WARNING: This review contains written text of an extremely brutal and explicit sexual nature.
Crash is Ballard’s most ‘controversial’ book because of its combination of psychotic behaviour (the characters’ obsession with car crashes) with extraordinarily powerful pornographic writing. It depicts the sexual fetishisation of car crashes with tremendous intensity:
In these crude photographs, Vaughan had frozen my uncertain embraces as I edged my wounded body into its first sexual encounters since the accident. He had caught my hand stretching across the transmission tunnel of my wife’s sports car, the inner surface of my forearm dented by the chromium gear lever, my bruised wrist pressing against the white flank of her thigh; my still-numb mouth against Renata’s left nipple, lifting her breast from her blouse as my hair fell across the window-sill; Helen Remington sitting astride me in the passenger seat of her black saloon, skirt hitched around her waist, scarred knees pressing against the vinyl seat as my penis entered her vulva, the oblique angle of the instrument panel forming a series of blurred ellipses like globes ascending from our happy loins.
The book is packed with scenes like this, in which the two central male characters become sexually addicted to fantasies of brutal car crashes, masturbating and ejaculating over their photos and film footage of terribly car wrecks or paying prostitutes to adopt the postures of car crash victims for their semen-filled, pornographic satisfaction.
Source explanations in The Atrocity Exhibition
Why? Well, a clue is given in one of the intense, experimental texts which make up Crash’s predecessor, The Atrocity Exhibition. In it are several little speeches given by the book’s resident psychiatrist, Dr Nathan, who suggests that:
‘Now that sex is becoming more and more a conceptual act, an intellectualization divorced from affect and physiology alike, one has to bear in mind the positive merits of the sexual perversions. Talbert’s library of cheap photo-pornography is in fact a vital literature, a kindling of the few taste buds left in the jaded palates of our so-called sexuality.’
And later the same idea is repeated:
‘Sex is now a conceptual act, it’s probably only in terms of the perversions that we can make contact with each other at all. The perversions are completely neutral, cut off from any suggestion of psychopathology – in fact, most of the ones I’ve tried are out of date. We need to invent a series of imaginary sexual perversions just to keep the activity alive.’
Nathan is suggesting that conventional sex has become so ‘vanilla’, and we humans so incapable of reaching each other during it, that only extreme perversions and pornography can nowadays prompt a response, a reaction, a genuine connection.
The Atrocity Exhibition doesn’t stop at car crashes, but suggests the erotic potential of newsreel atrocities, napalm burning Vietnamese villages, and speculates that eye witnesses to the Kennedy assassination experienced a surge in their sex lives for months afterwards. The book is saturated to overflowing with sexual imagery and feelings.
Ballard is being frank about the way that sex, sexual arousal and sexual excitement is nowhere near as easily defined or controlled as we like to think. But in Crash he is concentrating on the weird obsession people have with cars, on cars as the focal point of post-war culture.
The mystique of car crashes
Crash is obviously related to the famous exhibition Ballard put on in 1969 titled Crashed Cars, displaying three auto wrecks complete with photos of their original locations and conditions, an exhibition which scandalised right-thinking people at the time but would pass with barely a flicker today (it was fifty years go, after all).
Why stage it at all? Because there is something genuinely hypnotic and entrancing about car crashes. We stop to stare at them on the motorway or the street but, more symptomatically, our culture is full of all sorts of thrills and excitements to do with cars, from Formula One racing to stock car rallies to the American fad for demolition derbies, and thousands of movies which feature ‘thrilling’ car chases.
Crash is only really taking the idea of risk and excitement implicit in our culture’s obsession with cars to its logical, intense and irrational conclusion.
It is clear that the car crash is seen as a fertilizing rather than a destructive experience, a liberation of sexual and machine libido, mediating the sexuality of those who have died with an erotic intensity impossible in any other form. (The Atrocity Exhibition)
Part of what shocked readers then and now is the calm, detached, scientific way in which Ballard describes, using only the correct biological terminology (there are no swearwords anywhere in the book), the sexual obsession of the two central male figures, their erections, the shape of their penises, the way they rub the glans against the hand or shoulder of a paid-for prostitute, and the calm way he describes arranging the prostitutes so that their ‘vents’ and ‘clefts’ are presented in stylised poses, or imagines the vaginal mucus of the film star who both men are obsessed with, Elizabeth Taylor.
Vaughan propped the cine-camera against the rim of the steering wheel. He lounged back, legs apart,one hand adjusting his heavy groin. The whiteness of his arms and chest, and the scars that marked his skin like my own, gave his body an unhealthy and metallic sheen, like the worn vinyl of the car interior. These apparently meaningless notches on his skin, like the gouges of a chisel, marked the sharp embrace of a collapsing passenger compartment, a cuneiform of the flesh formed by shattering instrument dials,fractured gear levers and parking-light switches. Together they described an exact language of pain and sensation, eroticism and desire.
Part of the book’s transgressive thrill comes from the way the most outlandish sexual impulses are treated in this blank, detached, factual way. ‘Have you no shame, no manners, no restraint?’ the books critics asked. No, replied Ballard.
The collision of our two cars, and the death of her husband, had become the key to a new sexuality. During the first months after his death she moved through a series of rapidly consumed affairs, as if taking the genitalia of all these men into her hands and her vagina would in some way bring her husband back to life, and that all this semen mixed within her womb would quicken the fading image of the dead man within her mind.
See – no swearwords, just a documentary factuality. But of a subject (‘all this semen mixed within her womb’) that is usually discussed and described in polite circumlocutions (‘she had several boyfriends after her husband died’). It is this incredibly blunt reduction of all aspects of relationships to penises and vulvas which is, I think, the most calculatingly offensive aspect of the book.
The plot – short version
The plot is fairly straightforward: The married narrator is a professional producer of TV commercials. He has a car crash and as a result finds his (already rampant) sexuality being warped into re-enacting or remembering the crash, not least with the woman survivor of the car he crashed into, Dr Helen Remington. He is spied on and then meets Dr Robert Vaughan, a former TV presenter and a man obsessed with the sexual fetishisation of car crashes. He meets Vaughan’s small circle of fellow scarred crash survivors, and both the narrator and his wife find themselves drawn into the sexual fetishisation of car crashes in its most intense form, exploring the outer limits of perverse sexuality, before the book ends with Vaughan’s failed attempt to crash his car into the limousine of Elizabeth Taylor, the Hollywood film star who is in London to make a film.
The plot – long version
The (initially unnamed) first-person male narrator is a 4-year-old producer of television commercials (p.80) and lives near the film studios in Shepperton, west of London. He has a wife named Catherine and is having an affair with his secretary, Renata. One day he is involved in a car crash, his tyre blows out, propelling his car across the central reservation into the path of an ongoing car and they collide head-on. The male driver of the other car is thrown clean through the windscreen and bleeds to death all over the narrator, the man’s stunned wife staring into his eyes.
Narrator and wife – now widow – are taken to Ashford hospital where they both slowly recuperate and notice a burly doctor prowling around. Through a series of events the narrator finds himself bumping into the crash victim, whose name is Dr Helen Remington.
First a note that his sex life with his wife was already intensely erotic. She has affairs with fellow pilots or businessmen, knowing about his affair with Renata. During their marital sex, together they describe and/or re-enact Catherine’s latest sexual adventure and, at the moment of climax, she reveals her latest lover’s name.
The narrator drives Renata to the location of the crash, parks on the hard shoulder, and proceeds to have sex with the reluctant woman. A car is parked not far behind them and he notices a man with a camera. Later he’ll find out this was Vaughan voyeuristically photographing him.
A few days later, having dropped his wife at her work, the narrator picks up one of the hookers who hang round London airport and drives her to the top of Northolt multi-story car park to have sex. She is giving him a blowjob when a flashbulb goes off. Detaching himself and getting out, the narrator follows the photographer back to his car and realises a) it is the same man he saw prowling in Ashford hospital and parked behind him on the hard shoulder b) it is Dr Robert Vaughan, former computer scientist with a glamorous career as a TV presenter (a new type of crossover figure in the late 1960s and 70s). Vaughan refers to the narrator as ‘Ballard’. Aha. It is one of those kinds of novels, the kind where the narrator has the same name as the author. Not very often, though, so I’ll continue to refer to him as ‘the narrator’ since this is how he comes over in the text.
A week or so later, Ballard goes to the Northolt police pound to find his wrecked car, he finds Helen there. They drift into conversation and, in an electrifying scene, he offers to drive her home and they find themselves driving towards the location of the crash. The narrator becomes carried away by hyper-sexual fantasies
I followed the queue of cars, already thinking of how she would behave during sexual intercourse. I tried to visualize her broad mouth around her husband’s penis, sharp fingers between his buttocks searching out his prostate.
The narrator surreptitiously rubs the glans of his penis against the steering wheel until he ejaculates. He is quite shaken up; Helen seems to notice, and she puts his hand on her shoulder and guides him to a quiet side street, where she tells him about her job in the immigration department of the airport, while the narrator trembles with complicated lusts. He drops her home.
A week after the coroner’s inquest, the narrator sees Helen waiting at a bus stop at one of the airport terminals and offers her a lift. Once again they ascend the motorway and head towards the crash site. She presses against his shoulder. Wordlessly he comes off the motorway and drives to a deserted service road among the reservoirs. Here they have shatteringly erotic sex, mutual masturbation followed by her mounting him, all parts of their bodies in contact with the complicated mouldings, plastic and glass of the car’s interior.
The plastic laminates around me, the colour of washed anthracite, were the same tones as her pubic hairs parted at the vestibule of her vulva. The passenger compartment enclosed us like a machine generating from our sexual act an homunculus of blood, semen and engine coolant.
Over the next few weeks they have sex in his car routinely, but discover they can’t achieve it at her house: he can’t get an erection, she gets irritable and snappy.
While his wife is away at some conference the narrator takes Helen to a stock car rally – his jilted secretary gave him two tickets as an ironic gesture. One of the contestants is a wrecked-looking man with a ponytail of white hair who we learn is named Seagrave, a former stunt driver at Shepperton studios. He is encouraged in taking part by none other than the sinister Dr Vaughan.
When the stunt Seagrave is involved in goes wrong, Vaughan asks Helen to accompany him as he drives Seagrave to the nearest hospital, with the narrator following in his car. Once at the hospital, Helen takes Seagrave in, while the narrator gets into the passenger seat of Vaughan’s car. It is here, during their long wait, that the narrator first becomes sexually attracted to Vaughan and his (already hyper-active sexual imagination) fantasises about holding the bigger man’s penis, about masturbating him, or being entered by him, and almost sees the globules of the big man’s sperm spurting across the car dashboard. (It is like this all the way through.)
When Seagrave is released, Vaughan takes him, Helen and the narrator back to Seagrave’s house. Here they meet his thin nervy 30-year-old wife Vera, his 2-year-old son, and two friends, a TV producer who worked with Vaughan early in his career and a 30 year-old social worker named Gabrielle who has metal braces on her arms and back from a severe crash. While they sit on Seagrave’s sofa in his suburban house, Vaughan takes Ballard out to the back where he shows him his ‘project’, which is a big album of photos showing every stage of Gabrielle’s life from the crash, which he attended and helped at, through every stage of her recovery. Entranced, the narrator realises the crash blessed her with an entire new sexuality.
This agreeable young woman, with her pleasant sexual dreams, had been reborn within the breaking contours of her crushed sports car. Three months later, sitting beside her physiotherapy instructor in her new invalid car, she held the chromium treadles in her strong fingers as if they were extensions of her clitoris. Her knowing eyes seemed well aware that the space between her crippled legs was constantly within the gaze of this muscled young man. His eyes roved among the damp moor of her pubis as she moved the gear lever through its cage. The crushed body of the sports car had turned her into a creature of free and perverse sexuality, releasing within its twisted bulkheads and leaking engine coolant all the deviant possibilities of her sex.
Then Vaughan shows the narrator the sequence of photos he’s taken of him, in the car crash, in hospital, in cars having sex with Renata and then Helen. The narrator isn’t offended or upset, he’s fascinated. then Vaughan shows him the next stage of the project: photos of the movie star Elizabeth Taylor, who is currently in London, staying at the Hilton Hotel while she makes a movie at Shepperton Studios. Vaughan asks if the narrator knows her. Well, obviously not. But she is making a film at Shepperton and the narrator has an office there to produce commercials.
A few days later the narrator is at the studio, watching Liz Taylor herself be made up for the next scene of her film which is, eerily, spookily and unsurprisingly- a car crash. not only that, but Seagrave is being made up as Elizabeth Taylor in order to be her stunt double. There’s a kerfuffle at the door of the studio and the narrator sees Vaughan fighting off a security camera who is trying to take Vaughan’s camera away. Vaughan is a big man and retains it. He intends to photograph the scene.
The scene cuts to the narrator in bed with his wife. She is a very dirty lady, they are perfectly suited, as their marital sex reaches a climax, she asks the narrator insistently about Vaughan – has he seen Vaughan’s penis, how big is it, what shape is it, has he sucked his penis, would he like to, what flavour is his semen – and so on, until they both have thunderous orgasms.
In The Atrocity Exhibition some of the characters speculate about the invention or advent of a ‘new sexuality’. I realise that in Crash all the characters are living a new sexuality, and not just the men, not at all:
Gabrielle ‘The crushed body of the sports car had turned her into a creature of free and perverse sexuality’
Catherine ‘That Catherine should choose Vaughan, whose manic style summed up everything she found most unnerving, struck me as perfectly logical. The multiple car-crash we had seen had sprung the same traps in her mind as in mine.’
Helen ‘The collision of our two cars, and the death of her husband, had become the key to a new sexuality… Only in the car could she reach her orgasm.’
Helen has got a new job at the Road Research Laboratory. She takes the narrator along to witness one of those staged car crashes where the car is full of text crash dummy mannequins. Inevitably, Vaughan shows up, with his camera, and surreptitiously masturbates as the crash is carefully and elaborately staged by the RRL technicians, and Ballard gives a minutely detailed, moment-by-moment description of the test car crash, as filmed in slow motion.
Shavings of fibreglass from [the test motorbike rider’s] face and shoulders speckled the glass around the test car like silver snow, a death confetti.
The 30 or so spectators, including the Minister’s wife, stand around in silence, dumbfounded. It is like a religious ceremony. The narrator glances across and sees the wet patch at Vaughan’s crotch. Then Vaughan strolls over to the smashed car, wrenches open the front door and wedges onto the seat next to the mangled mannequin. Later he drives the narrator home and shows him the questionnaires he’s been getting his ‘friends’ and contacts to fill out, asking which politicians or celebrities they would like to see in car crashes; what sort of crashes they would be; what kind of wounds the celebrities would receive. The answers amount to an encyclopedia of physical atrocities which Ballard takes to the limit and beyond, as the entire book is intended to.
As Vaughan turned the car into a filling station courtyard the scarlet light from the neon sign over the portico flared across these grainy photographs of appalling injuries : the breasts of teenage girls deformed by instrument binnacles, the partial mammoplasties of elderly housewives carried out by the chromium louvres of windshield assemblies, nipples sectioned by manufacturers’ dashboard medallions; injuries to male and female genitalia caused by steering wheel shrouds, windshields during ejection, crushed door pillars, seat springs and handbrake units, cassette player instrument toggles. A succession of photographs of mutilated penises, sectioned vulvas and crushed testicles passed through the flaring light…
They pull over at a motorway services where the narrator buys a couple of bottles of wine, Vaughan rolls some joints and they pick up a couple of whores. The blonde sits in front next to the narrator as he drives, but in the back seat Vaughan subjects the dark-haired, slim-hipped one to extraordinary humiliations, moving and arranging her body into the postures of crash victims, exploring her cleft and orifices with scientific detachment, continually changing their positions. As he drives, the narrator realises he can control the sexual junctions taking place in the back by varying his speed, overtaking, accelerating, or going down exit ramps. Vaughan climaxes, they drive back to the services and dump the girls.
Over the next few days Vaughan bombards requests to get access to the actress and hand her his questionnaire. He is mad. In the narrator’s office he feverishly draws in imaginary car crash wounds on a publicity photo of Elizabeth Taylor while hitting his penis in a karate chop gesture, working himself towards orgasm, till the narrator stops him, all too aware of how aroused he is by Vaughan’s arousal. The narrator is fantasising almost continually about performing fellatio on Vaughan or being sodomised by him.
A few days later the narrator is driving Vaughan and Catherine back from the airport into central London. They are forced to slow down by the emergency services surrounding a three-car pile-up. The postures of the victims are graphically described as well as the firemen’s efforts to cut them out of the wreckage. They park on the hard shoulder a hundred yards further along, and Vaughan leaps out with his camera. A footbridge over the motorway is packed with sightseers gawping at the crash. The narrator notes the sexualised atmosphere, with the gawpers eventually leaving, arms round their partners.
On the way back into London the narrator pulls over into a service station and pays to go through the car wash repeatedly, while Vaughan has sex with his wife in the back seat, arranging their bodies in a series of stylised postures. Back in their apartment, the narrator dabs the wounds and bruises on her body with the tip of his penis.
Increasingly in thrall to Vaughan, the narrator becomes his unofficial chauffeur as they first steal cars, then borrow them using passkeys obtained from Seagrave’s wife for cars parked at the airport, and drive round looking for crashes or picking up whores or just available girls who Vaughan can position and abuse in innumerable poses in the back seat.
It’s during this period that they arrive at a devastating crash scene in order for Vaughan to a) get his camera and flash bulbs and take countless photos of the woman victim as she lies mangled across the front seats b) then cradle her head as she bleeds out into her white blouse and c) soon afterwards pick up a cheap prostitute and, in the back of his and the narrator’s car, makes her adopt the posture of the dying woman, examining her from all angles, and stylising her position before ejaculating over her.
They arrive at another crash to find the car of a middle-aged dentist has rolled over and off the road into a suburban garden. Waiting till the police and other services have quite left, Vaughan jumps down into the garden, takes his penis out and rubs it along various surfaces of the car. Finding a piece of chalk the police had used, he draws an outline of his penis against the paintwork. Pleased, he draws a succession of penis outlines all over the car and across the car’s seats and dashboard.
Vaughan, Gabrielle and the narrator visit the Motor Show at Earl’s Court. Showroom salesmen are embarrassed by Gabrielle’s extensive wounds and braces. Later, the narrator has sex with Gabrielle in her car, both of them bored with the conventional motions, until she starts kissing and sucking his scars, and he pushes his erect penis into the scarred grooves and clefts of her body caused by her crash. At which point they both become very aroused, and go on to have sex in her car over the following weeks.
The final chapters describe Vaughan’s increasing restless frustration. It’s a shock to both of them when they hear on the police radio of a crash involving Vaughan’s muse, Elizabeth Taylor. When they get to the scene they realise that – garishly and gruesomely and ironically – it is the raddled old stuntman, Seagrave, wearing the Elizabeth Taylor he’s been paid to wear when he was her body double in the staged car crash in the film she is still making at Shepperton.
Seagrave was high on LSD and drive head-on into the car of a faded TV presenter, and is dead, the present badly injured, and Vaughan follows the stretcher bearers carrying her to the ambulance (only to be turned away by the police who are coming to know Vaughan and his suspicious behaviour). Later he picks up a prostitute and rams his erect penis down her throat for ten minutes straight, making her gag and then vomit.
As the narrator accompanies Vaughan on their midnight outings to film or photograph crash scenes, or pick up prostitutes to arrange in ever more ghoulish postures of crash victims, the narrator realises his is increasingly attracted to Vaughan’s own sexuality, letting his homosexual tendencies become evermore obvious until, as he watches Vaughan copulating with prostitutes in the back seat of their car, he imagines it is he himself who is submitting to Vaughan’s oily, scarred hands and receiving his swollen penis in his anus or mouth.
The ante-penultimate chapter (21) is devoted to an extraordinarily vivid description of an acid trip, Vaughan giving the narrator a sugar cube dipped in acid as they set off driving and the drug kicking in as the narrator drives along the motorway, the text becoming carefully more visionary to reflect the gathering hallucinations.
Despite being tempted to drive into the oncoming traffic they manage to negotiate their way to a quiet slip road where, tripping off their faces, the narrator finally gets his long-held wish and has sex with Vaughan, unbuttoning him and kicking and kissing all his scars, before sucking his penis and then sodomising him and ejaculating in his anus, before the two very odd men return to slumping half naked in the front seats of their parked car, watching the light pour in glory from the crashed cars lying in the wrecker’s yard they’ve stopped next to.
Chapter 22 is brief and describes the narrator coming down from his acid trip, the world slowly returning to its banal grey, as he staggers from Vaughan’s heavy American Lincoln car and takes refuge in a wreck at the entrance to the wrecker’s yard. After an hour or so he stretches and stands up, and is walking back when he hears the roar of an engine and the Lincoln comes racing out from the underpass and tries to kill him, smashing into the side of the wrecked car and tearing down a stretch of the yard’s wooden fence, before roaring off along the slip road.
In chapter 23 it has taken the narrator some days to come down from his acid trip, and he is still having flashbacks and feeling shaken, not only by the intensity of the hallucinations, but by the memory of Vaughan suddenly, aggressively gunning the engine of the car and heading straight for him, trying to run him down.
The affair with Helen seems to have ceased and now he is recovering at the apartment and is looked after by Catherine who, having had sex with Vaughan, understands his addiction. They go out together in his car looking for the damaged archangel of the motorways, the concrete constructions described with the errant luminosity of the acid aftershocks.
They bump into Seagrave’s widow, Vera, at a filling station. She tells them the police are now definitely after Vaughan after an American serviceman was run over at Northolt. The narrator begins to explain that it’s not people but technology that stimulates Vaughan, but Vera cuts him short by telling him she was in the car with Vaughan. Ah. So he’s gone postal, crossed the line, achieved critical mass. Not sleeping or eating, haggard and grim-faced, Vaughan really has become the psychotic killer of the highways.
He is laying in wait for them. Catherine tells the narrator Vaughan followed her home from work at the airport, tailing her. The narrator follows Catherine as protection and next day takes part in a high-speed chase as Vaughan ram up alongside her, fades in the slow lane, then makes another approach and scrapes right alongside Catherine’s right car, before pulling away and disappearing down an exit ramp.
Day after day Vaughan follows Catherine along the expressways and airport perimeter roads. His old heavy Lincoln car is becoming a battered wreck, with dented fenders and wings, quarter windows smashed out, paintwork damaged and bent. The narrator doesn’t warn his wife about Vaughan’s intentions, but then he hardly needs to. Both of them have entered the end-zone, hypnotised by the high speed death-game they’re playing which is, of course, inextricably interfused with a panoply of sex games.
Aware of this coming collision, Catherine had entered an entranced room within her mind. Passively, she allowed me to move her limbs into the positions of unexplored sex acts.
After sex, in the quiet of the night, the narrator hears a heavy car gunning outside. He waits, dresses and goes down. There is Vaughan’s Lincoln, in all its battered dishevelled glory. Inside is a tartan blanket and empty food tins, Vaughan has evidently been living in it, on the run from the police. Catherine appears, she noticed his absence. As they stand beside the wrecked auto in the midnight silence, they hear the roar of another engine and walk back towards the ramp up out of the underground garage of the high rise where they live. Suddenly the narrator’s car appears, driven by Vaughan at manic speed. Before they have chance to cry out, the silver car has swerved round them and off into the night.
Ten days pass and the Lincoln slowly dies, its tyres deflating, rain and leaves getting in through the smashed windows, then a gang of youths completing the decay with a thorough trashing.
The short final chapter returns us to the start. Ballard’s stories are often book-ended like this, opening with a macabre scene and then going back to tell us how we ended up here. This is the structure of Crash. It opens with the narrator arriving at the scene of Vaughan’s final crash, the one in which he tried to collide with the chauffeur-driven limousine of movie star Elizabeth Taylor but missed, sailing through the safety barriers of a flyover and landing into the roof of a passing coach full of tourists. Vaughan is killed outright. Many of the tourists are killed or horribly maimed.
Now the narrator watches the white-faced film star, Liz Taylor, who the entire story has, in a sense, been about, standing by her stationary limo and being comforted by the chauffeur.
As well as the police and ambulance and helicopters fluttering overhead, a huge crowd has been drawn by (untrue) radio reports of the actress’s death and Ballard deploys his hallucinatory skills to great effect to describe the scene as a great stage set.
On the roofs of the police cars the warning lights revolved, beckoning more and more passers-by to the accident site, across the recreation grounds from the high-rise apartment blocks in Northolt, from the all-night supermarkets on Western Avenue, from the lines of traffic moving past the flyover. Lit by the arc-lights below, the deck of the flyover formed a proscenium arch visible for miles above the surrounding traffic. Across the deserted side-streets and pedestrian precincts, the concourses of the silent airport, the spectators moved towards this huge stage, drawn there by the logic and beauty of Vaughan’s death
The final apotheosis of the car crash as media event and public spectacle, liberating a multitude of latent sexual forces, attracting hundreds of sightseers, they know not why, and opening previous unknown doors in their minds.
The Epilogue describes the narrator and Catherine visiting the police pound, the one where he began his affair with Dr Remington, now in search of the wreckage of the car Vaughan stole and died in. They cram themselves into the wrecked back compartment and, inevitably, conduct a small sex act, she sitting astride him to ‘draw off a small spurt of semen after a short throe’. Then they walk among the wrecked cars.
Headlights are turned on, blinding them. Walking round to the car they find it occupied by Gabrielle, the car-crash cripple and Dr Remington. Ah. They are now a lesbian item. They reverse away and are gone. a) They were paying homage to Vaughan’s wrecked car and celebrating his legacy b) Ballard was handily informing us how their story ended up, the narrator pleased that Dr Remington’s explorations of sexual perversity are continuing.
The narrator realises he had cupped his hand under Catherine’s vulva after their sex to catch his oozing semen. Now, in the final scene of the book, they stroll among the wrecked cars and the narrator uses his semen to bless and anoint the instrument panels and steering wheels and handbrakes and all the other implements of pain and wounding and maiming which a car’s passenger compartment contains. It so perfectly conveys the jewelled perversity of the book that it’s worth quoting at length.
When they had gone, Helen’s arm on Gabrielle’s shoulder as she reversed away, Catherine and I moved among the cars. I found that I was still carrying the semen in my hand. Reaching through the fractured windshields and passenger windows around me, I marked my semen on the oily instrument panels and binnacles, touching these wound areas at their most deformed points.
We stopped at my own car, the remains of its passenger compartment sleek with Vaughan’s blood and mucilage. The instrument panel was covered with a black apron of human tissue, as if the blood had been sprayed on with a paint gun. With the semen in my hands I marked the crushed controls and instrument dials, defining for the last time the contours of Vaughan’s presence on the seats. The imprint of his buttocks seemed to hover among the creases of these deformed seats. I spread my semen over the seat, and then marked the sharp barb of the steering column, a bloodied lance rising from the deformed instrument panel.
Catherine and I stood back, watching these faint points of liquid glisten in the darkness, the first constellation in the new zodiac of our minds. I held Catherine’s arm around my waist as we wandered among the derelict cars, pressing her fingers against the muscles of my stomach wall. Already I knew that I was designing the elements of my own car-crash.
Stylised gestures, junctions and angles
Rereading the book I was taken by storm by the intensity of the sexual feelings and fantasies described by the narrator.
But also by another major thread, which is harder to describe and also a lot less sexy and so less grabby and impactful. And this is that, underlying the sexualisation of car crashes there is a kind of deeper level of weirdness, which is the basic, foundational insight – perception – hallucination, call it what you will, whereby Ballard identifies the geometry, the angles and abstract shapes and angles, underlying human bodies, human gestures and human behaviour.
In The Atrocity Exhibition Ballard mentions the Vorticists, the short-lived English avant-garde art movement which flourished just before the Great War. As the Tate website puts it:
Vorticist painting combined cubist fragmentation of reality with hard-edged imagery derived from the machine and the urban environment.
Add intense sexuality to the hard-edged imagery and you have Ballard:
The same unseen sexuality hovered over the queues of passengers moving through airport terminals, the junctions of their barely concealed genitalia and the engine nacelles of giant aircraft…
The same conjunctions, all the more terrifying when they seemed to evoke the underlying elements of character, I saw in the photographs of facial injuries. These wounds were illuminated like medieval manuscripts with the inset details of instrument trim and horn bosses, rear-view mirrors and dashboard dials. The face of a man whose nose had been crushed lay side by side with a chromium model-year emblem. A young coloured woman with sightless eyes lay on a hospital couch, a rear-view mirror inset beside her, its glassy stare replacing her own vision.
If the Vorticists (and the Futurists and other Modernist painters) saw the machine beneath the skin of the human organism, Ballard sees the machine beneath the skin – and then sees the machine and the human having sex.
As I explored her body, feeling my way among the braces and straps of her underwear, the unfamiliar planes of her hips and legs steered me into unique culs-de-sac, strange declensions of skin and musculature. Each of her deformities became a potent metaphor for the excitements of a new violence. Her body, with its angular contours, its unexpected junctions of mucous membrane and hairline, detrusor muscle and erectile tissue, was a ripening anthology of perverse possibilities.
A violent world sensationalised but also sanitised by mass media
There’s another thread running through the book, too, which is the sensationalising of atrocity by the newly available mass media i.e. television and photojournalism magazines.
Commentators in Ballard’s day were paying a lot of attention to the power of this new mass media, ‘new’ mainly referring to the newish technology of television, which was becoming more and more widespread.
It was only a few years since the Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan had published his book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, in 1964, which introduced the phrase: “The medium is the message”. The imaginative dominance of television was new, and it was taking place at the same time as an explosion in the uncensored coverage of war and atrocity, the mid-60s seeing the burnt corpses of Vietnam brought into everyone’s living room on the nightly news.
To many people, such as McLuhan, it seemed as if the visceral power of TV was introducing a new era in human consciousness and I think it’s important, for a sympathetic reading of the book, to grasp the novelty and power of these new insights about this popular new medium – and then to realise that Ballard was giving them visceral expression, taking to a straight-faced extreme the psychological damage which worried lots of contemporaries.
Here is the narrator’s wife visiting him in hospital after the crash:
Catherine watched me trying to catch my breath. I took her left hand and pressed it to my sternum. In her sophisticated eyes I was already becoming a kind of emotional cassette, taking my place with all those scenes of pain and violence that illuminated the margins of our lives – television newsreels of wars and student riots, natural disasters and police brutality which we vaguely watched on the colour TV set in our bedroom as we masturbated each other. This violence experienced at so many removes had become intimately associated with our sex acts. The beatings and burnings married in our minds with the delicious tremors of our erectile tissues, the spilt blood of students with the genital fluids that irrigated our fingers and mouths. Even my own pain as I lay in the hospital bed, while Catherine steered the glass urinal between my legs, painted fingernails pricking my penis, even the vagal flushes that seized at my chest seemed extensions of that real world of violence calmed and tamed within our television programmes and the pages of news magazines
So it’s not just a book about car crashes and sex: it’s a wider investigation or hallucination about the impact of extremely violent images being served up to quite ordinary citizens day after day after day in newspapers and on TV, and an exploration of the numbing, desensitising, and then disturbing impact this ultimately has on its consumers.
Here is the narrator, who has just driven his secretary to the site of that first crash and parked on the hard shoulder and finds himself in a psychotic state, linking: a) an extreme terminology describing sex and her body with b) the traumatic experience of the crash – all melded with c) the terrible images of human suffering which are now routinely packaged and promoted by the mass media. It makes for a searing combination:
I moved my hand along her thigh. Her vulva was a wet flower. An airline coach passed, the passengers bound for Stuttgart or Milan peering down at us. Renata buttoned her coat and took a copy of Paris-Match from the dashboard shelf. She turned the pages, glancing at the photographs of famine victims in the Philippines. This immersion in parallel themes of violence was a protective decoy. Her serious student’s eyes barely paused at the photograph of a swollen corpse that filled a complete page. This coda of death and mutilation passed below her precise fingers as I stared at the road junction where, fifty yards from the car in which I now sat, I had killed another man.
Car crashes and sex, yes: but also, between the lines, an indictment of the cynicism and exploitativeness of the high-minded magazines and TV programmes which distributed images of atrocity for profit.
If you need novels to have ‘themes’, then it is not hard to extract some weighty and still-very-relevant themes and ideas from this, at first glance, deliberately obscene and provocative novel.
Related links
Reviews of other Ballard books
Novels
- The Drowned World (1962)
- The Drought (1964)
- The Crystal World (1966)
- Some style features of the early novels of J.G. Ballard
- J.G. Ballard’s literary experimentalism
- The Atrocity Exhibition (1970)
- Preface to the French edition of Crash
- Crash (1973)
- Pornography, simile and surrealism in The Atrocity Exhibition and Crash
- Concrete Island (1974)
- High Rise (1975)
- The Unlimited Dream Company (1979)
- Hello America (1982)
Short story collections
- The Voices of Time and Other Stories (1962)
- The Terminal Beach (1964)
- The Disaster Area (1967)
- Vermilion Sands (1971)
- Low-Flying Aircraft and Other Stories (1976)
- The Venus Hunters (1980)
- Myths of the Near Future (1982)
Other science fiction reviews
Late Victorian
1888 Looking Backward 2000-1887 by Edward Bellamy – Julian West wakes up in the year 2000 to discover a peaceful revolution has ushered in a society of state planning, equality and contentment
1890 News from Nowhere by William Morris – waking from a long sleep, William Guest is shown round a London transformed into villages of contented craftsmen
1895 The Time Machine by H.G. Wells – the unnamed inventor and time traveller tells his dinner party guests the story of his adventure among the Eloi and the Morlocks in the year 802,701
1896 The Island of Doctor Moreau by H.G. Wells – Edward Prendick is stranded on a remote island where he discovers the ‘owner’, Dr Gustave Moreau, is experimentally creating human-animal hybrids
1897 The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells – an embittered young scientist, Griffin, makes himself invisible, starting with comic capers in a Sussex village, and ending with demented murders
1899 When The Sleeper Wakes/The Sleeper Wakes by H.G. Wells – Graham awakes in the year 2100 to find himself at the centre of a revolution to overthrow the repressive society of the future
1899 A Story of the Days To Come by H.G. Wells – set in the same future London as The Sleeper Wakes, Denton and Elizabeth defy her wealthy family in order to marry, fall into poverty, and experience life as serfs in the Underground city run by the sinister Labour Corps
1900s
1901 The First Men in the Moon by H.G. Wells – Mr Bedford and Mr Cavor use the invention of ‘Cavorite’ to fly to the moon and discover the underground civilisation of the Selenites
1904 The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth by H.G. Wells – scientists invent a compound which makes plants, animals and humans grow to giant size, prompting giant humans to rebel against the ‘little people’
1905 With the Night Mail by Rudyard Kipling – it is 2000 and the narrator accompanies a GPO airship across the Atlantic
1906 In the Days of the Comet by H.G. Wells – a comet passes through earth’s atmosphere and brings about ‘the Great Change’, inaugurating an era of wisdom and fairness, as told by narrator Willie Leadford
1908 The War in the Air by H.G. Wells – Bert Smallways, a bicycle-repairman from Kent, gets caught up in the outbreak of the war in the air which brings Western civilisation to an end
1909 The Machine Stops by E.M. Foster – people of the future live in underground cells regulated by ‘the Machine’ until one of them rebels
1910s
1912 The Lost World by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – Professor Challenger leads an expedition to a plateau in the Amazon rainforest where prehistoric animals still exist
1912 As Easy as ABC by Rudyard Kipling – set in 2065 in a world characterised by isolation and privacy, forces from the ABC are sent to suppress an outbreak of ‘crowdism’
1913 The Horror of the Heights by Arthur Conan Doyle – airman Captain Joyce-Armstrong flies higher than anyone before him and discovers the upper atmosphere is inhabited by vast jellyfish-like monsters
1914 The World Set Free by H.G. Wells – A history of the future in which the devastation of an atomic war leads to the creation of a World Government, told via a number of characters who are central to the change
1918 The Land That Time Forgot by Edgar Rice Burroughs – a trilogy of pulp novellas in which all-American heroes battle ape-men and dinosaurs on a lost island in the Antarctic
1920s
1921 We by Evgeny Zamyatin – like everyone else in the dystopian future of OneState, D-503 lives life according to the Table of Hours, until I-330 wakens him to the truth
1925 Heart of a Dog by Mikhail Bulgakov – a Moscow scientist transplants the testicles and pituitary gland of a dead tramp into the body of a stray dog, with disastrous consequences
1927 The Maracot Deep by Arthur Conan Doyle – a scientist, engineer and a hero are trying out a new bathysphere when the wire snaps and they hurtle to the bottom of the sea, where they discover…
1930s
1930 Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon – mind-boggling ‘history’ of the future of mankind over the next two billion years – surely the most sweeping vista of any science fiction book
1938 Out of the Silent Planet by C.S. Lewis – baddies Devine and Weston kidnap Oxford academic Ransom and take him in their spherical spaceship to Malacandra, as the natives call the planet Mars
1940s
1943 Perelandra (Voyage to Venus) by C.S. Lewis – Ransom is sent to Perelandra aka Venus, to prevent a second temptation by the Devil and the fall of the planet’s new young inhabitants
1945 That Hideous Strength: A Modern Fairy-Tale for Grown-ups by C.S. Lewis– Ransom assembles a motley crew to combat the rise of an evil corporation which is seeking to overthrow mankind
1949 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell – after a nuclear war, inhabitants of ruined London are divided into the sheep-like ‘proles’ and members of the Party who are kept under unremitting surveillance
1950s
1950 I, Robot by Isaac Asimov – nine short stories about ‘positronic’ robots, which chart their rise from dumb playmates to controllers of humanity’s destiny
1950 The Martian Chronicles – 13 short stories with 13 linking passages loosely describing mankind’s colonisation of Mars, featuring strange, dreamlike encounters with Martians
1951 Foundation by Isaac Asimov – the first five stories telling the rise of the Foundation created by psychohistorian Hari Seldon to preserve civilisation during the collapse of the Galactic Empire
1951 The Illustrated Man – eighteen short stories which use the future, Mars and Venus as settings for what are essentially earth-bound tales of fantasy and horror
1952 Foundation and Empire by Isaac Asimov – two long stories which continue the future history of the Foundation set up by psychohistorian Hari Seldon as it faces attack by an Imperial general, and then the menace of the mysterious mutant known only as ‘the Mule’
1953 Second Foundation by Isaac Asimov – concluding part of the Foundation Trilogy, which describes the attempt to preserve civilisation after the collapse of the Galactic Empire
1953 Earthman, Come Home by James Blish – the adventures of New York City, a self-contained space city which wanders the galaxy 2,000 years hence, powered by ‘spindizzy’ technology
1953 Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury – a masterpiece, a terrifying anticipation of a future when books are banned and professional firemen are paid to track down stashes of forbidden books and burn them until one fireman, Guy Montag, rebels
1953 The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester – a breathless novel set in a 24th century New York populated by telepaths and describing the mental collapse of corporate mogul Ben Reich who starts by murdering his rival Craye D’Courtney and becomes progressively more psychotic as he is pursued by telepathic detective, Lincoln Powell
1953 Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke a thrilling narrative involving the ‘Overlords’ who arrive from space to supervise mankind’s transition to the next stage in its evolution
1954 The Caves of Steel by Isaac Asimov – set 3,000 years in the future when humans have separated into ‘Spacers’ who have colonised 50 other planets, and the overpopulated earth whose inhabitants live in enclosed cities or ‘caves of steel’, and introducing detective Elijah Baley to solve a murder mystery
1956 The Naked Sun by Isaac Asimov – 3,000 years in the future detective Elijah Baley returns, with his robot sidekick, R. Daneel Olivaw, to solve a murder mystery on the remote planet of Solaria
— Some problems with Isaac Asimov’s science fiction
1956 They Shall Have Stars by James Blish – explains the invention, in the near future, of i) the anti-death drugs and ii) the spindizzy technology which allow the human race to colonise the galaxy
1956 The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester – a fast-paced phantasmagoria set in the 25th century where humans can teleport, a terrifying new weapon has been invented, and tattooed hard-man, Gulliver Foyle, is looking for revenge
1959 The Triumph of Time by James Blish – concluding novel of Blish’s ‘Okie’ tetralogy in which mayor of New York John Amalfi and his friends are present at the end of the universe
1959 The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut – Winston Niles Rumfoord builds a space ship to explore the solar system where encounters a chrono-synclastic infundibula, and this is just the start of a bizarre meandering fantasy which includes the Army of Mars attacking earth and the adventures of Boaz and Unk in the caverns of Mercury
1960s
1961 A Fall of Moondust by Arthur C. Clarke a pleasure tourbus on the moon is sucked down into a sink of moondust, sparking a race against time to rescue the trapped crew and passengers
1962 The Drowned World by J.G. Ballard – Dr Kerans is part of a UN mission to map the lost cities of Europe which have been inundated after solar flares melted the worlds ice caps and glaciers, but finds himself and his colleagues’ minds slowly infiltrated by prehistoric memories of the last time the world was like this, complete with tropical forest and giant lizards, and slowly losing their grasp on reality.
1962 The Voices of Time and Other Stories – Eight of Ballard’s most exquisite stories including the title tale about humanity slowly falling asleep even as they discover how to listen to the voices of time radiating from the mountains and distant stars, or The Cage of Sand where a handful of outcasts hide out in the vast dunes of Martian sand brought to earth as ballast which turned out to contain fatal viruses. Really weird and visionary.
1962 A Life For The Stars by James Blish – third in the Okie series about cities which can fly through space, focusing on the coming of age of kidnapped earther, young Crispin DeFord, aboard space-travelling New York
1962 The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick In an alternative future America lost the Second World War and has been partitioned between Japan and Nazi Germany. The narrative follows a motley crew of characters including a dealer in antique Americana, a German spy who warns a Japanese official about a looming surprise German attack, and a woman determined to track down the reclusive author of a hit book which describes an alternative future in which America won the Second World War
1962 Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut – the memoirs of American Howard W. Campbell Jr. who was raised in Germany and has adventures with Nazis and spies
1963 Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut – what starts out as an amiable picaresque as the narrator, John, tracks down the so-called ‘father of the atom bomb’, Felix Hoenniker for an interview turns into a really bleak, haunting nightmare where an alternative form of water, ice-nine, freezes all water in the world, including the water inside people, killing almost everyone and freezing all water forever
1964 The Drought by J.G. Ballard – It stops raining. Everywhere. Fresh water runs out. Society breaks down and people move en masse to the seaside, where fighting breaks out to get near the water and set up stills. In part two, ten years later, the last remnants of humanity scrape a living on the vast salt flats which rim the continents, until the male protagonist decides to venture back inland to see if any life survives
1964 The Terminal Beach by J.G. Ballard – Ballard’s breakthrough collection of 12 short stories which, among more traditional fare, includes mind-blowing descriptions of obsession, hallucination and mental decay set in the present day but exploring what he famously defined as ‘inner space’
1964 Dr. Strangelove, or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb by Peter George – a novelisation of the famous Kubrick film, notable for the prologue written as if by aliens who arrive in the distant future to find an earth utterly destroyed by the events described in the main narrative
1966 Rocannon’s World by Ursula Le Guin – Le Guin’s first novel, a ‘planetary romance’ or ‘science fantasy’ set on Fomalhaut II where ethnographer and ‘starlord’ Gaverel Rocannon rides winged tigers and meets all manner of bizarre foes in his quest to track down the aliens who destroyed his spaceship and killed his colleagues, aided by sword-wielding Lord Mogien and a telepathic Fian
1966 Planet of Exile by Ursula Le Guin – both the ‘farborn’ colonists of planet Werel, and the surrounding tribespeople, the Tevarans, must unite to fight off the marauding Gaal who are migrating south as the planet enters its deep long winter – not a good moment for the farborn leader, Jakob Agat Alterra, to fall in love with Rolery, the beautiful, golden-eyed daughter of the Tevaran chief
1966 – The Crystal World by J.G. Ballard – Dr Sanders journeys up an African river to discover that the jungle is slowly turning into crystals, as does anyone who loiters too long, and becomes enmeshed in the personal psychodramas of a cast of lunatics and obsessives
1967 The Disaster Area by J.G. Ballard – Nine short stories including memorable ones about giant birds, an the man who sees the prehistoric ocean washing over his quite suburb.
1967 City of Illusions by Ursula Le Guin – an unnamed humanoid with yellow cat’s eyes stumbles out of the great Eastern Forest which covers America thousands of years in the future when the human race has been reduced to a pitiful handful of suspicious rednecks or savages living in remote settlements. He is discovered and nursed back to health by a relatively benign commune but then decides he must make his way West in an epic trek across the continent to the fabled city of Es Toch where he will discover his true identity and mankind’s true history
1966 The Anti-Death League by Kingsley Amis –
1968 2001: A Space Odyssey a panoramic narrative which starts with aliens stimulating evolution among the first ape-men and ends with a spaceman being transformed into a galactic consciousness
1968 Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick In 1992 androids are almost indistinguishable from humans except by trained bounty hunters like Rick Deckard who is paid to track down and ‘retire’ escaped ‘andys’ – earning enough to buy mechanical animals, since all real animals died long ago
1969 Ubik by Philip K. Dick In 1992 the world is threatened by mutants with psionic powers who are combated by ‘inertials’. The novel focuses on the weird alternative world experienced by a group of inertials after they are involved in an explosion on the moon
1969 The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Le Guin – an envoy from the Ekumen or federation of advanced planets – Genly Ai – is sent to the planet Gethen to persuade its inhabitants to join the federation, but the focus of the book is a mind-expanding exploration of the hermaphroditism of Gethen’s inhabitants, as Genly is forced to undertake a gruelling trek across the planet’s frozen north with the disgraced native lord, Estraven, during which they develop a cross-species respect and, eventually, a kind of love
1969 Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut – Vonnegut’s breakthrough novel in which he manages to combine his personal memories of being an American POW of the Germans and witnessing the bombing of Dresden in the character of Billy Pilgrim, with a science fiction farrago about Tralfamadorians who kidnap Billy and transport him through time and space – and introduces the catchphrase ‘so it goes’
1970s
1970 Tau Zero by Poul Anderson – spaceship Leonora Christine leaves earth with a crew of fifty to discover if humans can colonise any of the planets orbiting the star Beta Virginis, but when its deceleration engines are damaged, the crew realise they need to exit the galaxy altogether in order to find space with low enough radiation to fix the engines – and then a series of unfortunate events mean they find themselves forced to accelerate faster and faster, effectively travelling forwards through time as well as space until they witness the end of the entire universe – one of the most thrilling sci-fi books I’ve ever read
1970 The Atrocity Exhibition by J.G. Ballard – Ballard’s best book, a collection of fifteen short experimental texts in stripped-down prose bringing together key obsessions like car crashes, mental breakdown, World War III, media images of atrocities and clinical sex
1971 Vermilion Sands by J.G. Ballard – nine short stories including Ballard’s first, from 1956, most of which follow the same shape, describing the arrival of a mysterious, beguiling woman in the fictional desert resort of Vermilion Sands, the setting for extravagantly surreal tales of the glossy, lurid and bizarre
1971 The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula Le Guin – thirty years in the future (in 2002) America is an overpopulated environmental catastrophe zone where meek and unassuming George Orr discovers that is dreams can alter reality, changing history at will. He comes under the control of visionary neuro-scientist, Dr Haber, who sets about using George’s powers to alter the world for the better with unanticipated and disastrous consequences
1971 Mutant 59: The Plastic Eater by Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis – a genetically engineered bacterium starts eating the world’s plastic, leading to harum scarum escapades in disaster-stricken London
1972 The Word for World Is Forest by Ursula Le Guin – novella set on the planet Athshe describing its brutal colonisation by exploitative Terrans (who call it ‘New Tahiti’) and the resistance of the metre-tall, furry, native population of Athsheans, with their culture of dreamtime and singing
1972 The Fifth Head of Cerberus by Gene Wolfe – a mind-boggling trio of novellas set on a pair of planets 20 light years away, the stories revolve around the puzzle of whether the supposedly human colonists are, in fact, the descendants of the planets’ shape-shifting aboriginal inhabitants who murdered the first earth colonists and took their places so effectively that they have forgotten the fact and think themselves genuinely human
1973 Crash by J.G. Ballard – Ballard’s most ‘controversial’ novel, a searingly intense description of its characters’ obsession with the sexuality of car crashes, wounds and disfigurement
1973 Rendezvous With Rama by Arthur C. Clarke – in 2031 a 50-kilometre-long object of alien origin enters the solar system, so the crew of the spaceship Endeavour are sent to explore it in one of the most haunting and evocative novels of this type ever written
1973 Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut – Vonnegut’s longest and most experimental novel with the barest of plots and characters allowing him to sound off about sex, race, America, environmentalism, with the appearance of his alter ego Kilgore Trout and even Vonnegut himself as a character, all enlivened by Vonnegut’s own naive illustrations and the throwaway catchphrase ‘And so on…’
1974 Concrete Island by J.G. Ballard – the short and powerful novella in which an advertising executive crashes his car onto a stretch of wasteland in the juncture of three motorways, finds he can’t get off it, and slowly adapts to life alongside its current, psychologically damaged inhabitants
1974 Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said by Philip K. Dick – America after the Second World War is a police state but the story is about popular TV host Jason Taverner who is plunged into an alternative version of this world where he is no longer a rich entertainer but down on the streets among the ‘ordinaries’ and on the run from the police. Why? And how can he get back to his storyline?
1974 The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin – in the future and 11 light years from earth, the physicist Shevek travels from the barren, communal, anarchist world of Anarres to its consumer capitalist cousin, Urras, with a message of brotherhood and a revolutionary new discovery which will change everything
1974 Inverted World by Christopher Priest – vivid description of a city on a distant planet which must move forwards on railway tracks constructed by the secretive ‘guilds’ in order not to fall behind the mysterious ‘optimum’ and avoid the fate of being obliterated by the planet’s bizarre lateral distorting, a vivid and disturbing narrative right up until the shock revelation of the last few pages
1975 High Rise by J.G. Ballard – an astonishingly intense and brutal vision of how the middle-class occupants of London’s newest and largest luxury, high-rise development spiral down from petty tiffs and jealousies into increasing alcohol-fuelled mayhem, disintegrating into full-blown civil war before regressing to starvation and cannibalism
1976 Slapstick by Kurt Vonnegut – a madly disorientating story about twin freaks, a future dystopia, shrinking Chinese and communication with the afterlife
1979 The Unlimited Dream Company by J.G. Ballard – a strange combination of banality and visionary weirdness as an unhinged young man crashes his stolen plane in suburban Shepperton, and starts performing magical acts like converting the inhabitants into birds, conjuring up exotic foliage, convinced his is on a mission to liberate them
1979 Jailbird by Kurt Vonnegut – the satirical story of Walter F. Starbuck and the RAMJAC Corps run by Mary Kathleen O’Looney, a baglady from Grand Central Station, among other satirical notions including the new that Kilgore Trout, a character who recurs in most of his novels, is one of the pseudonyms of a fellow prison at the gaol where Starbuck serves a two year sentence, one Dr Robert Fender
1980s
1980 Russian Hide and Seek by Kingsley Amis – set in an England of 2035 after a) the oil has run out and b) a left-wing government left NATO and England was promptly invaded by the Russians – ‘the Pacification’, who have settled down to become a ruling class and treat the native English like 19th century serfs
1980 The Venus Hunters by J.G. Ballard – seven very early and often quite cheesy sci-fi short stories, along with a visionary satire on Vietnam (1969), and then two mature stories from the 1970s which show Ballard’s approach sliding into mannerism
1981 The Golden Age of Science Fiction edited by Kingsley Amis – 17 classic sci-fi stories from what Amis considers the ‘Golden Era’ of the genre, basically the 1950s
1981 Hello America by J.G. Ballard – a hundred years from now an environmental catastrophe has turned America into a vast, arid desert, except for west of the Rockies which has become a rainforest of Amazonian opulence, and it is here that a ragtag band of explorers from old Europe discover a psychopath has crowned himself President Manson, has revived an old nuclear power station in order to light up Las Vegas, and plays roulette in Caesar’s Palace to decide which American city to nuke next, made redundant, girlfriend committed suicide) invents a fantasy world, the Dream Archipelago, and how it takes over his ‘real’ life
1982 Myths of the Near Future by J.G. Ballard – ten short stories showing Ballard’s range of subject matter from Second World War China to the rusting gantries of Cape Kennedy
1982 2010: Odyssey Two by Arthur C. Clarke – Heywood Floyd joins a Russian spaceship on a two-year journey to Jupiter to a) reclaim the abandoned Discovery and b) investigate the monolith on Japetus
1984 Neuromancer by William Gibson – Gibson’s stunning debut novel which establishes the ‘Sprawl’ universe, in which burnt-out cyberspace cowboy, Case, is lured by ex-hooker Molly into a mission led by ex-army colonel Armitage to penetrate the secretive corporation, Tessier-Ashpool, at the bidding of the vast and powerful artificial intelligence, Wintermute
1986 Burning Chrome by William Gibson – ten short stories, three or four set in Gibson’s ‘Sprawl’ universe, the others ranging across sci-fi possibilities, from a kind of horror story to one about a failing Russian space station
1986 Count Zero by William Gibson – second in the ‘Sprawl trilogy’
1987 2061: Odyssey Three by Arthur C. Clarke – Spaceship Galaxy is hijacked and forced to land on Europa, moon of the former Jupiter, in a ‘thriller’ notable for Clarke’s descriptions of the bizarre landscapes of Halley’s Comet and Europa
1988 Mona Lisa Overdrive by William Gibson – third of Gibson’s ‘Sprawl’ trilogy in which street-kid Mona is sold by her pimp to crooks who give her plastic surgery to make her look like global simstim star Angie Marshall, who they plan to kidnap but is herself on a quest to find her missing boyfriend, Bobby Newmark, one-time Count Zero; while the daughter of a Japanese gangster who’s sent her to London for safekeeping is abducted by Molly Millions, a lead character in Neuromancer
1990s
1990 The Difference Engine by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling – in an alternative version of history, Charles Babbage’s early computer, instead of being left as a paper theory, was actually built, drastically changing British society, so that by 1855 it is led by a party of industrialists and scientists who use databases and secret police to keep the population suppressedeep the population suppressed
Books & Boots 