“I would sum up my fear about the future in one word: boring. And that’s my one fear: that everything has happened; nothing exciting or new or interesting is ever going to happen again … the future is just going to be a vast, conforming suburb of the soul.”
Sadly, dystopian science fiction writer J. G. Ballard died yesterday after struggling many years with long illness. He was 78 years old.
The room where Ballard did his writing.
He was considered part of the new wave or avante garde wing of science fiction, and if you think you’ve never heard of him, you have, but probably outside the genre of SF, which to summarize Vonnegut, often gets mistaken with a toilet. His autobiographical novel about his time spent in a Shanghai interment camp during World War II, Empire Of The Sun, was made into a film by Steven Spielberg, starring a young Christian Bale.
He also wrote the novel Crash, which was made into a film by David Cronenberg in 1996. It’s about a group of people with a very unique paraphillia, in that derive sexual pleasure out of car crashes.
In addition to having written just under 20 novels, Ballard wrote an extensive amount of short stories during his career, and the original version of Crash started as a short piece in his 1970 experimental piece, The Atrocity Exhibition, which also contained another of his famous pieces, entitled “Why I Want To Fuck Ronald Reagan.” Wikipedia summarizes it best: It is written in the style of a scientific paper and catalogs an apocryphal series of bizarre experiments intended to measure the psychosexual appeal of Ronald Reagan, then the Governor of California and candidate for the Republican Party nomination for the 1968 United States presidential election.
Berg Katse has made the following claim about the piece: At the 1980 Republican Convention in San Francisco a copy of [Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan], minus its title and the running sideheads, and furnished with the seal of the Republican Party, was distributed by some puckish pro-situationists to the RNC delegates. It was accepted for what it resembled: a psychological position paper on the candidate’s subliminal appeal, commissioned by some maverick think-tank. You can read “Why I Want To Fuck Ronald Reagan” here.
“Twenty years ago no one could have imagined the effects the Internet would have: entire relationships flourish, friendships prosper…there’s a vast new intimacy and accidental poetry, not to mention the weirdest porn. The entire human experience seems to unveil itself like the surface of a new planet.”
-J.G. Ballard
Future Ruins by Michelle Lord, inspired by the works of Ballard.
Being only a casual fan of Ballard’s writings over the years, I would say that he tends to have a very apocalyptic vision of the future, possibly based on his growing up in Shanghai during the war. For a while now, I’ve wanted to do a post on the Klaxon’s first album, Myths Of The Near Future, which contains numerous references to all sorts of science fiction works. I mentioned the album only very briefly before in a post on Pynchon, since one of the tracks on the album is called “Gravity’s Rainbow,” but the title of the album itself comes from a short story collection by Ballard.
In fact, one could go wild with the references to Ballard through out pop culture. Example: Joy Division wrote a song called “The Atrocity Exhibition,” because Ian Curtis read and loved the novel, though a majority of the song had been written by the time he discovered the book.
Here is a nice Ballard website (amongst other things) and here a very good obituary of the late author.
“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 preempting of any free or original 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.”
