BALLARD: Yes, that’s true, but there are no living children in my fiction – yet all the people who know me closely know that I’m a very fond father and all the rest of it. It’s just that children are not relevant to my work.
GODDARD: Could you tell us more about your four disaster novels, which you insist aren’t disaster novels? The Wind from Nowhere, The Drowned World, The Drought and The Crystal World all have disaster in them, in the classic British SF form.
BALLARD: You’re right when you say that it’s a classic English SF form, but that’s the reason why I used the formula of the disaster story. Usually these disaster stories are treated as though they are disasters, they’re treated straight, and everyone’s running for the hills or out of the hills or whatever. If it’s going to be cold they’re all pulling on overcoats. I use the form because I deliberately want to invert it – that’s the whole point of the novels. The heroes, for psychological reasons of their own, embrace the particular transformation. These are stories of huge psychic transformations – I’m talking retrospectively now. And I use this external transformation of the landscape to reflect and marry with the internal transformation, the psychological transformation, of the characters. This is what the subject matter of these books is: they’re transformation stories rather than disaster stories.
If you take that classic among English disaster stories, The Day of the Triffids, I think it’s probably fair to say that there’s absolutely no psychological depth. The characters react to the changes that are taking place, but they are not in any psychological way involved with the proliferating vegetation, or whatever else is going on. They cope with the situation in the same way as the inhabitants of this town might cope with, say, a reservoir bursting. In the classic English disaster story there’s no involvement on a psychological level with whatever is taking place. My novels are completely different, and they only use the form superficially.
PRINGLE: On the question of space travel: you imply that it’s an improper subject for SF writers, but of course increasingly it is taking place.
BALLARD: No, you’re wrong. Decreasingly it’s taking place. I wrote a review of some book in New Society, a mad book – The Next Ten Thousand Years – in which I said the Space Age lasted about ten years. It’s true. That’s the extraordinary paradox. At the time of Gagarin’s first flight in 1961, everybody really thought that the Space Age would last for hundreds of years. One could say: ‘Now the Space Age begins, and it’s going on for ever.’ In fact, it ended with the last Skylab mission.
PRINGLE: You really believe that?
BALLARD: Absolutely. It happened. I’m sure there will be a Space Age, but it won’t be for fifty, 100, 200 years – presumably when they develop a new means of propulsion. It’s just too expensive. You can’t have a Space Age until you’ve got a lot of people in space. This is where I disagree, and I’ve often argued the point when I’ve met him, with Arthur C. Clarke. He believes that the future of fiction is in space, that this is the only subject. But I’m certain you can’t have a serious fiction based on experience from which the vast body of readers and writers is excluded. It’s absurd. In fact there are very few manned flights, if any, planned now. I think there are none.
PRINGLE: There’s the Soviet–American link-up flight this year.
BALLARD: Sorry, yes – orbital flights, but not lunar flights. Public disinterest became evident in the seventies, really. People weren’t even that touched by Armstrong landing on the moon. That was a stupendous event. I thought the psychological reverberations would be enormous, that they’d manifest themselves in every conceivable way – in department store window displays and styles of furnishing, etc. I really did believe that the spin-off from that event, both in obvious terms and in psychological terms, would be gigantic. In fact it was almost nil. It’s quite amazing. Clearly, the Space Age is over. Also, I think it’s rather difficult because, when SF writers have a monopoly of space travel they can define, they can invent the machinery literally, and they are the judges of their own authenticity.
This is one of my objections to SF, that the decks are all stacked, the reader doesn’t have a chance. As I’ve said for years, the stuff isn’t won from experience. It lacks that authority therefore. Now the SF writers are competing with the facts of real space flight. I haven’t read any recent SF. Perhaps it’s good, I don’t know.
GODDARD: For a few years in the mid-sixties your work had a sort of Jekyll-and-Hyde nature about it. You were producing both linear SF stories and the so-called experimental stories. Were you testing the water before taking the plunge, gauging public reaction?
BALLARD: They weren’t called experimental by me – I dislike that term. It implies a test procedure of uncertain outcome. The trouble with most British experimental writing is that it proves one thing, and that is that the experiment has not worked. I wasn’t influenced by market considerations at all. In fact, all through the sixties I was writing conventional short stories at the same time – there weren’t very many of them but I was still writing them. I’ve started writing some more now. In a review that Peter Linnett wrote, he said something about my giving up writing those Atrocity Exhibition pieces for financial reasons. I don’t know where he got that idea from. The simple fact is that the ideas that went into that book, good or bad, took years to generate. I’d like to write a follow-up to it, but it will take me ten years, probably, to accumulate the material inside my own head. Also, the climate is wrong now.
PRINGLE: There may have been no financial reasons for you to stop writing them, but were you at all influenced by adverse criticism?
BALLARD: Criticism by whom? By the SF readership? The literary critics or reviewers? I don’t know. Obviously a book like that is not going to be as popular as a conventionally written book, there’s no doubt about that, just as a book like Crash is not going to be popular. I found those stories in The Atrocity Exhibition produced more response from people than anything else I’ve ever written; people whom I’d never had any contact with, from all over the world, took the trouble to get in touch with me, which is a sure test of something. I felt the response to that book was better and larger than anything else I’ve ever had. In fact, I was encouraged to go on, because as I wrote the stories over a period of four or five years the response grew.
PRINGLE: I’d like to ask about the change from the non-linear style of The Atrocity Exhibition to the more conventional style of the two recent novels. Does this reflect a change of mind on your part about the worth of such techniques?
BALLARD: No. Maybe, when I was writing the stories and people questioned me about why I broke everything up, I tended to exaggerate a bit in the hope of getting something through. I may have made overlarge claims for non-linear narrative or whatever you want to call it, but basically I still feel that the subject matter comes first and the technique you adopt comes second. It was the subject matter of those stories that defined the way in which they were written. At the same time it’s true that once you develop an approach like that it, of itself, opens up so much more territory. I once said those condensed novels, as I called them, are like ordinary novels with the unimportant pieces left out. But it’s more than that – when you get the important pieces together, really together, not separated by great masses of ‘he said, she said’ and opening and shutting of doors, ‘following morning’ and all this stuff – the great tide of forward conventional narration – it achieves critical mass, as it were, it begins to ignite and you get more things being generated. You’re getting crossovers and linkages between unexpected and previously totally unrelated things, events, elements of the narration, ideas that in themselves begin to generate new matter.
I haven’t read any of those stories for a long time, but I remember it comes out of them – the crossovers become very unusual. It was very exciting to do. But those stories were written very much about their period, which was the middle to late sixties.