BALLARD: Literary competitions never produce anything all that outstanding. Newspapers and magazines for years have been running competitions for the best short story and the best travel story and so on, and the stuff that is sent in is never all that original, or all that exciting. I think the entries we received were interesting, but probably not so much for literary reasons as for biographical reasons, the circumstances in which people write stories, write poetry. This was interesting, and I think it was worth doing. Also, there was a lot of talk at the time about psychedelia, a kind of psychedelic revolution, that a whole lot of new arts were going to be produced, based on or inspired by drugs. And it was interesting to see as a result of the competition that in fact drugs didn’t have all that big an effect, that they’re very much a short cut and a short circuit.
STORM: Well, you’re a well-known admirer of William Burroughs. Would you say that his style has influenced yours?
BALLARD: No, I wish it had. Burroughs and I are completely different writers. I admire him as a writer who in his way has created the landscape of the twentieth century completely as new. He’s produced a kind of apocalyptical landscape, he’s close to Hieronymus Bosch and Bruegel. He’s not a pastoral writer by any means. He’s a writer of the nightmare. I only started reading Burroughs about four years ago, and it may be that he will influence me, I can’t say. But certainly he hasn’t influenced me now, though some people say he has. They’re completely wrong.
STORM: Actually there’s been quite a development in your style of writing. You started out with some quite ordinary stories, and now you have got these ‘condensed novels’, as you call them.
BALLARD: It has been a process of evolution rather than revolution. I wrote a novel called The Drought, after The Drowned World. That was a novel about desert areas. I noticed while I was writing it that I was beginning to explore the geometry of a very abstract kind of landscape and very abstract relationships between the characters. I went on from there to write a short story, ‘The Terminal Beach’, set on Eniwetok, the island in the Pacific where the H-bomb was tested. There again I was starting to look at the characters, and the events of the story, in a very abstract, almost cubist way. I was isolating aspects of character, isolating aspects of the narrative, rather like a scientific investigator taking apart a strange machine to see how it works. My new stories, which I call ‘condensed novels’, stem from ‘The Terminal Beach’. They’re developments of that, but I don’t think there’s been a revolution in what I’ve done. There’s just been a steady change over the years.
STORM: In your new stories you are using actual persons like John F. Kennedy and Elizabeth Taylor and so on. Why?
BALLARD: I feel that the 1960s represent a marked turning point. For the first time, with the end of the Cold War, I suppose, for the first time the outside world, so-called reality, is now almost completely a fiction. It’s a media landscape, if you like. It’s almost completely dominated by advertising, TV, mass-merchandising, politics conducted as advertising. People’s lives, even their individual private lives, are getting more and more controlled by what I call fiction. By fiction I mean anything invented for imaginative purposes. For example, you don’t buy an airline ticket, you don’t just buy transportation, let’s say, to the south of France or Spain. What you buy is the image of a particular airline, the kind of miniskirts the hostesses are wearing on that airline. In fact, airlines in America are selling themselves on this sort of thing.
Also the sort of homes people buy for themselves, the way they furnish their houses, even the way they talk, the friends they have, everything is becoming fictionalised. Therefore, given that reality is now a fiction, it’s not necessary for the writer to invent the fiction. The writer’s relationship with reality is completely the other way around. It’s the writer’s job to find the reality, to invent the reality, not to invent the fiction. The fiction is already there. The greatest fictional characters of the twentieth century are people like the Kennedys. They’re a twentieth-century House of Atreus.
These figures that I use, I don’t use them as individual characters. As I said in one of my stories, the body of a screen actress like Elizabeth Taylor, which one sees on thousands of cinema hoardings, thousands of advertisements every day, and on the movie screen itself, her body is a real landscape. It is as much a real landscape of our lives as any system of mountains or lakes or hills or anything else. So therefore I sought to use this material, this is the fictional material of the 1960s.
STORM: In SF Horizons, Brian Aldiss wrote that ‘Ballard is seldom discussed in fanzines’. Time has certainly proved him wrong, and now you are one of the most discussed people in fandom. What do you think of fandom itself?
BALLARD: I didn’t know that was the case, because I never see any fanzines. I don’t have any contact with fans. My one and only contact with fandom was when I’d just started writing, twelve years ago, when the World Science Fiction Convention was being held in London, in 1957, and I went along to that as a young new writer hoping to meet people who were interested in the serious aims of science fiction and all its possibilities. In fact there was just a collection of very unintelligent people, who were almost illiterate, who had no interest whatever in the serious and interesting possibilities of science fiction. In fact I was so taken aback by that convention that I more or less stopped writing for a couple of years. Since then I’ve had absolutely nothing to do with fans, and I think they’re a great handicap to science fiction and always have been.
1970: Lynn Barber. Sci-fi Seer
Originally published in Penthouse 5:5, 1970
From 1967 to 1974 journalist Lynn Barber worked for Penthouse, becoming the magazine’s literary editor in the late 1960s, when she discovered New Worlds and the New Wave. This interview was the first of three she would conduct with Ballard over the course of his career, conversations that betrayed their familiarity with each other. In their 1987 interview, she berated Ballard for the unkempt nature of his Shepperton abode, the most prominent in a long line of interviewers baffled by his modest living arrangements. In their 1991 encounter, she provided background to their relationship: ‘When I first knew him in the sixties, he was a familiar, but jolly peculiar, figure on the New Worlds or Arts Lab scene. He was older than most – thirty-something rather than twenty-something – rather obviously public-schooly and ex-RAF, whereas the other sci-fi writers were all beard-and-sandals brigade. He drank whisky while everyone else smoked pot, and often turned up with startlingly famous friends, such as Lucien Freud and Francis Bacon and Eduardo Paolozzi.’ It was in this interview that Barber claimed Ballard liked to show photographs of his girlfriend’s car-crash injuries to party guests, although Ballard later denied this.
By the time of this first interview, Ballard had published The Atrocity Exhibition, which was gathering a good deal of notoriety owing principally to the pulping of the US edition. While it would be three years before his next novel, Crash, he kept himself busy with an array of extra-curricular activities: full page, sexually charged ads in magazines; acting in a surreal short film with Gabrielle Drake, based on Atrocity fragments; attempting a multimedia play based around the car crash; and staging his notorious exhibition of crashed cars, which managed to enrage its audience of drunken guests.
The original Penthouse introduction provides a perfect summation of the early Ballardian manifesto: ‘He talks to Lynn Barber about the space programme, the outlook for science, car crashes, violence and his vision of a deviant sexual future’. [SS]
BARBER: Your books and your pronouncements about science fiction (‘the apocalyptic literature of the twentieth century’ and ‘Outer space