BARBER: Did the moon landing mean such a lot to you?
BALLARD: Of course it did. It’s probably the only important thing that has happened in the twentieth century. I had this feeling after they landed on the moon that in a way it gave me the moral right to do anything I wanted, because it didn’t matter what I did. I felt we were like a lot of animals in an abandoned zoo, and that the only important thing that was going to happen in our lifetime had happened. But the spin-off from the space programme – which should have had enormous effects on everybody’s lives, from the way we drive our cars to the way we light our cigarettes – and the effect on people’s imaginations, was absolutely nil. In fact when you think of the hundreds of millions of pounds that the Russians and Americans have invested in the space programme, the real effects of the moon landing could only be described as a gigantic flop, the worst first night in history. I noticed this after the first orbital flights a few years ago: within a day people had totally lost interest in them. How many people, if you asked them, could tell you the names of the men who first orbited the moon, the Christmas of – when was it? – 1968? How many people could tell you the names of those men who recited the extract from the Book of Genesis? Yet it was a fantastic voyage, a triumph of technology, courage, science, organisation, everything.
BARBER: If you think the moon the only important thing likely to happen in your lifetime you presumably have no great expectations of 2001?
BALLARD: We’re ahead of the clock, that’s the whole point. It’s like Buckminster Fuller, you know, saying that World War III is already over and we lost. People aren’t interested in the future any more. The greatest casualty of World War II, I think, was that the past ceased to have moral authority for people, the authority of precedent, tradition, one’s father, social background, everything. That ended with World War II, and thank God. But what has happened in the twenty-five years since then is that the future has become a casualty too. One could say that the moon landing was the death knell of the future as a moral authority. No one thinks that the future is going to be a better place – most people think it’s going to be a worse place. The moral authority of science was colossal in the 1930s. I can remember myself that children’s encyclopedias were loaded with scientific marvels – the greatest bridge in the world, the longest tunnel, the biggest ship, Professor Picard in his stratosphere balloon. But the idea that science was building a bigger and better world ended with Hiroshima and Eniwetok. Now people feel that science may not bring a better world, but a nightmare. Dr Barnard may really be Dr Moreau. Now people are frightened of science and they’re frightened of the future. They no longer feel that because something’s going to happen tomorrow it’s going to be better than today.
So the idea of America is dead, I think, because America was built on the assumption that tomorrow was a better day. The American Dream is the American Nightmare now. I think that’s why American sci-fi of the forties and fifties has come to a full stop. Nobody is writing it any more, no new writers have come into the field, because people don’t accept the authority of the future any more. God knows, the present is infinitely more varied and bizarre and fantastic. People have annexed the future into the present, just as they’ve annexed the past into the present. Now we have the future and the past all rolled into the present – one day you’re wearing Edwardian clothes, the next you’re dressed like an eighteenth-century samurai. One can visualise by, say, the end of the century calendars no longer existing. They won’t be necessary, there’ll be no dates, there won’t be a year 2000, because no one will be interested. And if the proverbial visitor from outer space lands here in the year 2000 (by his calendar, because we won’t have them) he might find himself in anything from Elizabethan England to ancient Rome to Nazi Germany to a Barbarella fantasy of the year 1,000,000 ad.
BARBER: Now you’re making a prediction about the future yourself.
BALLARD: Yes, because we’re still in the dying twilight of tomorrow, we can still see the idea of the future. But my children, or today’s teenagers, they’re not interested in the future. All the possibilities of their lives are contained within a different set of perspectives, an inner life. If you look back over the past ten years you can see a continuous retreat inwards. I coined the expression ‘inner space’ about ten years ago and usually sci-fi writers’ predictions are proven wrong with 100 per cent consistency, but in this one instance I was certainly right: that what you see is the death of outer space, the failure of the moon landing to excite anyone’s imagination on a real level, and the discovery of inner space in terms of sex, drugs, meditation, mysticism. Just look at the career of the Beatles and you see this retreat from the exterior by steady stages, through drugs, then meditation, to a more or less complete involvement with their own bodies. Lennon and Yoko seem to be rediscovering the tactile existence, the organic reality of their own embraces, and it’s very beautiful, I think.
BARBER: If what you say is true, why is there so much science journalism around? Why so many articles on the future of genetic engineering, or heart transplants, or the population explosion?
BALLARD: Most science journalism is really fiction masquerading as fact. Almost anything you care to name nowadays is really fiction, serving someone’s imaginative end, whether it’s a politician’s, or a TV executive’s, or a scientist’s. So-called hard science is now the new show business. Take someone like Desmond Morris, a so-called scientist who is really one of the leading pop entertainers. He’s as much a showbiz performer as John Lennon.
BARBER: What about Barnard?
BALLARD: I think he became show business afterwards. That was where science created its first superstar, the moment Washkansky had his new heart, the first one, that was something unique. I’m sure that most scientific developments in the future are going to be made in the Barnard way. There’ll be no more of the absent-minded professor in his laboratory stumbling on penicillin and taking five years to develop it. No, he’ll be a pushy, ambitious, publicity-oriented scientist who will launch himself not just into the new discovery, but into show business at the same time.
BARBER: Do you also dismiss the sort of science journalism that deals with serious extrapolations of the future, the population explosion, pollution, demographic factors?
BALLARD: This is the Herman Kahn school of distant extrapolation, which I find absolutely meaningless. They say something about the present and they say something about the mind of Herman Kahn, but they don’t say anything about the world fifty years from now, because one simply can’t anticipate. The world rate [sic] changes so fast you don’t need to be much of a mathematician to work out that things will be so different even in ten years’ time that one won’t be able to say anything about them now. It’s like women’s fashion – one can’t even guess what it’ll be like this time next year.
BARBER: Most of your novels and stories seem to be set in the future, and give the impression of a future after the holocaust,