I spend a tremendous amount of time, I won’t say doing research, but just soaking myself in the mental landscapes, particularly of a novel. Most of the time I’m thinking about what I’m writing, or hope to write. Particularly with Crash and The Atrocity Exhibition. I was carrying these for something like six or seven years. I was totally immersed mentally in this very overcharged world. It was an exciting time, but very tiring.
PRINGLE: Did you actually visit motorways and inspect the landscape?
BALLARD: Oh yes, I did a lot of research of that kind. I photographed this, that and the other.
PRINGLE: Was the inspiration for Concrete Island an actual place?
BALLARD: No. I’ve always been interested, since it was built, by the Westway motorway near Shepherd’s Bush, where I set the novel. It always struck me, driving around these complex interchanges, what would happen if someone stood by the wayside and tried to flag you down? Of course, nobody would stop. You can’t stop – you’d just have a multiple pile-up. You’d be dead if you tried to stop. France is a much more technologically oriented country than England, with the big high-speed boulevards that circle Paris. You can drive on the motorway from the Channel – it’s not the outskirts of Paris by any means, you can see the Eiffel Tower half a mile away – on their equivalent of our circular road. You can circle Paris if you want to, and you can pick up the motorway going south without stopping at a single traffic light. It’s an enormous complex of interchanges and multilevel high-speed avenues, and the French seem to drive much more aggressively than people do over here.
It often struck me there, every summer if you were marooned up on one of those balustrade ramparts – it’s not just a two-dimensional island, they’ve got three-dimensional islands up in the air – you’d never get off. The traffic seems to be flowing twenty-four hours a day. The French are ruthless, they don’t stop for anybody. Jesus Christ himself could be crucified by the wayside and nobody would stop. It was an obvious sort of idea to have. What’s so interesting about the technological landscape is the way it plays into people’s hands, people’s possibly worst motives. It’s difficult to maroon yourself on the A1, but much easier to maroon yourself on Westway.
GODDARD: Would you care to tell us something about what your future plans are?
BALLARD: Well, I finished a novel about three weeks ago, and since then I’ve written a couple of short stories and am writing a third now, and just catching my breath a bit.
PRINGLE: What’s the new novel called?
BALLARD: I call it The High Life provisionally [renamed High-Rise]. I may change it, I may stick to it. I don’t know.
GODDARD: You’ve no plans for another trilogy of novels on the lines of the last three?
BALLARD: I just tend to write whatever comes mentally to hand, and what I find interesting at a particular time. These decisions as to what one’s going to write tend to be made somewhere at the back of one’s mind, so one can’t consciously say ‘that’s what I’m going to write’. It doesn’t work out like that!
1976: Jörg Krichbaum & Rein A. Zondergeld. ‘It would be a mistake to write about the future’
Originally published in German as ‘Es wäre ein Irrtum, über die Zukunft zu Schreiben: J. G. Ballard im Gespräch mit Jörg Krichbaum und Rein A. Zondergeld’, Franz Rottensteiner (ed.), Quarber Merkur: Aufsätze zur Science Fiction und Phantastichen Literatur, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1979. Translated by Dan O’Hara
This interview, conducted at Shepperton on 1 March 1976, was first published in German in the science fiction magazine Quarber Merkur, and later republished in a paperback collection of articles from the magazine in 1979. In retranslating it into English, I’ve strayed from the rather formal style of the German version, trying to recover a little of the feel of Ballard’s own intonations and rhythms. Naturally this involves some distortion of the literal meaning conveyed in the German, but by the same token, it also involves the elimination of some of the more prolix distortions of Ballard’s original phrases.
Ballard’s comments on Russian writers and his explanation of his own use of specific filmic techniques are perhaps quite novel. His concern here is to define the uniqueness of his own work, set against the kind of science fiction favoured in Germany at the time, such as that by Stanislaw Lem (in fact, many of the other articles in this collection are by or about Lem), and he does this by implicitly dismissing both utopian and dystopian modes, especially where they deal with the future. What he emphasises instead is how he takes the stuff of the contemporary world as his subject, repeatedly mentioning ways in which he derives his techniques, formal methods and diction from the present. [DOH]
KRICHBAUM/ZONDERGELD: Before we talk about SF in England and America, in eastern Europe there’s also a great tradition of SF, Lem, for example, or the Strugatskis. What do you think of them?
BALLARD: To be honest, I find Lem rather hard going. His whole attitude towards the subject matter is entirely different from my own. He has something so demonstratively scientific and … messianic. In my work I proceed analytically, whereas he assembles vast systems synthetically. There’s something reminiscent of Star Trek in his work, ‘The Big Concept’. I don’t like Russian SF, or at least not that which I’ve read. Previously I often wrote reviews for the newspapers here. And I would sometimes get a Russian anthology sent to me, but I found it lacking in imagination. I say it reluctantly, but it was as if the spark was missing. It was never exciting, all grey on grey.
KRICHBAUM/ZONDERGELD: This style of grey mediocrity, which is also the principal quality of official socialist-realist literature …
BALLARD: Right, that’s exactly what I meant. You know, you always get these stories in which people are sitting around in tiny flats in Moscow. And then: ‘Agricultural Controller Woroschilow said …’ or some computer specialists bustle about the prose, you know. They rarely get off the ground, there’s something dead in it, like the regime of Soviet style. SF needs these old-fashioned things: the consumer society. It needs the media, which trickles slowly down to us. In SF it’s not a matter of science, but of pop science, and that’s something entirely different. Pop science, in how it’s transmitted for a mass audience through the media, TV and newspapers, through encyclopedias, which are published in a series of volumes. That’s the wave that carries SF. If one doesn’t have this whole mass media, then the material of SF is simply missing. It’s a peculiar thing.
KRICHBAUM/ZONDERGELD: In your earlier books, an interesting thing there is the relation between painting and literature, especially the relation to surrealist painting. Could you perhaps briefly say something about the possibilities of one artistic discipline influencing another? In your case, this seems particularly clear.
BALLARD: Yes, that’s true, actually. The surrealist painters have strongly influenced me. I don’t believe I’ve been influenced in this way by other literature. It’s been said that I was influenced by Joseph Conrad …
KRICHBAUM/ZONDERGELD: … why Conrad?
BALLARD: … but when the critics wrote that, I had still never read anything by Conrad. I first began with him a few years ago. But the surrealist painters were important. The essence of the surrealist imagination is its ability to translate the apparent forms of the world, the outer forms, into inner ones, into mental forms. The surrealist painter doesn’t seek to interpret the outer world as the classic schools of painting did, the Impressionists or the cubists or what you will; these