II
Arguably, Ballard’s most striking interview is the one he gave to Carol Orr in 1974, soon after the publication of Crash, when his notoriety was riding high. Four years earlier, the entire run of the American edition of The Atrocity Exhibition, to be published by Doubleday, had been pulped after a Doubleday executive became apoplectic at some of the more controversial material within (principally the story ‘Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan’). Then, Crash was initially turned down by a publisher’s reader with the infamous words: ‘This author is beyond psychiatric help. Do not publish.’ Ballard was probably about as ‘cult’ as a writer could be at the time, and although still regarded as primarily a writer of science fiction, was distancing himself farther and farther from the genre. As a writer of SF, his ostensible line of work was to collate the future, yet he undermines that job description by telling Orr that there is no future, that ‘the present is throwing up so many options, so many alternatives, that it contains the possibilities of any future right now. You can have tomorrow today. And the notion of the future as a sort of programmatic device … a compass bearing … a destination that we are moving towards psychologically and physically … is rather outdated.’ It is for this reason, he has claimed elsewhere, that science fiction is dead, its predictive capacity castrated by the ever-changing, real-world present. The prophetic nature of that observation can be gauged by the fact that William Gibson, among the most intelligent and successful of contemporary science fiction writers, has said in recent interviews that he has given up on writing SF for similar reasons – almost three decades after Ballard.
Orr asks Ballard about the likelihood of nuclear holocaust, and his response both predicts and undermines the nuclear hysteria and paranoia that would peak in the 1980s. Warning that networked technology and identity theft will become greater threats, he argues that we must be prepared for a coming age ‘where bank balances will be constantly monitored and at almost any given time all the information that exists about ourselves will be on file somewhere … where all sorts of agencies, commercial, political and governmental, will have access to that information’. (This can be tested empirically: who among us has been the victim of online identity theft, and who of a nuclear holocaust?)
Compare with Alvin Toffler’s bestselling non-fiction book Future Shock, published three years earlier but in 1974 still considered a frightening, all-too-real vision of the future. Toffler warned of ‘massive adaptational breakdown’ unless ‘man quickly learns to control the rate of change in his personal affairs as well as in society at large’. He predicted turmoil on an epic scale, with most of the population struggling to cope with the psychological shock of a mass-mediated life. While Ballard is concerned about the effects of new technologies, he discerns a rather different outcome, rooted in his belief in the affirmative possibilities of technological advance. He tells Orr that modern urban dwellers are psychologically tougher than ever before, ‘strong enough to begin to play all kinds of deviant games, and I’m sure that this is to some extent taking place’. He explains how the isolation that results from immersion in technological systems will invariably play into our latent fantasies: ‘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 … [But people] want to be alone. They want to be alone and watch television.’ Orr is unsure, her voice trailing as she struggles to articulate: ‘No, I can’t agree with you there. I think it is not a question of a conscious decision …’
Patiently, Ballard clarifies the true ‘togetherness’ of the technological age: people pressed together in traffic jams, aeroplanes, elevators, hemmed in by technology, an artificial connectedness. Protesting, Orr says she doesn’t want to be in a traffic jam, but neither does she want ‘to be alone on a dune, either’. Ballard counters: ‘being alone on a dune is probably a better description of how you actually lead your life than you realise … 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.’ The exchange is significant because, with hindsight, we can determine Ballard testing the hypothesis behind Concrete Island, the follow-up to Crash, and a concentrated study in willed social isolation (marooning himself under a motorway overpass, and deciding to stay there indefinitely, Concrete Island’s protagonist finds new reserves of psychological strength in the process). Here, his interview-art is in full effect: running the test, storing the results, turning the tables on his interrogator.
In later interviews, Ballard would refine his views on affirmative social isolation, enthusing about the possibilities of private media and suggesting that the average home would soon acquire the processing power of a small TV studio, enabling us to broadcast our intimate fantasies to one another. In 1982 he told V. Vale that ‘Everybody will be doing it, everybody will be living inside a TV studio. That’s what the domestic home aspires to these days … We’re all going to be starring in our own sit-coms, and they’ll be very strange sit-coms, too, like the inside of our heads. That’s going to come, I’m absolutely sure of that, and it’ll really shake up everything.’ It is this vision, not Toffler’s, that continues to resonate.
Yet for Ballard there was always a dark side. Today, online persona factories frame a fluid performativity enabled by the irresistible connective tissue of social media. What is YouTube – now inevitably banal, smoothly integrated into the fabric of everyday life – if not the medium for each of us to design and star in ‘our own sit-coms’? Anyone familiar with Ballard’s brutal short story ‘The Intensive Care Unit’ (1977) will surely recognise the dark shadow of those ‘very strange’ productions (indeed, of what we now recognise as social media), with its disturbing warning about the dangers that await when we have the capacity to broadcast ‘the inside of our heads’. Ballard’s futurism, always potent, extremely well reasoned and argued – frequently alarming – was, above all, uncannily accurate. He did not flinch, and he expected us not to, either.
III
From the moment I first read a Ballard interview (before any of his fiction, in fact), his slyly subversive conversational style colonised my thoughts and I became obsessed with tracking down every interview he ever did (my search continues; this collection merely scratches the surface). Back then, naive and inexperienced, I convinced myself that Ballard’s interviews were superior to his novels. Sacrilege today, of course, but there was a case to be made, for I deeply admired how he worked the interview format with a neurosurgeon’s skill, finessing philosophical positions and aesthetic strategies that would later find purchase in his work, triaging real-world scenarios into the dark revelations of his fictional mirror worlds. I would find a new fix in obscure zines. I would painstakingly transcribe his radio and TV appearances. I would badger my elder Ballard-watching associates for access to their magnificent collections, but I had a lot of catching up to do. Henry James gave just three interviews in his life; there are at least two hundred published Ballard conversations. Before he’d even uttered a word, Don DeLillo once presented an interviewer with a card that warned: ‘I don’t want to talk about it’; Ballard, in his heyday, could talk for hours, plying his interrogators with Scotch to keep things on an even keel.