LINNETT: Why did you use the form of the disaster story in your three subsequent novels?
BALLARD: I wanted to deal with a large canvas. I was interested in events, if you like; systems, of a very large area. The entire biological kingdom viewed as a single organism, as a single continuing vast memory. In fact I’ve never thought of them as being disaster stories, because I don’t see them as having unhappy endings. The hero follows the logic of his own mind; and I feel that anyone who does this is, in a sense, fulfilling himself. I regard all those novels as stories of psychic fulfilment.
LINNETT: The apocalyptic scene is really just the means of sending the hero on this journey?
BALLARD: Right. Also I was dealing with states of tremendous psychological crisis and transformation. Possibly because of my own background in the Far East during the war, and so on, I’ve always felt that there are situations such as great natural disasters, or wars – huge transformations of ordinary life where the barriers between the external world and internal world of the mind begin to break down, and you get a kind of overlap. All this seemed to me a very potent, very powerful area – for my imagination anyway.
LINNETT: That’s inner space? Did you coin that term?
BALLARD: I don’t know whether I was the first person to use it; when I first used it I was using it in conversation, in the late fifties. When I began writing I used it specifically within the context of SF, as a counterstroke against the phrase ‘outer space’, which roughly speaking summed up the whole of SF. I wanted inner space, psychological space.
LINNETT: Do you prefer using a specific locale in your work? In The Crystal World, for instance, you set the scene in Central Africa.
BALLARD: I use the locales that seem suitable to the subject at hand. I’m drawn to certain kinds of landscape: deserts, jungles, deltas, certain kinds of urban landscape. I suppose I like very formalised landscapes, like great dunes or sandbars. I’m drawn to freeways, concrete flyovers, the metallised landscapes of giant airports. As far as naming a particular place goes – well, take something like Atrocity Exhibition. It’s not really set anywhere. It probably is England, in fact, but it could equally be elsewhere. A lot of Americans think it’s the United States. It’s not specifically the US but it could be. It’s really a landscape we see in our minds, which we carry around with us, which we might see as we dream.
LINNETT: Why did you start writing the so-called condensed novels?
BALLARD: I wanted to write directly about the present day, and the peculiar psychological climate that existed in the middle sixties, when I started writing them. I think the key to that book was Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas, which I saw – and still do see – as the most important event of the whole of the 1960s. It seemed to me that to write about this, and about similar events that were taking place, like the suicide of Marilyn Monroe, and the emergence of political figures like Ronald Reagan, and the whole tremendous explosion of the mass media, the way politicians and advertising corporations were using them – well, it was to try to come to terms with all this. It seemed to me it was creating a landscape around us that was almost like a gigantic novel; we were living more and more inside a strange, enormous work of fiction.
LINNETT: Reality and fiction were crossing each other.
BALLARD: Yes, they’d begun to reverse – the only point of reality was our own minds. It seemed to me that the only way to write about all this was to meet the landscape on its own terms. Useless to try to impose the conventions of the nineteenth-century realistic novel on this incredible five-dimensional fiction moving around us all the time at high speed. And I tried to develop – and I think successfully – a technique of mine, the so-called condensed novels, where I was able to cross all these events, at right angles if you like. Like cutting through the stem of a plant to expose the cross-section of its main vessels. So this technique was devised to deal with this fragmentation and overlay of reality, through the fragmentation of narrative. Although the plot lines are very strong in those stories.
And they’re all variants. Each of the main stories in that collection describes the same man in the same state of mental crisis, but they treat him, as it were, at different points along a spectrum – as you might compile a scientific dossier about someone, explore various aspects of his make-up. On the one hand a story like ‘The Summer Cannibals’, where a man and a woman have turned up at a kind of superheated resort. This is a completely naturalistic account of two people on the level of their sweat glands. In fact they don’t have names, because their names are not important. Right through to the other extreme, where the character is seen as a kind of cosmic hero, a second coming of Christ, in ‘You and Me and the Continuum’. The same character appears in a whole series of different roles. Any of us could be fragmented in the same way, we are all to some extent.
LINNETT: The three heroes of your earlier novels seem to be variations of the same character. Do you worry very much about character – getting across a person’s character?
BALLARD: This one figure is a dominant character of mine; I suppose he’s a version of myself. It’s a journey towards myself – I suppose all writing is. On the whole, SF is not that interested in characterisation; it’s interested in psychological roles which operate on a slightly different level.
LINNETT: Atrocity wasn’t liked very much by critics.
BALLARD: It had very bad reviews over here, on the whole. But in Europe, oddly enough, the response was completely different. Denmark, Germany, Holland – it had a terrific reception, absolutely stupendous. What impressed me about the reviews was not that they were flattering, but that they grasped straight away what the book was about. Most of the English reviewers seemed to resent not just the technique, the style in which the book was written, but also the subject matter, that I should want to talk about such things.
In America the entire Doubleday edition was destroyed, on the orders of an executive, for similar reasons. The book has just been published in America under a different title [Love and Napalm: Export USA], by Grove Press. As far as response to the stories on the US SF scene goes, you’ve got to bear in mind that there I was seen as the originator of the so called New Wave – terrible phrase – and I was absolutely loathed by most of the American SF establishment. The old guard – Isaac Asimov and company – would almost go red in the face with anger. But that particular storm, New Wave versus Old Wave, has died down; it was just a sort of last spasm of the old guard, I think.
The so-called New Wave began long before it was seized on by the old-guard SF fans. When Ted Carnell was still editing the magazine, in the late fifties, he was already publishing the sort of material by me that was going to outrage American fans. He published ‘The Terminal Beach’, a story which actually started me off on the series that led to The Atrocity Exhibition, in 1963. Some of my early stories were already arousing tremendous hostility on the part of the British fans. They were writing to Ted and telling him, stop publishing this nonsense. So the trouble was brewing a long, long while ago.
LINNETT: The Atrocity Exhibition was published in 1970 – could you say anything about what you’ve done since?
BALLARD: Well, my last novel [Concrete Island] I finished three weeks ago. I’d rather not give the story away as it won’t be published here for a year. But a previous novel, Crash, will be published in June by Cape. I spent about two years writing that. As the title implies it’s about the motor car, and its whole role in our lives. It’s a cautionary tale in a sense, how I see the future. Sex times technology equals the future. In the novel I take the motor car as most clearly representing technology in our lives.
LINNETT: Taking off from The Atrocity Exhibition?
BALLARD: In a sense it’s