All posts tagged Dr Nathan

Pornography, simile and surrealism in The Atrocity Exhibition and Crash

WARNING: This review contains quotations and images of an extremely brutal and/or sexually explicit nature.

The Atrocity Exhibition (1970) is packed with deviant sexual activity, described with a cold clinical detachment, and Crash (1973) is notorious for being one of the most pornographic ‘serious’ novels of the post-war period, not just pornographic but deliberately and studiedly perverse, in that the story is about how the lead characters – both men and women – become fixated on the erotic potential of car crashes.

All this can easily appear gratuitous, designed purely to shock, or to generate publicity and sales.

But apart from all the external arguments we can invoke to defend Ballard, there are arguments in the works themselves which go some way to explaining their extremity.

In particular, one of the recurring characters in The Atrocity Exhibition, the psychiatrist Dr Nathan, is given several speeches where he explains the reason behind the lead character’s obsession with sex – and with extreme, fetishistic sex of the kind Ballard describes in these two books. These two or three speeches explain Ballard’s motivation, contain interesting insights about modern society, and unwittingly shed light on Ballard’s broader approach and technique.

1. Perverse sex resists the trivialisation and commercialisation of sexuality

During the 1960s sex came out of the closet and into all forms of art and media, advertising, music and movies, the mini-skirt, the pill. Ballard’s shock novels both became possible because of this swift liberalisation of social attitudes, but they are also in some measure a reaction against the modern ubiquity of sex:

‘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.’

The argument is that, as the imagery of sex becomes more ubiquitous in advertising and popular culture, our personal enactments of it unavoidably repeat images, positions, postures, maybe even words and phrases, which we have all seen in the tide of increasingly ‘liberated’ movies and TV dramas. So how can we escape from the sense of simply going through motions done much better on the silver screen by glamorous movie stars, or detailed in a thousand ‘How To Have Better Sex’ books and magazine articles, or in the highly sexualised fiction that we can now read? How can we escape from the nagging feeling that our sex lives have been colonised and occupied by the mass media?

By doing things ‘normal people’ would never dream of.

Thus, at a basic level – level 1 – the characters’ obsession with perverse sex is to some extent justifiable as a rejection of the safe, tame, commercially packaged and sanitised sex lives which are increasingly pushed on us from all directions.

(The irony of David Cronenberg making a glossy movie out of Crash was that he was incorporating into film a glaring example of a work which was trying to rebel against being incorporated into film. Hollywood eats everything. Turns everything into two-hour glamorisation and trivialisation, converts the weird and uncanny into a tried and trusted set of gestural and facial clichés. Which is why I loathe film as a medium.)

2. Car crashes are sexually liberating

But not only is extreme fetishistic sex a way of escaping the stifling ‘norms’ of how-to guides in magazines and on daytime TV – Dr Nathan goes on to assert that there is something specifically exciting and arousing about car crashes.

‘Talbot’s belief – and this is confirmed by the logic of the scenario – is that automobile crashes play very different roles from the ones we assign them. Apart from its ontological function, redefining the elements of space and time in terms of our most potent consumer durable, the car crash may be perceived unconsciously as a fertilizing rather than a destructive event – a liberation of sexual energy – mediating the sexuality of those who have died with an intensity impossible in any other form: James Dean and Miss Mansfield, Camus and the late President.’

Think how vital car crashes are to Hollywood movies, both comedies and catastrophes. Think of the orgasmic pleasure it gave hundreds of millions of cinema-goers to watch the whole world blow up in an orgy of crashing cars, airplanes and tube trains in the blockbuster Armageddon movie 2012, and all the many others like it.

Disaster movies are just a shallow, celluloid re-enactment of something much darker and fiercer in human nature: that we revel in destruction. Ballard is just taking this meme – embedded in countless examples of the most popular popular culture – and pushing it to one absolute limit.

The notion that witnessing car crashes allows the release of sexual energy among onlookers lies behind the semi-satirical ‘survey’s which make up the last sections of The Atrocity Exhibition. These assure us, in the po-faced language of questionnaires and social science, that witnesses of car crashes experience a sharp increase in their libido and report marked increases of sexual activity with their partners in the weeks that follow. Car crashes are hot!

3. Car crash sex is one way into a new form of sexuality

If you combine the two ideas above – 1. that fetishistic sex is a way of avoiding the commercialisation of our own sex lives, and 2. that car crashes are exciting – then you move towards a conclusion, a third idea: that car crash sexual fetishisation may be the gateway into a brand new form of human sexuality.

The deformed body of the crippled young woman, like the deformed bodies of the crashed automobiles, revealed the possibilities of an entirely new sexuality.

This view is repeated again and again in Atrocity Exhibition and Crash, that humans are evolving new relationships with their brutal built environment and with each other, and that the combination of the two – of concrete motorways and shopping precincts and multi-story car parks – is creating a new, dissociated, alienated psychology which is giving rise to a new, hard-edge psychology of sex.

4. Car crashes are telling us something

But then there is a fourth level of meaning: beneath the (normally forbidden and repressed) sexual elements which are liberated (in Ballard’s view) by car crashes, there is another, much deeper level of significance. For while we consciously deplore the loss of life etc, we are nonetheless attracted, compulsively attracted, to the scene of car crashes and to re-enact them over and over again. Why?

For Ballard, the assassination of President Kennedy forms a kind of religious apotheosis of the theme: and God knows American culture, from Oliver Stone to Don DeLillo, has been compelled to replay that moment in Dealey Plaza over and over again, picking at the scar, endlessly hoping the psychological devastation of that one fateful moment can be forced to reveal its true secret, to unfold the real conspiracy which led to the president’s death.

The fruitless investigations and countless personal obsessions with the Kennedy assassination are all trying to do the same thing – to get to the bottom, to find the truth about the world. For it all to make sense.

This is a fourth way of interpreting the meaning of car crashes: they are a weird and perverse emblem of humanity’s obsessive need to make sense of the world.

Dr Nathan, in The Atrocity Exhibition, describes one of the other characters as attempting to restage the Kennedy assassination but this time ‘so it makes sense’, and in the annotations he later wrote for the book, Ballard is (as usual) totally candid about the importance of the JFK assassination to the entire book.

Kennedy’s assassination presides over The Atrocity Exhibition, and in many ways the book is directly inspired by his death, and represents a desperate attempt to make sense of the tragedy, with its huge hidden agenda. The mass media created the Kennedy we know, and his death represented a tectonic shift in the communications landscape, sending fissures deep into the popular psyche that have not yet closed.

For all the characters in Crash, the crashes they’ve been involved and the systems of scars and scar tissue left woven into their bodies are telling them something, are codes whose code books have been lost, ciphers of some meaning trembling just beyond reach.

If you think this sounds eccentric or exaggerated, just cast your mind back to the public reaction to Princess Diana’s death in a car crash: it was epic, it was awesome, the entire nation came to a halt, vast crowds gathered outside Kensington Palace and queued for days to sign the book of condolence. And then her funeral. Every commentator at the time highlighted the sense of excess, that the nation seemed to be traumatised far more than the facts of the matter seemed to justify. My own interpretation was that it was us we were grieving for, for all our lost illusions, dreams and hopes which this fairytale princess had come to symbolise.

And then consider the conspiracy theories about the role of the driver, and the pursuing cars, and the role of MI6 or the Royal Family in ‘assassinating’ her, or was it the Russians or… or… Anything, no matter how far-fetched, in order to give meaning, purpose, shape and coherence to what was, in fact, just a stupid pointless car crash, like so many hundreds of thousands of others.

Well, it is the same forlorn, doomed quest for the elusive meaning at the heart of the violent confrontation between man and machine, for the sense of any meaning at the heart of our lives, which the characters of Crash are condemned to pursue, right up to the book’s logical and senseless climax.

5. Car crashes are examples of Ballard’s obsession with junctures and juxtapositions

But these four interpretations of car crash sex – the sexual and the psychological and the ontological – themselves overlay an even deeper level of meaning: for in The Atrocity Exhibition in particular we come to realise that the protagonist’s obsession with sex is in fact a sub-set of a much deeper obsession – an obsession with the way things are put together – with the modern world of junctions and conjunctions.

Seen from this perspective, sex is just the most garish and compelling avatar of a far deeper and more abstract structure which exists throughout the world as we know it, which is the joining together of disparate parts.

The Primary Act. As they entered the cinema, Dr Nathan confided to Captain Webster, ‘Talbert has accepted in absolute terms the logic of the sexual union. For him all junctions, whether of our own soft biologies or the hard geometries of these walls and ceilings, are equivalent to one another. What Talbert is searching for is the primary act of intercourse, the first apposition of the dimensions of time and space. In the multiplied body of the film actress – one of the few valid landscapes of our age – he finds what seems to be a neutral ground. For the most part the phenomenology of the world is a nightmarish excrescence. Our bodies, for example, are for him monstrous extensions of puffy tissue he can barely tolerate. The inventory of the young woman is in reality a death kit.’ Webster watched the images of the young woman on the screen, sections of her body intercut with pieces of modern architecture. All these buildings. What did Talbert want to do – sodomize the Festival Hall?

This passage explains in a flash the bizarre linkage of sex and architecture which runs throughout The Atrocity Exhibition and recurs in Crash, in its fetishisation of concrete motorways and multi-story car parks.

Modern brutalist architecture reveals the junctions of floors and ceilings, uprights and flats, struts and pillars, with crushing candour – and it is not altogether irrational to see the brutal slotting of concrete floors into concrete stanchions, stark geometric arrangements of prefabricated parts slotted together to create complicated cantilevered structures – with even the most basic sexual positions; even the missionary position, seen from outside, is quite an unwieldy network of limbs arranged in funny and strikingly geometric angles, four arms, four legs, bearing weights or bent at strange angles – all to arrange for the slotting of a vertical member into an oval orifice.

Seen – just seen – actually observed with no moral or sentimental framework whatsoever – sex is a complicated assemblage of moving parts for dubious ends.

Above all, the interest in angles, angles of entry or penetration, the rectilinear arrangements and poses of the human body, can be quite easily made to seem half-abstract.

The identification of splayed human bodies with the splayed metal plates of cars which have been in catastrophic crashes is not, in the end, that far-fetched.

Modern art and angles

This fetishistic approach seems less exceptional when taken out of the context of novels and literature altogether, and placed in the tradition of modern art.

Remember Ballard was very interested indeed in modern art, confessed in interviews to wanting to have been an artist, and litters his stories with art references. In these respects – exploring sexual perversion, and the geometric aspect of the human body – art was waaaaay ahead of written literature, having discovered the geometry beneath the skin of human beings fifty years before Ballard was writing his rude books.

Nude Descending a Staircase by Marcel Duchamp (1912)

Indeed, Duchamp’s famous painting Nude Descending a Staircase is directly referenced in The Atrocity Exhibition, in The Great American Nude chapter:

Koester parked the car outside the empty production offices. They walked through into the stage. An enormous geometric construction filled the hangar-like building, a maze of white plastic convolutions. Two painters were spraying pink lacquer over the bulbous curves. ‘What is this?’ Koester asked with irritation. ‘A model of A/ 3 1 ?’ Dr Nathan hummed to himself. ‘Almost,’ he replied coolly. ‘In fact, you’re looking at a famous face and body, an extension of Miss Taylor into a private dimension. The most tender act of love will take place in this bridal suite, the celebration of a unique nuptial occasion. And why not? Duchamp’s nude shivered her way downstairs, far more desirable to us than the Rokeby Venus, and for good reason.’

‘Far more desirable to us than the Rokeby Venus’? Discuss.

Bellmer and fetish dolls

Ballard was particularly attracted by the Surrealists, and The Atrocity Exhibition references a dozen or so Surrealist paintings and artists, and the idea of bodies regarded as weird fragments, taken to pieces and reassembled to make bizarre new biologies, was one of Surrealism’s basic strategies.

This is most crudely obvious in the obscene and disturbing mannequins made by the German Surrealist artist and photographer Hans Bellmer (1902 to 1975). Bellmer made his first recombined ‘dolls’ in 1933, was forced to flee to the Nazis, was welcomed to France by the Surrealists, and after the war continued to produce a stream of erotic drawings, etchings, sexually explicit photographs, paintings and prints, often – the transgressive little tinker – of pubescent girls.

Plate from La Poupée (1936) by Hans Bellmer

This is not just like Ballard, it virtually is the Ballard of The Atrocity Exhibition and Crash, in which men fetishise parts of the female body, pose women in awkward and anti-romantic positions, imagine women’s bodies as multiple fragments or as specific zones blown up to the size of billboard hoardings.

Bellmer explained his thinking thus:

What is at stake here is a totally new unity of form, meaning and feeling: language-images that cannot simply be thought up or written up … They constitute new, multifaceted objects, resembling polyplanes made of mirrors … As if the illogical was relaxation, as if laughter was permitted while thinking, as if error was a way and chance, a proof of eternity.

This could be Ballard talking.

Or take the surprise final work by Marcel Duchamp, the notorious (for the tiny number of people who have heard of it) Étant donnés, which Duchamp laboured over (allegedly) from 1946 to 1966 in his Greenwich Village studio, and which was only discovered after his death.

It consists of a common-or-garden wooden door which contains a peephole through which you see a brutal photo of a nude woman lying on her back with her face hidden, legs spread, and one hand holding a gas lamp against a landscape backdrop.

Étant donnés: 1° la chute d’eau / 2° le gaz d’éclairage (Given: 1. The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas) by Marcel Duchamp (1946 to 1966)

Shocked? You’re meant to be. Puzzled? Ditto.

Ballard and the French tradition of épatant la bourgeoisie

In fact, the more you think about it, the more ‘traditional’ Ballard’s two extreme books seem – just not in the well-mannered English tradition.

The Atrocity Exhibition and Crash have nothing in common with the polite and subtle novels about upper-middle-class life of an Anthony Powell from this period, or the works of the so-called Angry Young Men (Osborne, Amis), or the kitchen-sink dramas which came in in the early 60s (Saturday Night and Sunday morning et al).

But they are entirely in the tradition, the very long tradition, of French literary attempts to ‘épater la bourgeoisie’ or shock the middle classes.

This French tradition goes back at least as far as the self-consciously decadent poets and writers of the 1890s, or further back to Arthur Rimbaud writing in the 1870s or further back to Baudelaire’s poems about hashish and prostitutes, Les Fleurs du Mal in 1857, or maybe all the way back to the Marquis de Sade and works like The Hundred Days of Sodom (1785) which set out to scientifically catalogue every kind of sexual position and perversion conceivable to the mind of man.

By 1924 when André Breton published his Surrealist Manifesto France had had seventy years or so of ‘radical’ artists determined to use sex and obscenity to disrupt what they saw as the placid banality of bourgeois life.

Courbet scandalised the bourgeoisie with his Realism, Flaubert with the ‘immorality’ of Madame Bovary. Monet scandalised the bourgeoisie with his naked women at a picnic, the Impressionists with their shapeless ‘daubs’. Zola scandalised the bourgeoisie with his blunt Naturalism and frank depictions of Paris prostitutes (in Nana). The Decadents scandalised the bourgeoisie with their over-ripe dreams of drugs and unmentionable perversions. The Cubists scandalised the bourgeoisie with their collages and geometric shapes. The Surrealists shocked the bourgeoisie with their revelation of the sexual perversions lurking just beneath the surface of human consciousness. And so on…

In other words, in France, there is a very well-established and totally assimilated tradition of artists, novelists and playwrights doing their best to shock the bourgeoisie. Seen from this perspective Ballard is hardly a pioneer, more of a late-comer which, I think, sometimes explains the rather bloodless and placid feel of even his most ‘scandalous’ novels. Even when I first read them in the 1970s I had the sense that I’d somehow already read them and now, 40 years later, I think that’s because he was in fact channelling well-established tropes and notions (albeit from the Continental tradition) and simply updating them for the age of helicopters, napalm and multi-story car parks.

Surrealism, the art of juxtaposition and Ballard

At the core of Surrealist practice was the idea of the jarring juxtaposition of completely disparate elements.

It was while reading Les Chants de Maldoror, published in 1869 by Isidore-Lucien Ducasse under the pseudonym the Comte de Lautréamont, that the godfather of the French surrealists, André Breton, discovered the phrase that became foundational to the surrealist doctrine of objective chance:

as beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table.

Striking juxtapositions are a core element of the Surrealist aesthetic.

Thus when Ballard makes systematic, obsessive and repeated comparisons between the splayed bodies of naked women and a) the hard angles of brutalist concrete architecture, and b) the splayed metal and shattered windscreens of car crashes, he is following the Surrealist aesthetic to a T.

Although our imaginations are bombarded with adverts, films and novels encouraging us to think of sex as a smooth and sensual affair, not very different from eating a Cadburys Flake, anybody who’s actually had sex knows that it can also be quite energetic and brutal, that it contains elements of aggression and domination, compliance and submission which are hovering on the brink of possibility, waiting to be isolated and encouraged.

Since Fifty Shades of Grey became the fastest-selling novel of all time, we as a culture have become much more open about aspects of bondage or BDSM as it is now known and marketed in High Street sex shops, leading to a great deal more sexual experimentation of the kind Ballard describes in his books.

The identification of sex with car crashes was deeply shocking in the repressed 1960s, and upsets the simple-minded to this day, but both visually and conceptually, I am persuaded by Ballard that it is born of a deep, latent similarity between the two events.

Similes and Surreal juxtapositions

This gesture, the idea of the unexpected linking together of disparate elements, echoes some of the points I made in my essay about the importance of similes in Ballard’s writing.

Ballard uses similes a lot. So do other writers, but from his earliest novels Ballard as a writer is notable for the striking and outré comparisons he makes: a woman’s eyes are like dragonflies, wrecked cars look like Saurian lizards, high rise buildings tower overhead like glass coffins.

Ballard’s mind is always making comparisons and correlations, moving from the real concrete thing being described to often wild and unlikely analogies so that when you read a Ballard text you are not only reading about things themselves but are continually projected or flung into the full flood of his uncanny imaginarium.

This is another way to understand the obsession with geometry, planes and angles in The Atrocity Exhibition. It is like the technique of simile but converted into the language of geometry. You can think of all the references to angles and geometry as like being structural containers for similes, but without the actual content. Lines from the draft of a painting waiting to be filled in.

Looked at from this point of view, the linkage of porno sex to car crashes, and the various angles and shapes made by women’s bodies to the architectural shapes of concrete flyovers or modernist hotels, is in a sense only taking the metaphor-making tendency intrinsic in all Ballard’s fiction to extremes.

Ballard himself acknowledges the weirdness and extremity of some of his analogies at various points in the text:

This can be carried to remarkable lengths – for example, the jutting balconies of the Hilton Hotel have become identified with the lost gill-slits of the dying film actress, Elizabeth Taylor.

Extremes of disgust, in some critics’ minds; but extremes of delirious insight and extraordinary beauty, in my opinion. I am particularly haunted by his obsessive use of the idea that human faces contain implicit lines and planes which project outwards, forming complex three-dimensional geometries.

His eyes stared at Travis, their focus sustained only by a continuous effort. For some reason the planes of his face failed to intersect, as if their true resolution took place in some as yet invisible dimension

The planes of their lives interlocked at oblique angles, fragments of personal myths fusing with the commercial cosmologies.

The planes of his cheekbones and temples intersected with the slabs of rainwashed cement, together forming a strange sexual modulus.

For English readers in 1970 this was weird and revolutionary stuff and it still has the power to stun and disorient today. But deep down, is it anything more than a putting into words of the visual effects created by about ten thousand cubist portraits from fifty years earlier?

Young Man in a Gray Sweater (1914) by Diego Rivera

Ballard’s fundamental strategy in these two shattering books is to contrast the soft and (for most people) precious and sentimental idea of the human body, especially its most sensitive, erogenous and private zones – breast and pubis, penis and vulva – and juxtapose them with the most public, hard-edged, angular and manufactured objects of the modern world – cars, roads, brutalist buildings.

Although the books contain hundreds of individually brilliant similes and metaphors, I couldn’t help thinking that underlying most of them and the deeper structures of the books’ themes and ideas, were the profoundly disruptive and innovative strategies of early 20th century Modernist art.

Reviews of J.G. Ballard’s books

Novels

Short story collections

Other Surrealism reviews

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by Simon on February 4, 2020  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on February 4, 2020

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Crash by J.G. Ballard

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

Short story collections

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

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Posted by Simon on February 2, 2020

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Preface to the French edition of Crash by J.G. Ballard (1974)

The short introduction to the French edition of Crash is so brilliantly insightful that it is worth quoting in its entirety. [I’ve put in the headings for my own reference, to break it up into sections, and to remind me at a glance the development of the argument. And I’ve added footnotes to my comments.]

The fear of nuclear holocaust weirdly combined with the ubiquity of advertising culture have emptied human emotions of any meaning

The marriage of reason and nightmare which has dominated the 20th century has given birth to an ever more ambiguous world. Across the communications landscape move the spectres of sinister technologies and the dreams that money can buy. Thermonuclear weapons systems [1] and soft drink commercials coexist [2] in an overlit realm ruled by advertising and pseudo-events, science and pornography. Over our lives preside the great twin motifs of the 20th century – sex and paranoia. Despite McLuhan’s delight in high-speed information mosaics we are still reminded of Freud’s profound pessimism in Civilization and its Discontents [3]. Voyeurism, self-disgust, the infantile basis of our dreams and longings – these diseases of the psyche have now culminated in the most terrifying casualty of the 20th century: the death of affect. [4]

This demise of feeling and emotion has paved the way for all our most real and tender pleasures – in the excitements of pain and mutilation; in sex as the perfect arena, like a culture bed of sterile pus, for all the veronicas of our own perversions; in our moral freedom to pursue our own psychopathology as a game; and in our apparently limitless powers for conceptualization – what our children have to fear is not the cars on the highways of tomorrow but our own pleasure in calculating the most elegant parameters of their deaths. [5]

Ballard’s defence of science fiction

To document the uneasy pleasures of living within this glaucous paradise have more and more become the role of science fiction. I firmly believe that science fiction, far from being and unimportant minor offshoot, in fact represents the main literary tradition of the 20th century, and certainly its oldest – a tradition of imaginative response to science and technology that runs in an intact line through H.G. Wells, Aldous Huxley, the writers of modern America science fiction, to such present-day innovators as William Burroughs. [6]

The main fact of the 20th century is the concept of the unlimited possibility. This predicate of science and technology enshrines the notion of a moratorium on the past – the irrelevancy and even death of the past – and the limitless alternatives available to the present. What links the first flight of the Wright brothers to the invention of the Pill is the social and sexual philosophy of the ejector seat. Given this immense continent of possibility, few literatures seem to be better equipped to deal with their subject matter than science fiction. No other form of fiction has the vocabulary and images to deal with the present, let alone the future. The dominant characteristic of the modern mainstream novelist its sense of individual isolation; its mood of introspection and alienation, a state of mind assumed to be the hallmark of the 20th century consciousness. Far from it. On the contrary, it seems to me that this is a psychology that belongs entirely to the 19th century, part of a reaction against the massive restraints of bourgeois society, the monolithic character of Victorianism and the tyranny of the paterfamilias, secure in his financial and sexual authority. Apart from its marked retrospective bias and its obsession with the subjective nature of experience, its real subject matter is the rationalization of guilt and estrangement. Its elements are introspection, pessimism and sophistication. Yet if anything befits the 20th century it is optimism, the iconography of mass merchandising, naivety and a guilt free enjoyment of all the mind’s possibilities. [7]

The kind of imagination that now manifests itself in science fiction is not something new. Homer, Shakespeare and Milton all invented new worlds to comment on this one. The split of science fiction into a separate and somewhat disreputable genre is a recent development. It is connected to the near disappearance of dramatic and philosophical poetry and the slow shrinking of the traditional novel as it concerns more and more exclusively with the nuances of human relationships. Among those areas neglected by the traditional novel are, above all, the dynamics of human societies [the traditional novel tends to depict society as static], and man’s place in the universe. However crudely or naively, science fiction at least attempts to place a philosophical and metaphysical frame around the most important events within our lives and consciousness. [8]

Ballard names, defines and explains ‘inner space’

If I make this general defense of science fiction it is, obviously, because my own career as a writer has been involved with it for almost 20 years. From the very start, when I first turned to science fiction, I was convinced that the future was a better key to the present than the past [9]. At the time, however, I was dissatisfied with science fiction’s obsession with its two principal themes – outer space and the far future. As much for emblematic purposes as any theoretical or programmatic ones, I christened the new terrain I wished to explore inner space, that psychological domain [manifest, for example, in surrealist painting] where the inner world of the mind and the outer world of reality meet and fuse.

Primarily I wanted to write a fiction about the present day. To do this in the context of the late 1950s, in a world where the call sign of Sputnik I could be heard on one’s radio like the advance beacon of a new universe, required completely different techniques from those available to the 19th century novelist. In fact, I believe that if it were possible to scrap the whole of existing literature, and be forced to begin again without a any knowledge of the past, all writers would find themselves inevitably producing something very close to science fiction [10]. Science and technology multiply around us. To an increasing extent they dictate the languages in which we speak and think. Either we use those languages, or we remain mute.

Yet, by an ironic paradox, modern science fiction became the first casualty of the changing world it anticipated and helped to create. The future envisaged by the science fiction of the 1940s and 1950s is already our past. Its dominant images, not merely of the first Moon flights and interplanetary voyages, but of our changing social and political relationships in a world governed by technology, now resemble huge pieces of discarded stage scenery [11]. For me, this could be seen most touchingly in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, which signified the end of the heroic period of modern science fiction – its lovingly imagined panoramas and costumes, its huge set pieces, reminded me of Gone With the Wind, a scientific pageant that became a kind of historical romance in reverse, a sealed world into which the hard light of contemporary reality was never allowed to penetrate.

The death of ‘reality’

Increasingly, our concepts of past, present and future are being forced to revise themselves. Just as the past itself, in social and psychological terms, became a casualty of Hiroshima and the nuclear age [almost by definition a period where we were all forced to think prospectively], so in its turn the future is ceasing to exist, devoured by the all voracious present. We have annexed the future into our own present, as merely one of those manifold alternatives open to us. Options multiply around us, we live in an almost infantile world where any demand, any possibility, whether for lifestyles, travel, sexual roles and identities, can be satisfied instantly [12].

In addition, I think that the balance between fiction and reality has changed significantly in the past decade [1960s]. Increasingly their roles are reversed. We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind – mass merchandising, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the instant translation of science and technology into popular imagery, the increasing blurring and intermingling of identities within the realm of consumer goods, the pre-empting of any free or imaginative response to experience by the television screen. We live inside an enormous novel. For the writer in particular it is less and less necessary for him to invent the fictional content of his novel. The fiction is already there. The writer’s task is to invent the reality. [13]

In the past we have always assumed that the external world around us represented reality, however confusing or uncertain, and that the inner world of our minds, its dreams, hopes, ambitions, represented the realm of fantasy and the imagination. These roles, too, it seems to me, have been reversed. The most prudent and effective method of dealing with the world around us is to assume that it is a complete fiction – conversely, the one node of reality left to us is inside our own heads. Freud’s classic distinction between the latent and manifest content of the dream, between the apparent and the real, now needs to be applied to the external world of so-called reality [3].

The task of the contemporary writer – to be a scientist testing fictional hypotheses

Given these transformations, what is the main task facing the writer? Can he, any longer, make use of the techniques and perspectives of the traditional 19th century novel, with its linear narrative, its measured chronology, its consular characters grandly inhabiting domains within an ample time and space? Is his subject matter the sources of character and personality sunk deep in the past, the unhurried inspection of roots, the examination of the most subtle nuances of social behaviour and personal relationships? Has the writer still the moral authority to invent a self sufficient and self-enclosed world, to preside over his characters like an examiner, knowing all the questions in advance? Can he leave out anything he prefers not to understand, including his own motives, prejudices and psychopathologies? [14]

I feel myself that the writer’s role, his authority and license to act, has changed radically. I feel that, in a sense, the writer knows nothing any longer. He has no moral stance. He offers the reader the contents of his own head, he offers a set of options and imaginative alternatives. His role is that of the scientist, whether on safari or in his laboratory, faced with a completely unknown terrain or subject. All he can do is to devise hypothesis and test them against the facts. [15]

Crash, the novel, is just such a fictional and psychological experiment

Crash! is such a book, an extreme metaphor for an extreme situation, a kit of desperate measures only for use in an extreme crisis.

If I am right, and what I have done over the past years is to rediscover the present for myself, Crash! takes up its position as a cataclysmic novel of the present day in line with my previous novels of world cataclysm set in the near or immediate future – The Drowned World, The Drought and The Crystal World. Crash!, of course, is not concerned with an imaginary disaster, however imminent, but with a pandemic cataclysm institutionalized in all industrial societies that kills hundreds of thousands of people each year and injures millions. Do we see, in the car crash, a sinister portent of a nightmare marriage between sex and technology? Will modern technology provide us with a hitherto undreamed-of means for tapping our own psychopathologies? Is this harnessing of our innate perversity conceivably of benefit to us? Is there some deviant logic unfolding more powerful that that of reason? [16]

The nature of pornography i.e. ‘the most political form of fiction’

Throughout Crash! I have used the car not only as a sexual image, but as a total metaphor for man’s life in today’s society. As such the novel has a political role quite apart from its sexual content, but I would like still to think that Crash! is the first pornographic novel based on technology. In a sense, pornography is the most political form of fiction, dealing with how we use and exploit each other in the most urgent and ruthless way [17]. Needless to say, the ultimate role of Crash! is cautionary, a warning against that brutal, erotic realm that beckons more and more persuasively to us from the margins of technological landscapes.

My thoughts

1. The possibility of nuclear war and utter extermination which hung over Ballard and his generation from 1945 to 1990 has now more or less vanished, but dominated the imaginations of the sensitive for decades. The Americans lovingly filmed their nuclear tests throughout the 1950s and there’s something mesmerising, haunting and beautiful about the footage – the entranced mind only slowly registering the appalling destructive power embodied in those shapely mushroom clouds. Stanley Kubrick’s film Dr Strangelove captures the mad attractiveness of nuclear armageddon with its closing montage of nuclear test footage. And the intense psychic power of the abandoned nuclear test sites haunt Ballard stories, notably classic story The Terminal Beach, and haunt the predecessor to this book, The Atrocity Exhibition.

2. The juxtaposition of the very real possibility of the end of the world and the human race with a world of glossy, day-glo soft drinks ads and the ‘honey-I’m-home’ frivolities of FMCG advertising is a) Surreal without even trying to be, and b) patently absurd. It creates an absurdist mental landscape in which absurd thoughts flourish and absurdist works of art naturally arise. Ballard is situated bang in the middle of the absurd junctures of modern life.

3. It’s always worth remembering how literally and simplistically Ballard read Freud, he makes no reference to the super-subtle French interpretations of psychoanalysis e.g. by Jacques Lacan – although even a simplistic reading of Freud is bewildering enough, suggesting that all our ‘adult’ rationality and manners is built up on the most infantile, primitive foundation.

4. The death of affect i.e. of real emotion, is the basis given by the character Dr Nathan in The Atrocity Exhibition for the extreme pornography created by the book’s central character: he is trying to break through the husk of a sexuality which has become nullified by commercial exploitation, in search of extremes of sexual practice which once again mean something.

5. The death of vanilla sex leads to the diversion of the same primitive Freudian urge to new sources of excitement: violence and death.

6. It is ironic that Ballard is defending the tradition of science fiction at more or less the moment he abandons it to write novels about the present – an extreme fetishised vision of the present – but dispensing with every identifying characteristic of science fiction to become, simply, fiction, albeit of an extreme and pornographic flavour.

7. The notion that pessimism in fiction is an archetypal Victorian sentiment, and that the dominant mode of 20th century fiction ought to be optimism at the unlimited technical opportunities lying around us is bracingly counter-intuitive and attractive.

8. I take the point that much science fiction, even the shortest of short stories, tends to imply a worldview, a particular vision of the future, ideas about society, which plain fiction rarely does. The problem with this idea is that these ‘philosophical and metaphysical frames’ is that they are so often cheap, sensational, alarmist, comic-book cartoon ideas about society or human nature which no grown-up can take seriously.

9. ‘The future is a better key to the present than the past’ is a profound idea, if somewhat difficult to put into practice. But it’s certainly true that so many politicians, commentators and writers are stuck in the same old treadmill version of well-worn clichéd versions of the past (commemorating the Great War, commemorating the Holocaust and so on) which are a drag on human progress, which are always pulling us back back back, and prevent us from taking a long, hard look at the future.

10. Enchanting idea, thought experiment.

11. True dat. The most obvious thing about science fiction, hard science fiction dependent on technology, is how quickly it dates.

12. Surprisingly true of the Western world in 2020, with its obsession with gender, transgender and gender fluid identities.

13. Brilliantly witty and paradoxical conclusion, worthy of Wilde.

14. An impressive summary of the characteristics of grand, expansive, realist 19th century fiction?

15. A dazzlingly persuasive redefinition of the role of the writer, underpinned by Ballard’s familiarity with the scientific worldview derived from the science journals he worked on.

16. Like any good teacher, Ballard is prolific in plausible-sounding questions to stimulate thought/debate.

17. An unsettling idea. Discuss. Enjoyable to ponder for a while… Can this be true or is it just a glib formulation?

Related links

Reviews of other Ballard books

Novels

Short story collections

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
1981 The Affirmation by Christopher Priest – an extraordinarily vivid description of a schizophrenic young man living in London who, to protect against the trauma of his actual life (father died, 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 suppressed databases and secret police to keep the population suppressed

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The Atrocity Exhibition by J.G. Ballard (1970)

WARNING: This review contains quotations which are extremely brutal and/or sexually explicit.

Fingers fretting at the key in her pocket, she watched Travers search through the montage photographs which the volunteers had assembled during anaesthesia. Disquieting diorama of pain and mutilation: strange sexual wounds, imaginary Vietnam atrocities, the deformed mouth of Jacqueline Kennedy. (p.68)

The fact that American edition of the book was titled Love and Napalm gives you fair warning of what to expect.

The Atrocity Exhibition is only a short book, 110 pages in the Granada paperback edition I’ve got, and yet it opens up wide, jagged horizons and makes a tremendous impact because of its format.

The human organism is an atrocity exhibition at which he is an unwilling spectator. (p.13)

Experiments and collage

Ballard was keenly interested in experimental fiction and art, an interest which reached its peak in the late-1960s. As early as the late 1950s he’d created a series of collages assembled from texts cut out of scientific magazines. In 1967 he began a series of what came to be called ‘Advertiser’s Announcements’, being surreal or collagist parodies of traditional adverts. And we know that Ballard originally wanted The Atrocity Exhibition to be a book of collage illustrations.

I originally wanted a large-format book, printed by photo-offset, in which I would produce the artwork – a lot of collages, material taken from medical documents and medical photographs, crashing cars and all that sort of iconography.

In the event this proved impractical and Ballard ended up creating a kind of verbal equivalent of collage from a sequence of stand-alone prose pieces. These were originally published as stand-alone ‘stories’ in various art and sci fi magazines.

The final text of The Atrocity Exhibition is divided into 15 of these pieces or stories or texts, and then each of these is sub-divided into very short sections, often only a paragraph long. Each paragraph has a title of its own, in bold. The result is to make the book a highly fragmented read and certainly not a ‘novel’ with a consistent linear narrative in any traditional sense. Here’s a typical paragraph, or fragment, or angle.

Auto-erotic. As he rested in Catherine Austin’s bedroom, Talbot listened to the helicopters flying along the motorway from the airport. Symbols in a machine apocalypse, they seeded the cores of unknown memories in the furniture of the apartment, the gestures of unspoken affections. He lowered his eyes from the window. Catherine Austin sat on the bed beside him. Her naked body was held forward like a bizarre exhibit, its anatomy a junction of sterile cleft and flaccid mons. He placed his palm against the mud-coloured areola of her left nipple. The concrete landscape of underpass and overpass mediated a more real presence, the geometry of a neural interval, the identity latent within his own musculature.

1. You immediately see the intense but detached pornography of the female body, which never uses swearwords but refers to intercourse and all aspects of sexuality by their strict scientific names, ‘sterile cleft and flaccid mons’.

2. And you immediately see how the sex is intimately and intricately interwoven with equally precise descriptions of architecture and modern transport machines – helicopters flying over the motorway from the airport, a concrete landscape of overpasses and underpasses.

3. And beneath it all, initially obscured by the novelty of the clinical sexuality and the obsessed concrete-mania, lies the characteristic Ballard exorbitance, the Edgar Allen Poe hysteria ‘mediated’, as he would put it, through the detachment of the science journalist, summarising his perceptions as ‘symbols in a machine apocalypse’.

And yet there is no apocalypse. A few cars crash, one helicopter crashes and burns (I think), but there’s nothing like an ‘apocalypse’. The apocalypse – the extremity of all the situations – is all in the mind – of the cipher-characters and, ultimately, of Ballard himself.

The chapters of The Atrocity Exhibition

Here’s a list of the fifteen ‘chapters’/stories and the magazines they were first published in, and dates of first publication. You can see how the composition of the pieces stretched over three years from spring 1966 to late 1969 i.e. was a relatively slow and scattered process.

  1. The Atrocity Exhibition (New Worlds, Vol. 50, # 166, September 1966, excerpt)
  2. The University of Death (Transatlantic Review, No. 29, London, Summer 1968)
  3. The Assassination Weapon (New Worlds, Vol. 50, # 161, April 1966)
  4. You: Coma: Marilyn Monroe (Ambit # 27, Spring 1966)
  5. Notes Towards a Mental Breakdown (New Worlds July 1967, excerpt)
  6. The Great American Nude (Ambit # 36 Summer 1968)
  7. The Summer Cannibals (New Worlds # 186 January 1969)
  8. Tolerances of the Human Face (Encounter Vol. 33, No. 3, September 1969)
  9. You and Me and the Continuum (Impulse, Vol. 1, No. 1, March 1966) FIRST
  10. Plan for the Assassination of Jacqueline Kennedy (Ambit # 31, Spring 1967 [the 26 paragraph titles are in alphabetical order])
  11. Love and Napalm (Export USA Circuit #6, June 1968)
  12. Crash! (ICA-Eventsheet February 1969, excerpt) LAST
  13. The Generations of America (New Worlds # 183, October 1968)
  14. Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan (Brighton: Unicorn Bookshop, 1968)
  15. The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race (Ambit # 29, Autumn 1966)

Condensed novels

In one interview Ballard described the chapters or stories as each forming an individual, ‘condensed’ novel.

They’re certainly condensed in the sense that, as you read them, it feels as if lots of the action and description and linking passages which would create an ordinary ‘story’ have been surgically removed. Instead the paragraphs jump between isolated moments or scenes, between characters, between settings, so that it’s often difficult to see how they’re at all related, apart from featuring the same names. I’m not sure I really followed the ‘narrative’ of any of them.

And the prose style is just as ‘condensed’. Although it’s only 110 pages long, The Atrocity Exhibition is a chewy read because every single sentence feels packed with meaning and significance. There’s no filler or run-of-the-mill description or dialogue. It makes you realise how slack the texture of most normal novels is.

The Geometry of Her Face. In the perspectives of the plaza, the junctions of the underpass and embankment, Talbot at last recognized a modulus that could be multiplied into the landscape of his consciousness. The descending triangle of the plaza was repeated in the facial geometry of the young woman. The diagram of her bones formed a key to his own postures and musculature, and to the scenario that had preoccupied him at the Institute. He began to prepare for departure. The pilot and the young woman now deferred to him. The fans of the helicopter turned in the dark air, casting elongated ciphers on the dying concrete.

Threads and themes

So the book consists of fifteen short (7, 8 or 9 page) sections, themselves sharply cut up into 20 or 30 fragments or perspectives which superficially justifies the term ‘condensed novels’.

But actually, the term is quite misleading because the sections are not as free-standing as it implies. In fact there are clear, indeed dominating, threads, themes, images and ideas which link almost all the chapters and make the assembly of the texts together much bigger than just the sum of a bunch of disparate parts.

For a start the same ‘characters’ recur in almost all of them – Dr Nathan the psychiatrist, Catherine Austen a mature love object and Karen Novotnik, a younger woman.

The first three or four sections all feature a central male protagonist who leads the action and the other characters comment on although, in an approach which I enjoyed, this character’s name changes from chapter to chapter – from Travis to Talbot to Tallis and so on – and in each incarnation he’s not quite the same person, as if reality shifts subtly in each story, or as if each avatar each one represents an alternative possible reality. This would explain why the young woman Karen Novotnik appears to die not once but several times, each time in a different scenario.

Celebration. For Talbot the explosive collision of the two cars was a celebration of the unity of their soft geometries, the unique creation of the pudenda of Ralph Nader. The dismembered bodies of Karen Novotny and himself moved across the morning landscape, re-created in a hundred crashing cars, in the perspectives of a thousand concrete embankments, in the sexual postures of a million lovers.

As well as these recurring names, the texts are held together by their obsessive circling round the same handful of images, ideas and names. In fact, the way that the central male figure keeps reappearing under different names made me realise that without much difficulty you could say that the characters aren’t carrying the plot, the obsessions are.

So that the book can really be seen as about the circulation, meeting, mingling, parting and interaction of certain obsessive ideas, images and phrases. It’s as if the obsessions are the real, rounded, multi-dimensional entities, the ones we get to know in detail, who feature in various adventures and permutations, while the so-called human ‘characters’ are just vectors or mediums through which the idées fixes are channelled.

Over and over, the same images, situations, ideas and phrases recur with a claustrophobic, obsessive repetition. Dominant are images of death, war, car crashes, apocalypse. They include:

  • World War III
  • the atom bomb and atomic test sites
  • cars and car crashes and the wounds car crashes create in soft human bodies
  • helicopters flying ominously overhead, Vietnam-style
  • utterly impersonal sexual congress conceived as a form of geometric investigation
  • images over-familiar film stars such as Elizabeth Taylor or Brigitte Bardot
  • newsreel footage of war atrocities, from Auschwitz to Vietnam via Biafra and the Congo
  • the Kennedy assassination (one character is described as obsessively trying to recreate the Kennedy assassination ‘in a way that makes sense’)
  • concrete motorways and multi-storey car parks

Each chapter contains a specific mix of these ingredients, but the same overall list of ingredients recurs across all 15, rotating in ever-changing combinations like a kaleidoscope.

Chapter one – The Atrocity Exhibition

Thus chapter one features characters named Travis, his wife Margaret Travis, Catherine Austen who he’s having an affair with, his psychiatrist Dr Nathan who is analysing Travis’s obsession with creating a kind of one-man, psychological World War III, and Captain Webster who is having an affair with Margaret.

Travis is collecting ‘terminal documents’ (just like Kaldren in the short story The Voices of Time). Travis dreams of starting World War III, if only in his head (‘For us, perhaps, World War III is now little more than a sinister pop art display…’). These terminal documents appear pleasingly random and in a note Ballard tells us they were the result of free association:

  1. A spectrohelion of the sun
  2. front elevation of balcony units, Hilton Hotel, London
  3. transverse section through a pre-Cambrian trilobite
  4. ‘chronograms’ by E.J. Marey
  5. photograph taken at noon 7 August 1945 in the Qattara Depression Egypt
  6. a reproduction of Max Ernst’s Garden Airplane Traps
  7. fusing sequences for ‘Little Boy’ and ‘Fat Boy’, the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atom bombs

They’re actually quite a good cross-section of JG’s obsessions: the atom bomb, the alienating effect of modernist architecture, deep geological time (which Ballard had painted as returning to dominate the modern world with its dinosaurs and tropical swamps in The Drowned World or the short story Now Awakes The Sea), a Surrealist painting, the obsession with time indicated by the fictional ‘chronographs’.

And hotels, hotels are classic locations for alienation and ennui for Ballard, if they’re abandoned in one of his dystopian futures, surrounded by drained swimming pools, all the better.

So far, so sort-of reasonable, after all characters and themes occur in all novels. But it’s difficult to convey the chaotic and deliberately dissociative texture of the book.

Brachycephalic. They stopped beneath the half-painted bowl of the radio-telescope. As the blunt metal ear turned on its tracks, fumbling at the sky, he put his hands to his skull, feeling the still-open sutures. Beside him Quinton, the dapper pomaded Judas, was waving at the distant hedges where the three limousines were waiting. ‘If you like we can have a hundred cars – a complete motorcade.’ Ignoring Quinton, he took a piece of quartz from his flying jacket and laid it on the surf. From it poured the code-music of the quasars.

There is no joined-up, consecutive narrative. Each paragraph is genuinely a fragment in the sense that they don’t cohere into any kind of ‘story’. Instead they are snapshots of the characters’ obsessions. Certainly the ‘people’ in the stories meet, encounter each other, have sex, drive cars because we see this in individual paragraphs. But each consecutive paragraph charts a new scene. They are like fragments from a lot of different jigsaws all jumbled together.

At the end of ‘chapter’ one the bodies of Dr Nathan, Captain Webster and Catherine Austen form a small tableau by the bunker. Maybe they were killed in bombing of the target zone in the disused military zone which Travis seems to have organised.

But the second ‘chapter’ begins with these same ‘dead’ characters – Dr Nathan, Catherine Austen – brought back to life, in new scenes as if nothing had happened. Now they are taking part in a screenshow in a university organised by one ‘Talbot'( a sort of structural variation on Travis) and whose students are ostensibly studying World War III, inspired by the jealous student Koester. Talbot is having an affair with Catherine but sees her body chiefly as a ‘geometry’ of vents and clefts and is more interested in the sculpture he’s building on the roof, metal aerials constructed to hold glass faces to the sun. He is clearly cracking up.

And so it continues, tangling and rethreading a narrow and obsessive networks of themes and images…

Key words

If certain key ideas recur and repeat in endless permutations, so do key words. As so often, I find the words more interesting than the ‘ideas’:

geometry

  • her own body, with its endless familiar geometry…
  • in the postures they assumed, the contours of thigh and thorax, Travis explored the geometry and volumetric time of the bedroom
  • only an anatomist could have identified these fragments, each represented as a formal geometric pattern
  • his wife’s body with its familiar geometry
  • His room was filled with grotesque magazine photographs: the obsessive geometry of overpasses, like fragments of her own body; X-rays of unborn children; a series of genital deformations; a hundred close-ups of hands.
  • the concrete landscape of underpass and flyover mediated a more real presence, the geometry of a neural interval…
  • the obsessive geometry of flyovers, like fragments of her own body
  • the geometry of the plaza exercised a unique fascination upon Talbot’s mind
  • a crushed fender; in its broken geometry Talbot saw the dismembered body of Karen Novotny
  • the danger of an assassination attempt seems evident, one hypotenuse in this geometry of a murder
  • For Talbot the explosive collision of the two cars was a celebration of the unity of their soft geometries…

mimetised

  • he assumed the postures of the fragmented body of the film actress, mimetising his past dreams and anxieties in the dune-like fragments of her body
  • the mimetised disasters of Vietnam and the Congo
  • segments of his postures mimetised in the processes of time and space
  • our anxieties mimetised in the junction between wall and ceiling

terminal

  • A Terminal Posture. Lying on the worn concrete of the gunnery aisles, he assumed the postures of the film actress, assuaging his past dreams and anxieties in the dune-like fragments of her
    body.
  • Dr Nathan gazed at the display photographs of terminal syphilitics in the cinema foyer
  • He remembered the aloof, cerebral Kline, and their long discussions on this terminal concrete beach…
  • The Terminal Zone. He lay on the sand with the rusty bicycle wheel. Now and then he would cover some of the spokes with sand, neutralizing the radial geometry. The rim interested him. Hidden behind a dune, the hut no longer seemed a part of his world. The sky remained constant, the warm air touching the shreds of test papers sticking up from the sand. He continued to examine the wheel. Nothing happened.

neural

  • Overhead the glass curtain-walls of the apartment block presided over this first interval of neural calm.
  • The concrete landscape of underpass and overpass mediated a more real presence, the geometry of a neural interval, the identity latent within his own musculature.
  • Impressions of Africa. A low shoreline; air glazed like amber; derricks and jetties above brown water; the silver geometry of a petrochemical complex, a Vorticist assemblage of cylinders and cubes superimposed upon the distant plateau of mountains; a single Horton sphere – enigmatic balloon tethered to the fused sand by its steel cradles; the unique clarity of the African light: fluted tablelands and jigsaw bastions; the limitless neural geometry of the landscape.

planes

  • For some reason the planes of his face failed to intersect, as if their true resolution took place in some as yet invisible dimension, or required elements other than those provided by his own character and musculature.
  • The planes of their lives interlocked at oblique angles, fragments of personal myths fusing with the commercial cosmologies.
  • Her blanched skin revealed the hollow planes of her face.
  • His rigid face was held six inches from her own, his mouth like the pecking orifice of some unpleasant machine. The planes of his cheekbones and temples intersected with the slabs of rainwashed cement, together forming a strange sexual modulus.
  • The planes of her face seemed to lead towards some invisible focus, projecting an image that lingered on the walls, as if they were inhabiting her skull
  • The apartment was a box clock, a cubicular extrapolation of the facial planes of the yantra, the cheekbones of Marilyn Monroe.

This sketchy review of his key vocabulary establishes that what Ballard’s key words have in common is the way they are hard and technical, continually shifting the imagination away from soft human bodies to hard geometries, from sentimental ‘feelings’ towards impersonal, scientific and mathematical notions of ‘neural’ events, planes and geometries.

Art

Ballard made no secret of the immense influence on him of Surrealist painting. He mentions it in pretty much every interview he ever gave, lards his stories with the adjective ‘surrealist’, and frequently refers to specific Surrealist paintings. The Atrocity Exhibition contains references to the following works of art:

  • Max Ernst – Garden Airplane Traps
  • Max Ernst – Europe after the Rain (p.15)
  • Salvador Dali – Hypercubic Christ
  • Max Ernst – Silence (p.21)
  • Salvador Dali – The Persistence of Memory (p.22)
  • Magritte – The Annunciation (p.31)
  • Duchamp – The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even
  • Max Ernst, The Stolen Mirror (p.47)
  • Bellmer sculptures (p.54)
  • Duchamp – Nude descending a Staircase (p.55)
  • Tanguy – Jours de Lenteur (p.85)
  • Max Ernst – the Robing of the Bride (p.85)
  • de Chirico – The Dream of the Poet (p.85)

The art references tend to occur in contexts where they add, expand and complicate existing descriptions.

The ‘Soft’ Death of Marilyn Monroe. Standing in front of him as she dressed, Karen Novotny’s body seemed as smooth and annealed as those frozen planes. Yet a displacement of time would drain away the soft interstices, leaving walls like scraped clinkers. He remembered Ernst’s ‘Robing’: Marilyn’s pitted skin, breasts of carved pumice, volcanic thighs, a face of ash. The widowed bride of Vesuvius.

On reflection, I realise that you could see each of the individual paragraphs as the equivalent of free-standing paintings. That makes a lot of sense. Treating each paragraph as a painting treating a different mood, or angle, or perspective on similar events, covering similar subjects, but each from a different angle and approach – and yourself sauntering past them as they’re hung up on a gallery wall.

Sex and pornography

The text is soaked in sex and sexual perversions and pornography regarded as a clinically detached exercise.

This is justified, if needs be, by Ballard’s view that we are in a hyper-advanced technological society where all experience is mediated by a bombardment of media and advertising imagery to such an extent that naive notions of simple sentimental sex have been scorched out of existence.

The need for more polymorphic roles has been demonstrated by television and news media. Sexual intercourse can no longer be regarded as a personal and isolated activity, but is seen to be a vector in a public complex involving automobile styling, politics and mass communications

The satirical surveys

With a satire which is so straight-faced it’s hard to tell whether he’s laughing or not, the later chapters of The Atrocity Exhibition are notably different from the earlier ones.

They are still laid out as fragmented paragraphs but they more or less cease being (fragmented) narratives and consist of collections of pseudo-scientific surveys and reports.

And these focus relentlessly, obsessively on the conjunction of atrocity and sex, specifically the impact of viewing a) President Kennedy’s assassination b) Vietnam war footage c) general atrocity footage (Auschwitz, the Congo) on the sex lives of an amusingly random and surreal cross-section of audience types, including children, the mentally ill and housewives.

Satirically, the ‘research’ presents evidence that atrocity footage improves workplace efficiency and stimulates a healthy sex drive. Conclusion? Wars of the Vietnam type are good for society.

Using assembly kits of atrocity photographs, groups of housewives, students and psychotic patients selected the optimum child-torture victim. Rape and napalm burns remained constant preoccupations, and a wound profile of maximum arousal was constructed. Despite the revulsion expressed by the panels, follow-up surveys of work-proficiency and health patterns indicate substantial benefits. The effects of atrocity films on disturbed children were found to have positive results that indicate similar benefits for the TV public at large. These studies confirm that it is only in terms of a psychosexual module such as provided by the Vietnam war that the United States can enter into a relationship with the world generally characterized by the term ‘love.’

This fairly blunt satire – although presented in the same-chopped-up paragraphs each headed by a title in bold type as the earlier ‘stories’ – feels drastically different in intention from the earlier stories.

Maybe they reflect the quick escalation in protest against the war which took place in the last few years of the 1960s, and which prompted the equally savage satirical short story The Killing Ground of 1969.

Nuclear satire

Also: In one of his notes to the book, Ballard points out that from the late 1950s and early 1960s, the heyday of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, the fact that the world was living under the shadow of impending nuclear holocaust meant that, to anybody who thought about it, everything was permissible. How could you believe in the fuddy-duddy old values of Church and State, all those crowns and gowns, if the world could be incinerated tomorrow?

Not only that, but how can you think about the end of the world and the destruction of the planet except via extremity and satire? As demonstrated by the Stanley Kubrick movie Dr Strangelove which was a) released in 1964 only 2 years before the first Atrocity story was published, and b) filmed at Shepperton studios just round the corner from Ballard’s house. Serendipities. Zeitgeist. Spirit of the Age.

Conclusion for philistines

If Ballard’s obsession with car crashes and clinical pornography seems sick, ask yourself who’s the sickest – novelists who write blistering porno-satire or generals who order napalm by the lakeful to be dropped on peasant villages?

That was the reality of the times Ballard was writing in, and for. Remember the American version of the book was titled Love and Napalm

  • The billboards multiplied around them, walling the streets with giant replicas of napalm bombings in Vietnam, the serial deaths of Elizabeth Taylor and Marilyn Monroe terraced in the landscapes of Dien Bien Phu and the Mekong Delta.
  • Homage to Abraham Zapruder Each night, as Travers moved through the deserted auditorium, the films of simulated atrocities played above the rows of empty seats, images of napalm victims, crashing cars and motorcade attacks.
  • On the basis of viewers’ preferences an optimum torture and execution sequence was devised involving Governor Reagan, Madame Ky and an unidentifiable eight-year-old Vietnamese girl napalm victim.

Remember the photo of that little naked Vietnamese girl running down the road her skin flapping off her where the napalm had burned her? Those photos were all around in 1966, 67, 68. Atrocity Exhibition is Ballard’s response to the TV-mediated hyper-violence and psychic disturbance of the times.

Conclusion for Ballardians

I think it’s his best book. It’s an über-intense encyclopedia of Ballard’s distinctive obsessions and visions. Some people read it as an experimental depiction of the psyche of a man undergoing a nervous breakdown.

I think it’s bigger than that, it presents an (in)coherent way of verbalising a number of the visual, psychological and imaginative pressures anyone living in the modern era is subjected to. The constant, hammering pressure of the motorways, the thundering traffic, the massive planes grinding overhead, the aggressive billboard hoardings, the saturated mediascape, the faces of the same handful of celebrities dinned into our brains, and the deadening and at the same time hysterical impact that has on our imaginative lives, and emotional lives, and sex lives (if we have them).

Joy Division

Wrote a song based on the book, released on their 1980 album Closer, which is a fair attempt to capture the book’s weirdness in another medium.

Related links

Reviews of other Ballard books

Novels

Short story collections

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
1981 The Affirmation by Christopher Priest – an extraordinarily vivid description of a schizophrenic young man living in London who, to protect against the trauma of his actual life (father died, 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 suppressed

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Posted by Simon on January 31, 2020

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J.G. Ballard’s literary experimentalism

The most obvious thing about Ballard’s novels and short stories is that, although they have a hallucinatory intensity and routinely describe extreme mental states and characters who descend into psychosis and insanity, the outward form of them is for the most part extremely conservative.

Ballard’s prose style occasionally uses unexpected phraseology but is, at its heart, pukka – an eminently correct, professional, middle-class English voice. In other words, the searing weirdness of many of Ballard’s stories is conveyed in a disconcertingly respectable prose style.

It is, therefore, something of a surprise to learn that Ballard had a long-running interest in quite radical literary experimentation, and it’s useful to be aware of his efforts in this field because they inform your reading of the earlier and mid-period stories and novels.

This blog post is a brief overview of the most notable of Ballard’s literary experiments. (What follows is heavily indebted to a number of online articles which are referenced at the bottom.)

Project for a new novel (1958)

In the late 1950s Ballard was working on the journal of the Chemical Society in London and was much taken with the juxtaposition of snazzy layout and scientific content in related American magazines, such as Chemical and Engineering News.

He had the idea of cutting up headlines and text from it and other scientific magazines like it, in order to create collages packed with scientific words and phrases arranged in surreal combinations:

Letters, words and sentence fragments are pasted onto backing sheets with glue. Their design visually references everyday media, with headlines, body text and double-page spreads suggesting a magazine layout. Originally Ballard planned to display the work on billboards, as if it was a public advertisement.

In the end Ballard created four collage works, which became famous among his friends and close colleagues, and which are now in the possession of the British Library who curate Ballard’s collected notes and manuscripts.

One of the four collages Ballard made for his Project for New Novel. Note the phrase Mr F is Mr F, which became the title of a short story, and the names Coma, Kline and Xero, given to characters who turn up in the novel The Atrocity Exhibition

Ballard himself described the Project as:

Sample pages of a new kind of novel, entirely consisting of magazine-style headlines and layouts, with a deliberately meaningless text, the idea being that the imaginative content could be carried by the headlines and overall design, so making obsolete the need for a traditional text except for virtually decorative purposes.

I liked the stylish typography. I also like the scientific content, and used stories to provide the text of my novel. Curiously enough, far from being meaningless, the science news stories somehow become fictionalised by the headings around them.

It was a collage of things clipped from journals like Chemical Engineering News, the American Chemical Society’s journal – I used them a lot because I liked the typeface. I wanted to publish a novel that looked like that, you see – hundreds of pages of that sort of thing. Get away from text altogether – just headlines!

Many of the names, phrases and concerns which first appeared in the Project have resurfaced over the years, particularly the characters Coma, Kline and Xero who appear in The Atrocity Exhibition, Coma also cropping up in the classic short story The Voices of Time, and phrases such as ‘the terminal beach’ and ‘Mr F is Mr F’, both of which became the titles of short stories.

The four collages can also be seen in the background of a photograph of Ballard taken in 1960 in his garden at Shepperton, which has become a talisman for true Ballardians. The full text of Project for a New Novel was finally published 20 years after it was created, in New Worlds magazine No. 213, in 1978.

J.G. Ballard in front of his abandoned billboard novel, 1960. Photo: Mary Ballard

Advertisers Announcements (1967-71)

Between 1967 and 1971 Ballard produced five Advertisers Announcements. As he explained in an interview:

Back in the late 60s I produced a series of advertisements which I placed in various publications (Ambit, New Worlds, Ark and various continental alternative magazines), doing the art work myself and arranging for the blockmaking, and then delivering the block to the particular journal just as would a commercial advertiser.

Of course I was advertising my own conceptual ideas, but I wanted to do so within the formal circumstances of classic commercial advertising – I wanted ads that would look in place in Vogue, Paris Match, Newsweek, etc.

To maintain the integrity of the project I paid the commercial rate for the page, even in the case of Ambit, of which I was and still am Prose Editor. I would liked to have branched out into Vogue and Newsweek, but cost alone stopped me…

The five ads are:

1. Homage to Claire Churchill

Homage to Claire Churchill (1967)

Claire was his girlfriend and this a pretty straightforward happy photo of her. There’s no strapline or product logo as you’d expect in a real advert. Instead there’s a dense paragraph of text at the bottom, quoting a typical paragraph from his experimental novel, The Atrocity Exhibition, indeed the ad was published in Ambit in July 1967 and it borrows copy directly from ‘The Death Module’, simultaneously published in New Worlds and later re-named ‘Notes Towards A Mental Breakdown’ in The Atrocity Exhibition.

2. Does the angle between two walls have a happy ending?

The Angle Between two Walls (1967)

This is a still from the art film Alone by American filmmaker Steve Dwoskin, which records a woman masturbating, shot from floor level and pointing up between her legs to show her hand as she touches herself.

What has this got to do with the angle between walls? Well, the correlation of sex and the angles of walls and buildings is explained in The Atrocity Exhibition by the book’s psychiatrist Dr Nathan. He explains that the book’s central protagonists has moved so far beyond conventional sex that he has excavated down to the fundamental paradigm of the junction – an obsession with how entities meet and combine of which human sex is just a small sub-set.

Hence the character’s obsession with the walls of the apartments and bedrooms he finds himself in, and with modern architecture like the (then new) Hilton Hotel, and the curving ramps and inclined planes of the new concrete multi-story car parks. These are all aspects of the modern world’s obsession with junctions and angles and the meeting points of lines and planes. As such they are visual correlatives of the strange angles and postures adopted by the human animal when it has sex.

3. A Neural Interval

A Neural Interval (1968)

This is a photo from a 1960s bondage magazine. It’s not particularly sexy, is it? Because of the sea in the background I initially thought the subject was a swimmer or diver with cumbersome kit photo-collaged on top of her. But no, this really is a supposedly sexy photo of bondage gear circa 1968.

The adjective ‘neural’ crops up a lot in late-60s Ballard, and the phrase ‘neural interval’ suggests a stoppage in time, or at least a stoppage of stimuli to the senses. It’s not immediately clear how this is related to a woman wearing bondage gear in a boat, although possibly the very disjunction between the words and the image are precisely its point.

4. Placental Insufficiency

A Placental Insufficiency (1970)

Ballard appropriates a striking photo by American photographer Les Krims. I thought that some or all of it must have been collaged, but apparently this woman looked like that and was happy to pose with a hunting rifle. Those Yanks, eh.

By this stage, after four ads, I think two or three things are obvious.

1. Women The photos are all of women, sexy or naked women in 3 out of 4. If Ballard is seeking to deconstruct the glib imagery of advertising, featuring naked women is a funny way of going about it. Still, it was 1967 or 68, I suppose when plenty of womens liberationists thought that burning their bras and stripping naked would abolish shame, embarrassment and the male gaze.

2. America For someone supposedly engaged in critiquing the modern world, deconstructing consumer capitalism, revealing the perverse fetishism which underlies the commercial packaging of homogenised sexuality etc etc, Ballard, like so many rebels and revolutionaries of his era, was strongly attracted to the epicentre of world capitalism and inclined to bow the knee to every type of American consumer product, including Hollywood film actresses and the long, cool, flash American cars which feature in so much of his mid-period fiction (like the heavy American Lincoln Continental driven by Dr Robert Vaughan, the demented exponent of car crash fetishism in Crash).

3. Texts But the really obvious thing about them is that, although the images are striking, the real force of the thing comes from the texts. Ballard not only doesn’t have the courage to leave the images to stand alone, or to give them brief and clever or satirical straplines: each one has to have quite lengthy and demanding avant-garde text stapled onto them.

5. Venus Smiles

Venus Smiles (1970)

Ballard himself took this photo of his partner Claire Churchill as she was contorting herself to get into a pair of jeans after a visit to the beach, hence the flecks of seaweed and sand sticking to her white skin.

This is the most interesting of the photos because of the way it’s been turned on its side, because of the big black bush between her legs, and the way the detritus clings to her skin like flies or enlarged bacilli. And the superimposed text, which starts off with characteristic Ballard obsessions with depersonalisation, ends up being unexpectedly sweet.

Conclusion

These pictures of five women, four of them naked, tend to confirm the suspicion that the super-imposed text might be clever but this arty contrivance – like so many attempts at avant-garde art – pales into insignificance next to the immense primal urge of male voyeurism.

Condensed novels and The Atrocity Exhibition

Knowing about the cut-and-paste novel idea, and having seen the Alternative Ads, it’s a lot easier to understand why Ballard originally wanted to have The Atrocity Exhibition done as a book of collage illustrations.

I originally wanted a large-format book, printed by photo-offset, in which I would produce the artwork – a lot of collages, material taken from medical documents and medical photographs, crashing cars and all that sort of iconography.

Alas, the practicalities of publishing intervened, and Ballard amended the idea to something related but different.

The final version of The Atrocity Exhibition is his most accessible piece of experimentalism because it was published as a mass market paperback. Superficially the book is divided into fifteen short ‘chapters’ but as soon as you start reading them you realise that none of them make sense in themselves, and they certainly don’t add up to a consistent narrative in the usual way of a novel.

Instead, each chapter is what Ballard described as a ‘condensed’ novel – clips and excerpts, moments of time, brief gestures and fragments of dialogue cut and pasted together. The reader has to sort out what is going on and how the fragments are connected, in his or her own mind.

Not only that, but each ‘chapter’ or ‘condensed novel’ references the same fragments, actions and images, repeated but in distorted form. At the most obvious level, the same ‘characters’ recur in consecutive sections – Dr Nathan, Catherine Austen, Karen Novotny – but there is also a stray meeting between two characters at some kind of formal conference or symposium which is re-enacted in each chapter, there is the repeated enactment of car crashes or of a helicopter crash which is its cognate; the male characters each display obsessive behaviour, such as Talbot assembling some kind of modernist sculpture on the roof or outlining furniture in an apartment with chalk; and each chapter contains a numbered list, although the items on the list change from chapter to chapter and so does the ostensible list creator. And so on.

The point is that The Atrocity Exhibition makes a lot more sense if you don’t come to it cold, as an unexpected freak show, but see it as a logical development and extension of Ballard’s long-running interest in fragments, collage and non-narrative.

Crashed Cars exhibition (1970)

In April 1970 Ballard staged an exhibition titled Crashed Cars at the New Arts Laboratory in London.

1. In the post-war period cars became a symbol of consumer empowerment and glamour. Cars were promoted in films and adverts and car ownership rocketed. However, so did the incidence of car crashes, with a number featuring high-profile fatalities – James Dean (1955), Albert Camus (1960), Jayne Mansfield (1967) (which, obviously, continued after the exhibition and down to our day – Marc Bolan (1977), Grace Kelly (1982), Princess Diana (1997)).

2. And after all, a car crash is the centrepiece of the closing song on the decade’s keystone album, Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, when John Lennon sings:

I read the news today, oh boy
About a lucky man who made the grade
And though the news was rather sad
Well, I just had to laugh
I saw the photograph

He blew his mind out in a car
He didn’t notice that the lights had changed
A crowd of people stood and stared
They’d seen his face before
Nobody was really sure if he was from the House of Lords

3. A quick search of the internet reveals that, as it happens, the highest figure for road traffic-related deaths during peacetime was 7,985 in 1966, the year before the Beatles album (by comparison, 1,782 people were killed in road accidents in 2018.)

So Ballard wasn’t being all that eccentric to envision a) the car as a key symbol of the twentieth century, and b) the mystique about car crashes – the way they had killed a number of A-list celebrities, the way people were gruesomely fascinated by them (‘Well, I just had to laugh, I saw the photograph’) – as telling us something profound and unsettling about our car-mad culture.

And so he staged an exhibition of crashed cars. Actually, there were only three car wrecks in the exhibition and – disappointingly – no photos of the event appear to have survived. Some of the visitors to the gallery vandalised the wrecks with wine, paint and urine, confirming Ballard’s belief that the growing ‘technological landscape’ was influencing human behaviour and social relationships and not in a good way.

Alternatively, they might just have been getting into the spirit of anarchic 1960s ‘happenings’.

To me Ballard’s Crash exhibition hardly seems experimental at all. It is well known that people stop to stare at car crashes and that traffic slows right down on motorways as people slowly pass the scenes of smashes. I’ve done it myself.

This is because there really is something deeply fascinating about the pathology of car crashes and something weirdly compelling about the way that objects which are promoted as smooth and curved and aerodynamically perfect are transformed into angular nests of smashed windscreens and random spikes of metal jutting out. For the last few days I’ve walked past a car parked near my work, the right half of whose bonnet and wings are buckled up and outwards like the carapaces of an enormous beetle.

Since 1970 we’ve had precisely 50 years during which all kinds of objects from the real world have been situated in galleries for our entertainment and mystification. A few years ago I came across a display at Tate Modern of a set of engine blocks from cars which had been blown up by suicide bombers in the Middle East, considered as works of art. No-one bats an eyelid at things like that any more.

So considering the exhibition as an investigation of just what it is that fascinates us about car crashes, and the suggestion that they have a strange and eerie beauty of their own, doesn’t strike me as at all weird. In fact it’s surprising that it took someone so long to come up with it.

Traditionally, the significance of the exhibition is that Ballard went on to explore the mystique and pathology of car crashes in the ‘controversial’ novel Crash (1973), although the weirdness of our obsessive car culture is also the subject of the less well-known novel Concrete Island which immediately followed it (1974). But I’m making the point that the Crash exhibition was part of a continuum of literary and artistic experiments which Ballard undertook in the first half of his career.

Practical conclusion

In the 1950s and 60s Ballard created more collages, now lost. I imagine these, like the New Project and the Advertisers Announcements were fun to make and show friends and maybe persuade a gallery to display for a while… But in the end your agent, your wife and your publisher want standardised texts which they can publish, market and sell. Which is what, after the mid-70s, Ballard produced in abundance.

References

Reviews of other Ballard books

Novels

Short story collections

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
1981 The Affirmation by Christopher Priest – an extraordinarily vivid description of a schizophrenic young man living in London who, to protect against the trauma of his actual life (father died, 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 suppressedand secret police to repress the population

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by Simon on January 30, 2020  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on January 30, 2020

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