I think the future is going to be angular, rather hard geometrically, stripped of ornament. Unpredictable, with rapid temperature changes from black to white in the sun. I think the future will be very lunar, and people will behave in a very lunar way, very isolated from each other. Does that appeal to me? Yes it does, because I think people will have more freedom there. I mean, the freedom of isolation, the freedom of complete choice in one’s behaviour. It’s the difference between being in an empty city or being in a resort out of season or being on a crowded beach.
ORR: But surely there’s something between that. That sounds absolutely horrifying to me.
BALLARD: I don’t think there are going to be any more in-betweens. That’s my latest prophecy! No, I think one’s moving into a realm where everything will become increasingly stylised. It’s quite obvious that nothing is going to exist at all that doesn’t serve some sort of imaginative role in the future. It won’t simply be because we won’t notice its existence – just as we don’t notice a piece of furniture unless it happens also to be an aesthetic object, if it conforms to various visual conventions of the day.
We tend to assume that people want to be together in a kind of renaissance city if you like, imaginatively speaking, strolling in the evening across a crowded piazza. I don’t think people want to be together, I think they want to be alone. People are together in a traffic jam or in a crowded elevator in a department store, or on airlines. That’s togetherness. People don’t want to be together in a physical sense, in an actual running crowd on a pavement. People want to be alone. They want to be alone and watch television.
ORR: I don’t.
BALLARD: Most people do, actually.
ORR: I don’t want to be in a traffic jam, but I don’t want to be alone on a dune, either.
BALLARD: No, I didn’t suggest that you should be. But I’m saying that you probably have more privacy in your life than you realise. One lives in a world where, even if one’s apartment or hotel room tends to be small, one tends to be the only occupant of it. One is not living in something like an eighteenth- or nineteenth-century city where it was, metaphorically speaking, like a crowded noisy tenement, where we knew every neighbour, where we were surrounded by relations of many generations, in an intimate sort of social context made up of hundreds of people. This isn’t the case.
Most of us lead comparatively isolated lives. ‘Being alone on a dune’ is probably a better description of how you actually lead your life than you realise, compared with the life you would have lived fifty years ago, or 150 years ago, where you would have been surrounded in a large tenement or a large dwelling in an overcrowded city, say. If you think of a medieval town, well, probably every inhabitant knew every other inhabitant intimately, or at least knew something of them. One’s not living in that world any more.
The city or the town or the suburb or the street – these are places of considerable isolation. People like it that way, too. They don’t want to know all their neighbours. This is just a small example where the conventional appeal of the good life needs to be looked at again. I don’t think people would want to have the sort of life that was lived 100 years ago or 200 years ago.
ORR: On that note we’re going to have to close up shop …
1974: Robert Louit. Crash & Learn
Originally published in Foundation, The Review of Science Fiction 9, November 1975. Translated by Peter Nicholls
Like Jannick Storm, editor and translator Robert Louit played a critical role in promoting Ballard’s work beyond the English-speaking world. Louit lived in London in the early 1970s and translated many of Ballard’s novels into French (as well as some by Philip K. Dick), and, again like Storm, he was there at the birth of one of Ballard’s most significant works. According to Ballard’s then agent John Wolfers and Ballard archivist David Pringle, Louit played a major part in editing the original, extensive manuscript of Crash down to a publishable size.
This interview first appeared in April 1974 in Magazine Littéraire, with Louit translating Ballard’s answers into French. The version here is a back-translation by science fiction critic Peter Nicholls, who, in an earlier review of Crash, wrote that Ballard was ‘advocating a life style quite likely to involve the sudden death of yourself or those you love’. When Nicholls came to realise that Ballard’s aims were less shock tactic and more social commentary, he decided as editor of Foundation to correct that earlier assessment by reprinting the Magazine Littéraire interview alongside Ballard’s introduction to the French edition of Crash (again, back-translated by Nicholls from the Louit version). In his original introduction, Nicholls relates that Ballard had told him ‘a number of interesting things … about the reception of Crash! [sic]. He commented that it had been received less enthusiastically in the USA, and more enthusiastically in France, than he expected. He now believes this is because “there is a tradition of intellectual pornography in France, while in America pornography is still disreputable”.’
The interview covers Ballard’s views on science fiction, the experimental nature of The Atrocity Exhibition, the commodification of surrealism and the increasing dominance of television. At this stage, Concrete Island had been published but was yet to appear in France, so Louit made no mention of it. Note the exclamation mark in Crash’s title, consistent with the French publication. [SS]
LOUIT: What’s your position today with respect to science fiction?
BALLARD: When I began writing, towards the end of the fifties, science fiction was the only branch of literature which permitted speculative writing making evaluations of human reaction to the various upheavals, scientific, technological, political, which were happening them. I turned naturally towards the genre. I’m tempted to say that half of my work preceding The Atrocity Exhibition was science fiction; the other half belongs to fantasy or to allegory pure and simple – for example, my short story ‘The Drowned Giant’. I consider that I left the genre completely with The Atrocity Exhibition, but I don’t have any substitute terminology to offer you for what I actually write. Crash! is not a science fiction novel, but could nevertheless be read as one, because it contains elements of political and ‘sociological’ thought which one finds in certain works of the genre. I wouldn’t want a reader tackling Crash! to let himself be fenced in by the limitations (which don’t, however, necessarily imply a pejorative judgement) that are habitually attributed to science fiction.
LOUIT: You once defined science fiction as ‘the literature of technological optimism, born in America in the twenties’. It seems to me that your work takes the exact opposite course to the one implied by this. Perhaps the subject matter remains to a certain extent technological, but you are less occupied in speculating on the future than on the present, whose strangeness and fascination you unveil. The result is not always optimistic.
BALLARD: Exactly. I don’t see much I could add to that description. For some years I have been trying to show the present from an unusual angle.
LOUIT: This evolution of yours culminates in the ‘fragmented’ stories of The Atrocity Exhibition.
BALLARD: In effect. The determining factor for me was the assassination of John Kennedy in 1963: it is, among other things, the subject of The Atrocity Exhibition. I wrote a lot about the Kennedys at that time because they seemed to me a kind of twentieth-century House of Atreides. Their history illustrates particularly well the way in which, little by little, the fictional elements of everyday reality have ended up by completely masking the so-called ‘real’ elements. It’s the same in politics: presidential elections in the USA are nothing less than the crashing together of two spheres of fiction, like the collision of two galaxies. As to private