This is a frightening realm, but it’s the sort of logic that works, for example, when you go to any motor car race. The fact that people are mangled to death in these huge machines spinning around at 150 miles an hour is something that is accepted. We accept the thrills and spills of the speedway track. Now we accept all kinds of violence. For example: for ten years Vietnam was just a TV war; it was just wallpaper, mental wallpaper. I think one learnt to enjoy – it’s a terrible thing to say – but one learnt to enjoy some of the apparently insane marriages between violence and technology that took place.
ORR: Do you have some kind of faith in the future?
BALLARD: I think there are going to be enormous changes. The rate of change over the next fifty years is going to be greater. I think sometimes that more events took place in the last ten years than happened in the whole of previous history. The rate of change is just extraordinary. Where we are, in the early seventies, is in a sense a doldrums period. So much happened in the sixties that people were exhausted by the change – people can only take so much change. Once you could see the enormous changes that took place all over the world during the sixties, you knew it was pretty obvious that this couldn’t go on for ever and it became obvious that everyone needed a period of consolidation. This is taking place now. But I think the process of radical change is going to begin again.
Now the materials are at hand thanks to advances in transplant surgery, of developments like the extra-uterine foetus, above all the application of the computer and its various spin-off devices to every aspect of domestic life as well as commercial and political life. Computers above all are leading us into a realm of really stupendous change where we’ll have to look twice to even identify ourselves. I think they’re going to offer us in the next twenty to thirty years a realm of bizarre possibilities that will far transcend anything that’s happened so far.
ORR: Insofar as we are able to grasp the opportunities more correctly than perhaps we have in the past?
BALLARD: Yes, but we’re moving into a realm where it is getting increasingly difficult to make moral judgements, to know what is right. I can only speak chiefly of England, but for example, popular views on capital punishment, on drugs, on pornography, on sexual freedom – these have changed enormously over the last ten to fifteen years. Even though there’s a certain backlash against permissiveness, we’re still enjoying a range of freedoms in those fields which were unthinkable, say, twenty years ago.
This process will continue, but we’re moving into a realm where it’s going to become even more difficult to make a judgement about whether such and such an activity is morally reprehensible or not. Whether it’s of moral value to institutionalise, say, homosexual marriages between consenting adults, men or women, and the whole view of the sanctity of the family as the basic social unit on which society rests – whether that is going to be jettisoned simply because the range of experiences available to somebody in the future will preclude the establishment of very durable personal relationships of the kind that are necessary to bring up children, and the like.
Again, one sees this in the overlay of an enormous range of changes where it is difficult to make out what is right and what is wrong. The old yardsticks don’t really help. One can visualise all kinds of social behaviour which run quite contrary to the sort of social and moral principles which we have been brought up on – sex, drugs, etc. These are all topics which are crying out at us from the headlines. But it is very difficult to apply the old moral yardstick to the new situations. This is why, by retreating from technology, as I think a lot of people are, we are in danger of losing our grip on the changing situation.
ORR: What is your reaction to Frederik Pohl, who said that science fiction ought to be propaganda? Did Wells and Huxley and Swift write propaganda?
BALLARD: Well, yes. I think science fiction has always had a sort of a cautionary role – of warning people. Warning its readers against the possibilities of the future. But I also see science fiction having a propaganda role. I see the SF writer looking into the future and saying: ‘Well, twenty years from now black may be white, morally and every other way’. Think about a world in which this or that social relationship is something that may appal us. Now this might very well be the norm – it might be a social crime to think about having a child.
The whole tradition of valuing people who bring up large families, by giving them every conceivable welfare benefit and the like, tax advantages and so forth – that may be turned on its head. I mean, to think in terms of monogamous sexual relationships oriented around the idea of reproduction, of having children, may become morally offensive, it may be a crime on all levels to do this. One’s got to bear in mind that a complete reversal of that kind may take place. This sort of casualness in promiscuity may become much admired: they may be necessary virtues which society as a whole will encourage.
ORR: Except that there’s a difference we ought to draw here between propaganda and warnings. In order to write propaganda you must necessarily take a moral stance, mustn’t you?
BALLARD: Yes, I suppose that’s true but it’s a science fiction writer’s job, to some extent, to live on a sort of boom, on the bowsprit in front of the boat. I mean, he’s got to live at least a few minutes ahead of everybody else, if not a few years. He’s got to anticipate the sort of world which may exist and offer either encouragement or warning. And I think a lot of encouragement is needed. We must urge people to face the future, for I think that people turn their backs on the future. In a sense, our whole notion of past, present and future has become a little worn out.
One of the biggest casualties of World War II, for example, certainly as far as Europe was concerned, was that the past ceased to exist. The whole social order, based on an intimate, continuing understanding of the past and all its forms going back for many generations, underpinning the present in every conceivable way – that ended. I mean, you now meet people who have no idea who their grandparents were, which in this country, in England, was unthinkable twenty years ago.
But I think another casualty, in a sense, is the future. The present is throwing up so many options, so many alternatives, that it contains the possibilities of any future right now. You can have tomorrow today. And the notion of the future as a sort of programmatic device – a direction, a compass bearing that we can look forward to, a destination that we are moving towards psychologically and physically – I think that possibility is rather outdated.
We’re living in a kind of continuum of past, present and future, where anything is possible. The whole distinction between fiction and reality is turned on its head. The external environment now is the greatest provider of fiction. We are living inside an enormous novel, written by the external world, by the worlds of advertising, mass-merchandising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, and so on and so forth. The one node of reality left to us is inside our own heads.
ORR: This is the ‘inner space’ you were talking about?
BALLARD: In a sense. I suppose we are moving into a realm where inner space is no longer just inside our skulls but is in the terrain we see around us in everyday life. We are moving into a world where the elements of fiction are that world – and by fiction I mean anything invented to serve imaginative ends, whether it is invented by an advertising agency, a politician, an airline or what have you. These elements have now crowded out the old-fashioned elements of reality.
ORR: But surely that’s always been a part of any consumer society? That’s