BALLARD: But technology in terms of videotape machines and so on may make it possible to have a continuous alternative to direct experience, and I mean any alternative. You can have this played back in a slow motion, or do you want it in infrared, or do you want it this or that. Take your pick, like a jukebox. Technology may make it possible to have a continuous feedback to ourselves of information. But at the moment I think we are starved of information. I think that the biggest need of the painter or writer today is information. I’d love to have a tickertape machine in my study constantly churning out material: abstracts from scientific journals, the latest Hollywood gossip, the passenger list of a 707 that crashed in the Andes, the colour mixes of a new automobile varnish.
In fact, Eduardo and I in our different ways are already gathering this kind of information, but we are using the clumsiest possible tool to do it: our own hands and eyes. The technology of the information-retrieval system that we employ is incredibly primitive. We fumble around in bookshops, we buy magazines or subscribe to them. But I regard myself as starved of information. I am getting a throughput of information in my imaginative life of one hundredth of what I could use. I think there’s an information starvation at present and technology will create the possibility of knowing everything about everything.
When Apollo 99 blasts off to Alpha Centauri we will know everything about the crew all of the time. It’s always struck me that Eduardo’s studio is lavishly equipped with photographic and recording equipment of various kinds. He spends a large part of his time on information collection and sorting, and an equal amount of time ensuring that he has a ready access to all the material he has around him. It’s a far cry from the nearest thing I can visualise which is books on shelves in a library where one has a kind of notional access to the material but no real access because it’s not all scanning in front of your mind.
And it struck me that the information system Eduardo has designed for himself comes very close to the sort of information-retrieval systems that a scientist has. For instance, Dr Christopher Evans at the National Physical Laboratories uses very similar devices and has a similar internal scanning system to make sure that he keeps up to date with whatever touches his imagination. I know no writer, other than Len Deighton, who maintains this sort of system. Most do not even grasp the fact that they need information to keep their imagination up to par. Deighton used to have, perhaps still does have, a computer, a telex and an electric typewriter plugged into the system.
PAOLOZZI: Just think that only two people in Bucharest are going to read this.
1973: Peter Linnett. J.G. Ballard
Originally published in Corridor 5, 1973
This interview appeared in Corridor, a fanzine that, as critic Phil Stephenson-Payne wrote, was ‘a cheaper, thinner, New Worlds and featured many of the same authors’. Corridor was the first partnership of Michael Butterworth and David Britton, who went on to build the controversial Savoy Books empire. Britton later wrote the notorious Lord Horror, which led to his imprisonment in England, while Butterworth was already a published writer, having had short stories published in New Worlds between 1966 and 1970. Ballard, an inspiration to both Butterworth and Britton, edited some of these.
The interview took place in February 1973, with Crash about to be published and Concrete Island recently written. Ballard talks to Peter Linnett about his rejection of ‘hard science fiction’, about the genesis of The Atrocity Exhibition and about his later switch from experimental fiction to a more conventional narrative style. Ballard also tests soon-to-be familiar riffs, including what is surely the first airing of his famous equation: ‘sex times technology equals the future’. [SS]
LINNETT: How did you come to be a writer?
BALLARD: This goes back to when I was a child. In fact the first book I ever produced was when I was about twelve years old, on how to play contract bridge. But my real start, oddly enough, came at school. The whole form was given, for some reason, ten pages of lines to copy out. The masters didn’t give a damn what we wrote out – all they wanted to see was all this paper covered. I was copying lines out of a thriller, and I found that it was easier if I didn’t bother to transcribe, but just made up the story myself. That was the first time I realised it was exciting to invent things. That set me off. I was writing all through school. Then when I went to Cambridge there was an annual short story competition in Varsity – I entered it, and won it. By that time I was about twenty, and pretty well convinced I wanted to be a writer.
LINNETT: How about science fiction, was that what you were starting out to do?
BALLARD: At that stage no. When I came out of the air force at the age of twenty-four I’d written a lot of short stories of a general kind, and was vaguely writing a novel, but there was something missing from all of this, as well as from most of the fiction being published then. It didn’t seem to me interesting enough or about the real world. I saw the middle fifties as being more and more dominated by science and technology; and the only fiction that was about life then was science fiction. If the whole of previous fiction had not existed, if you started out from scratch in 1956, to write about the world in which you lived, you would write something pretty close to SF. You had to write it, to write about your own world.
It’s a paradox – people thought of SF as something fantastic and remote from ordinary experience. But I felt that was a wrong impression; in fact here was a marvellous area, a tremendously exciting area, that ought to be explored. I wasn’t interested in interplanetary travel and time travel and so on – this was the other thing, I felt SF hadn’t really tapped its own possibilities. This was what I set out to do.
LINNETT: I think your first published story was ‘Prima Belladonna’, in Science Fantasy in 1956. I don’t suppose the SF markets were very lucrative at this time?
BALLARD: No, the payments were extremely small – a flat rate of two pounds per one thousand words. But over the years a lot of the short stories have made a good deal of money for me, through being reprinted so many times. Some I’ve made a total of l,000 pounds from – each. And many have been anthologised thirty times. The point about writing for the SF magazines was, the demand was unlimited. You were under pressure by the editor, if you had any talent at all, to go on writing. You could have a short story in every issue of a magazine, for a whole year. Which was quite unlike any of the general fiction magazines like Argosy, or the literary magazines – they would take a story from you but they wouldn’t want another one for a long while. That’s still true today. So there was this great pressure to produce material; and it was a tremendous test of one’s talent and imagination.
LINNETT: Your first published novel was The Wind from Nowhere, in 1962, which seems rather different from the rest of your work.
BALLARD: That was really done as a kind of joke. At the time I wrote it, in 1961, my wife and I were extremely short of money. The one thing I wanted to do was to be able to give up my job as an editor of a scientific magazine so that I could write a decent novel, to think about where I was going as a writer. We’d moved to Shepperton in 1960, and I had this tremendously long railway journey in the evenings, coming home from work; there were all these small children running around, I was absolutely exhausted. The future looked extremely dismal, professionally speaking; I’d been writing short stories since 1956 but I felt I was getting nowhere. I needed a break. I didn’t want to begin lowering my sights and begin churning out novels that were partly serious – you know, money-spinners. I had two weeks’ holiday – I think my wife suggested it: why don’t you, just for the hell of it, write a novel in two weeks? I’d always been intrigued by the idea of writing a novel very quickly and I still am. I’d like to be able to write a novel in three days. So I sat down and wrote The Wind from Nowhere, in literally I think ten working days. I set myself