GODDARD: How do you view your books since The Atrocity Exhibition in the greater science fiction context, in which you maintain they still have a niche?
BALLARD: You’re entirely right, and I’ve said so myself, they do still have a niche. I was tremendously exhilarated when I started reading American science fiction – the excitement, the enormous power of imagination, etc. But I felt they weren’t really making the most of their own landscapes and subject matter. Right from the start what I wanted to do was write a science fiction book that got away from spaceships, the far future, and all this stuff which I felt was basically rather juvenile, to writing a kind of adult science fiction based upon the present. Why couldn’t one harness this freedom and vitality? SF is a form, above all else, that puts a tremendous premium upon the imagination, and that’s something that seems to have left the English novel in the last 150 years. Imagination is enormously important, and I felt that if one could only harness this capacity to think imaginatively in an adult SF, one would have achieved something.
Right from the beginning I tried with varying success to write a science fiction about the present day, which is more difficult to do than one realises, because the natural tendency when writing in a basically allegorical mode is to set something at a distance because it makes the separateness of the allegory that much more obvious. I wanted to write about the present day, and I think Crash, Concrete Island and the book I’ve just finished, which are a kind of trilogy, represent the conclusion of the particular logic I’ve been trying to unfold ever since I began writing. Are they SF? I don’t know – maybe the science fiction of the present day will be something like Crash. They come into the category of imaginative fiction, don’t they? With a strong moralistic, cautionary and exploratory note. But I don’t know whether they’re SF or not.
PRINGLE: What do you mean by ‘moralistic’?
BALLARD: Trying to say something about the quality of one’s moral direction in the ordinary sense of the term.
PRINGLE: There’s one thing that people who dislike your work often talk about, and that’s a lack of moral standards, a lack of some sort of touchstone, where you stand. This disturbed a lot of people who reviewed Crash.
BALLARD: They were supposed to be disturbed. When I set out to write Crash, I wanted to write a book in which there was nowhere to hide. I wanted the reader, once I’d got him inside the book, never to lose sight of the subject matter. As long as he continued reading he was face to face with the subject matter. It would have been very easy to write a conventional book about car crashes in which it was quite clear that the author was on the side of sanity, justice and against injuring small children, deaths on the road, bad driving, etc. What could be easier? I chose to completely accept the demands of the subject matter, which were to provoke the reader by saying that these car crashes are good for you, you thoroughly enjoy them, they make your sex life richer, they represent part of the marriage between sex, the human organism and technology. I say all these things in order to provoke the reader and also to test him. There may be truth in some of these sentiments, disagreeable though they are to consider. Nobody likes that they’ll think ‘God, the man’s mad’, but any other way of writing that book would have been a cop-out, I think.
GODDARD: Why did you call the protagonist of Crash ‘Ballard’?
BALLARD: Well, that was part of the whole business of being absolutely as honest as I could. I wanted a first-person narrator to stand between Vaughan and the reader – the honest thing to do was to give him my own name. Although the superficial landscapes of the book’s ‘Ballard’ and my life are different, there are many correspondences. Also, I wanted to anchor the book more in reality; I had a named film star [Elizabeth Taylor], who never speaks, of course.
The constant striving of the writer over the last few years has been to lower the threshold of fiction in what he writes, to reduce the amount of fiction. One’s seen this in the theatre over the last fifteen years, and in the visual arts it started a long, long time ago. The move is to reduce the fictional elements in whatever one is doing and get it to overlap reality as much as possible, rather than keep it separate from reality and ordinary experience.
GODDARD: How do you react to criticism of your books? I’m thinking particularly of inane criticisms. Going back to Martin Amis and his review of Crash, he said something like ‘he uses the word penis 147 times’.
BALLARD: I didn’t read that. I didn’t read any of the reviews of Crash in this country. There didn’t seem any point after the reviews of The Atrocity Exhibition – nobody read the book. Having been a reviewer myself, I can always tell when somebody has stopped reading the book he’s reviewing. As for criticism in general, well, science fiction writers have always been handicapped by a lack of intelligent critical response. That’s why it’s so encouraging to find intelligent magazines like Cypher around now, and intelligent critics like David Pringle here – they didn’t exist ten years ago.
On the other hand, in America particularly, the critical response to SF has got totally out of hand. Now and then someone shows me a copy of the New York Review of Books, and I recently saw an ad for some of the most extraordinary stuff, either a series of lectures someone was giving, or a series of publications – sort of Levi-Strauss and Heinlein’s such and such – all of them sounding like self-parodies, the application of serious literary criticism to popular SF authors.
GODDARD: In Billion Year Spree, Brian Aldiss said of your early work that you had never resolved the problem of writing a narrative in which the central character pursues no purposeful course of action. That seemed rather harsh.
BALLARD: It ties in with what I was saying earlier. I think Brian is at heart an SF fan, and he approaches my stuff – about which he is very generous and always has been – like an SF fan. He judges what he sees. To him, these books have a sort of vacuum at their centre – the character’s behaviour superficially seems to be either passive or meaningless in the context of the events. Why don’t they just run for the hills? Why don’t they head north? There won’t be a problem – there won’t be a novel either, of course. Therefore I think he fails to realise that, in a novel like The Drowned World – and this applies to all my fiction – the hero is the only one who is pursuing a meaningful course of action.
In The Drowned World, the hero, Kerans, is the only one to do anything meaningful. His decision to stay, to come to terms with the changes taking place within himself, to understand the logic of his relationship with the shifting biological kingdom, and his decision finally to go south and greet the sun, is a totally meaningful course of action. The behaviour of the other people, which superficially appears to be meaningful – getting the hell out, or draining the lagoons – is totally meaningless. The book is about the discovery by the hero of his true compass bearings, both mentally and literally. It’s the same in the others: in The Crystal World the hero decides to go back and immolate himself in a timeless world. In ‘The Terminal Beach’ why does the man stagger ashore on an abandoned island, what is he doing there? I can well understand that to the SF fan his behaviour is meaningless or lacks purpose – this, I think, means that Brian may have read too much SF.
PRINGLE: Can you tell us about your physical methods of writing, and whether they’ve changed over the years?
BALLARD: They haven’t changed. I don’t find that I work late in the evening now unless I really have to. My eyes are tired. But basically I haven’t changed my approach. I set myself a target, about a thousand words a day – unless I just stare out of the window, which I do a lot of anyway. I generally