertisements, and this is a very effective way of putting them over. If these ideas were in the middle of a short story people could ignore them. They could just say, ‘It’s Ballard again, let’s get on with the story’. But if they’re presented in the form of an advertisement, like one in Vogue magazine, or Life magazine, people have to look at them, they have to think about them. I hope I can go on, the only problem being the expense. I hope eventually the magazines will pay me to put advertisements in their pages.

STORM: In Ambit – where you’re prose editor – you’ve had a competition for things written under the influence of drugs, but as you admitted yourself in Ambit, the things which came out of it were pretty close to the things that you normally produce in Ambit. Would you comment on this?

BALLARD: Literary competitions never produce anything all that outstanding. Newspapers and magazines for years have been running competitions for the best short story and the best travel story and so on, and the stuff that is sent in is never all that original, or all that exciting. I think the entries we received were interesting, but probably not so much for literary reasons as for biographical reasons, the circumstances in which people write stories, write poetry. This was interesting, and I think it was worth doing. Also, there was a lot of talk at the time about psychedelia, a kind of psychedelic revolution, that a whole lot of new arts were going to be produced, based on or inspired by drugs. And it was interesting to see as a result of the competition that in fact drugs didn’t have all that big an effect, that they’re very much a short cut and a short circuit.

STORM: Well, you’re a well-known admirer of William Burroughs. Would you say that his style has influenced yours?

BALLARD: No, I wish it had. Burroughs and I are completely different writers. I admire him as a writer who in his way has created the landscape of the twentieth century completely as new. He’s produced a kind of apocalyptical landscape, he’s close to Hieronymus Bosch and Bruegel. He’s not a pastoral writer by any means. He’s a writer of the nightmare. I only started reading Burroughs about four years ago, and it may be that he will influence me, I can’t say. But certainly he hasn’t influenced me now, though some people say he has. They’re completely wrong.

STORM: Actually there’s been quite a development in your style of writing. You started out with some quite ordinary stories, and now you have got these ‘condensed novels’, as you call them.

BALLARD: It has been a process of evolution rather than revolution. I wrote a novel called The Drought, after The Drowned World. That was a novel about desert areas. I noticed while I was writing it that I was beginning to explore the geometry of a very abstract kind of landscape and very abstract relationships between the characters. I went on from there to write a short story, ‘The Terminal Beach’, set on Eniwetok, the island in the Pacific where the H-bomb was tested. There again I was starting to look at the characters, and the events of the story, in a very abstract, almost cubist way. I was isolating aspects of character, isolating aspects of the narrative, rather like a scientific investigator taking apart a strange machine to see how it works. My new stories, which I call ‘condensed novels’, stem from ‘The Terminal Beach’. They’re developments of that, but I don’t think there’s been a revolution in what I’ve done. There’s just been a steady change over the years.

STORM: In your new stories you are using actual persons like John F. Kennedy and Elizabeth Taylor and so on. Why?

BALLARD: I feel that the 1960s represent a marked turning point. For the first time, with the end of the Cold War, I suppose, for the first time the outside world, so-called reality, is now almost completely a fiction. It’s a media landscape, if you like. It’s almost completely dominated by advertising, TV, mass-merchandising, politics conducted as advertising. People’s lives, even their individual private lives, are getting more and more controlled by what I call fiction. By fiction I mean anything invented for imaginative purposes. For example, you don’t buy an airline ticket, you don’t just buy transportation, let’s say, to the south of France or Spain. What you buy is the image of a particular airline, the kind of miniskirts the hostesses are wearing on that airline. In fact, airlines in America are selling themselves on this sort of thing.

Also the sort of homes people buy for themselves, the way they furnish their houses, even the way they talk, the friends they have, everything is becoming fictionalised. Therefore, given that reality is now a fiction, it’s not necessary for the writer to invent the fiction. The writer’s relationship with reality is completely the other way around. It’s the writer’s job to find the reality, to invent the reality, not to invent the fiction. The fiction is already there. The greatest fictional characters of the twentieth century are people like the Kennedys. They’re a twentieth-century House of Atreus.

These figures that I use, I don’t use them as individual characters. As I said in one of my stories, the body of a screen actress like Elizabeth Taylor, which one sees on thousands of cinema hoardings, thousands of advertisements every day, and on the movie screen itself, her body is a real landscape. It is as much a real landscape of our lives as any system of mountains or lakes or hills or anything else. So therefore I sought to use this material, this is the fictional material of the 1960s.

STORM: In SF Horizons, Brian Aldiss wrote that ‘Ballard is seldom discussed in fanzines’. Time has certainly proved him wrong, and now you are one of the most discussed people in fandom. What do you think of fandom itself?

BALLARD: I didn’t know that was the case, because I never see any fanzines. I don’t have any contact with fans. My one and only contact with fandom was when I’d just started writing, twelve years ago, when the World Science Fiction Convention was being held in London, in 1957, and I went along to that as a young new writer hoping to meet people who were interested in the serious aims of science fiction and all its possibilities. In fact there was just a collection of very unintelligent people, who were almost illiterate, who had no interest whatever in the serious and interesting possibilities of science fiction. In fact I was so taken aback by that convention that I more or less stopped writing for a couple of years. Since then I’ve had absolutely nothing to do with fans, and I think they’re a great handicap to science fiction and always have been.