Now I think the writer no longer needs to invent the fiction. The fiction is already there. His job is to put in the reality. The writer’s task now is to become much more analytic, especially the science fiction writer. He has to approach the subject matter of ordinary lives the way a scientist approaches nature, his subject matter. You know, one devises some sort of hypothesis and then applies it to one’s material, to one’s subject matter, and tests it to see whether the hypothesis is correct.
In Crash, I took an apparently absurd – well, terrifyingly absurd – idea, that car crashes might conceivably have a beneficial role, and tested that against the reality that people were actually experiencing. It seems to me that it may well be the case, in some strange way, that my hypothesis is correct. It fits the facts. The writer’s role now is much more investigative.
ORR: I wonder if we could discuss one of the points Judith Merril was discussing with Frederik Pohl and Arthur Gibson: in planning for the future, which things do you go about altering? They were discussing reality in terms of altering human psychology, saying that you have to somehow inspire in people a desire to do what is either (a) of personal benefit, or (b) of social benefit. Now it seems to me that those two are contradictory.
BALLARD: I think it’s very difficult to stand outside one’s own time and take a completely dispassionate view of what’s happening. I think a kind of relativity applies that makes it extremely difficult to know who we are, where we are, and where we are going at any given time. So I’d be very wary of deciding what our destination should be and suggesting that people should change or conform to it.
ORR: For people living in the thirteenth century, the sixteenth century was just as far off as we are now from the eighteenth.
BALLARD: We are living now in a radically different environment. We share our environment with the manifold products of science and technology. I mean, you can’t say that a man driving a motor car is alone if he hasn’t any passengers – he’s sharing reality with the motor car and the highway. He’s not alone in any sense whatever. I don’t think people are getting weak minded, I think quite the contrary – they are getting very much more tough minded than ever before. I think they need to be.
We take in our stride a high degree of ruthlessness in ourselves, in our private lives. We take for granted a wide range of options that we exercise without any second thoughts, without any self-doubts. It’s only at the fringes of our lives that we question this or that. I think quite the contrary, that people are getting very tough minded. I think that is why the future is going to be a very electric and aggressive place.
ORR: Do you agree with Pohl that we need that kind of small apocalypse to force a change?
BALLARD: Well, I think all the disasters have taken place, haven’t they? I don’t think there’s any need for another Hiroshima or another World War II – I don’t think we need another involved preview of Armageddon. These changes are taking place all the time. I welcome them: the more information flowing, the better. I mean, I prefer high-density information to low-density. I’m all for more and more experience of a more and more random kind: I think it makes for a richer and more exciting life. I think one should embrace all kinds of possibilities, no matter how bizarre, or perverse, or morally reprehensible they may seem. Change is almost good in itself.
ORR: Couldn’t Hiroshima be used as an argument that mankind is bent on a kind of suicidal path?
BALLARD: No. I think nuclear weapons and the limited amount of nuclear warfare that has actually taken place shows that people are fully able to master these weapons in a way that campaigners for nuclear disarmament twenty years ago certainly wouldn’t have accepted. I think mankind as a whole – the small number of men who control the use of these weapons – have made intelligent and sensible decisions, and the proof is in the pudding. We haven’t had any nuclear war and I don’t think we’re likely to.
ORR: Surely the intelligent decision is not to have them.
BALLARD: I don’t think that’s the intelligent decision at all. The object of having these weapons is to preserve peace and national security and they’ve achieved that. No major power is likely to renounce them, so any argument about them is academic.
ORR: What about other forms of doomsday – ecology and pollution?
BALLARD: Personally, I’m not that opposed to pollution. I think the transformation of the old landscape by concrete fields and all that isn’t necessarily bad by definition. I feel there’s a certain beauty in looking at a lake that has a bright metallic scum floating on top of it. A certain geometric beauty in a cone of china clay, say, four hundred yards high, suddenly placed in the middle of the rural landscape. It’s all a matter of a certain aesthetic response. Some people find highways, cloverleaf junctions, overpasses and multi-storey car parks to be ugly, chiefly because they are made of concrete. But they are not. Most are structures of great beauty.
When Los Angeles is forgotten, probably what will remain will be the huge freeway system. I’m certain people in the future – long after the automobile has been forgotten – will regard them as enigmatic and mysterious monuments which attested to the high aesthetic standards of the people that built them, in the same way that we look back on the pyramids or the mausoleums in a huge Egyptian necropolis as things of great beauty – we’ve forgotten their original function. It’s all a matter of aesthetics. I think that highways for the most part are beautiful. I prefer concrete to meadow.
ORR: Why? I can see liking one or the other. I don’t understand preferring something …
BALLARD: I feel that a modern high-rise building, or a concrete seven-storey car park, or a cloverleaf roadway junction, reflects and embraces within itself all the aesthetic laws of good design that we apply to the sorts of things we regard as beautiful in our lives, like well-designed cutlery and kitchen equipment. They embrace all the aesthetic standards of modern sculpture.
The last 100 years have consistently led us towards industrial design and the set of standards and aesthetic yardsticks which we apply in our everyday lives – to our judgement of which washing machine we buy, which motor car we prefer, which coffee percolator we like. But we must apply these yardsticks right across the board. They’re the same yardsticks, the same criteria that you see in the design of motorway junctions. They are motion sculptures of great beauty. Now, to say because it’s a road, it must therefore be automatically ugly is illogical. I simply accept the logic of the world in which I live.
There was a tremendous outcry over here about a year ago, when a section of motorway was built in central London, called the Westway, a six-lane concrete highway built on pillars which ran through what had been one of the most shabby areas of London around Harrow Road. People living in terrible conditions in these old Victorian, or pre-Victorian, houses – slums for the most part – raised this enormous outcry about the ugliness of this huge structure that swept through their neighbourhood. The irony is that if you drove along the highway it was actually a thing of great beauty. It’s a motion sculpture beautifully constructed and designed. The ugliness resides in the landscape it is supposed to be desecrating, in these ancient, tilting, collapsing Victorian houses, which are a blot on the landscape, socially, aesthetically and in every conceivable way. That’s an example of the sort of absurd and paradoxical logic that people apply.
ORR: Well, that’s part