LINNETT: So you still feel it’s OK to use conventional structures?
BALLARD: I think one has to adjust the style to the subject matter. People have accused me of being an experimental writer, but I’ve written ninety short stories and six novels, of which eighty short stories and six novels are completely conventional, in technique and form. I think the subject matter comes first. The style and technique serve the subject matter, and I still think there’s a place for conventional narrative. It’s the idea that needs to be needled. My real criticism of most of the fiction written today is that the content is so banal, so second rate, so imitative of itself. It’s a fiction based on fiction, other people’s fiction, rather than based on experience and ordinary life.
LINNETT: Finally, have you any advice to offer to budding writers?
BALLARD: Yes, I’d warn anyone beginning his career that the days when a writer could think of having a career, writing fiction as a main life’s activity, are probably over. I think it’s going to be more and more difficult for the novelist and short story writer to make a living of any kind over the next twenty years. All the signs are that fiction sales are sliding downwards, continuously. Don’t regard yourself as being anyone special, as having any right to even a modest financial success, because you’re a writer. So be very wary about committing yourself entirely to being a writer. I think the writer’s role is very much in decline, at least for the time being.
As for SF, it’s one of the healthiest fields in fiction – sales of SF books all over the world are going up, one’s stuff is endlessly reprinted. I would say that SF is one of the few areas where you could actually be successful, if you have the flair. There’s no problem within SF; it’s outside the field that the problems lie, for the writer there.
1974: Carol Orr. How to Face Doomsday without Really Trying
Previously unpublished
This is the edited transcript of an interview conducted by Carol Orr for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. It was included in the series ‘How to Face Doomsday without Really Trying’, broadcast on the CBC radio show Ideas in March 1974 and produced by Judith Merril, the influential SF critic once described by Ballard as the ‘strongest woman in a genre for the most part created by timid and weak men’. The series featured science fiction writers discussing doomsday scenarios, and, besides Ballard, guests included Frederik Pohl, Isaac Asimov, John Brunner, Samuel Delaney and Arthur Gibson.
The interview is remarkable for its range. Ballard discusses the perceived threat of nuclear war, backlashes against technology, the peculiar atemporality of Western societies (where any and every lifestyle choice seems immediately available), the ‘greatness’ of modernist architect Le Corbusier and the aesthetic qualities of concrete overpasses. The latter tangent produces some memorable quotes. When Ballard declares that he feels ‘there’s a certain beauty in looking at a lake that has a bright metallic scum floating on top of it’, there is a sense that he is provoking Orr, and yet he is also making a serious point when he aligns the metaphoric impact of that observation with the oft-maligned freeway system of Los Angeles. For Ballard, urban infrastructure is often constructed with great skill and intelligence (a ‘motion sculpture … of great beauty’) and needs to be appreciated on its own terms, rather than automatically dismissed as a blight on the landscape. In this light, his ‘urban disaster’ triptych (Crash, Concrete Island and High-Rise, which take place almost wholly within a landscape of motorways, overpasses and apartment blocks, and are invariably characterised as ‘dystopian’ by critics) demands to be reassessed.
The interview, conducted just before the publication of Concrete Island, demonstrates Ballard’s predictive power. In the earlier Lynn Barber conversation, he suggested that in the twentieth century the computer was unlikely to play a major role in most people’s lives. Here he revises that statement, asserting that the average person has more to fear from identify theft via computer than a nuclear conflict (the ‘doomsday’ scenario most in vogue at the time). Elsewhere, Ballard elaborates on the ideas essayed in his introduction to Crash, particularly the distinction between inner space and the outer world of fictionalised reality. [SS]
BALLARD: It is quite obvious today that people are tremendously concerned with a huge range of problems that in previous generations tended to be handled by professionals, by politicians, theologians, philosophers and the like. Now we find the situation where everybody is concerned about the world in which they live, and to a large extent people have the vocabulary to talk about these critical matters. The last ten or fifteen years have shown that communities and individuals, small groups, can take actions on matters of immediate interest to them and their personal environment. They can get bus routes altered, they can have bridges built for children going to school, they can have lakes cleaned up if effluents pour into them. I’m all for people being engaged.
But at the same time there is a sort of neurotic or overemotional backlash against technology as a whole. There’s been a tremendous reaction against technology in the last ten or fifteen years. I would suppose it is one of the consequences of World War II, the A-bomb, the H-bomb. In world affairs in the fifties, the whole threat of nuclear, technological warfare turned people against science and against technology, and we’re seeing some of the fruits of that now. I think that’s a shame because whatever we may think, science and technology are going to continue to transform our world. You know, it’s the old game, if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em, and we might as well join science and technology. They’re going to dominate the future far more than they’ve dominated the present.
ORR: You don’t see nuclear holocaust as a plausible doomsday?
BALLARD: I don’t think that’s likely in any way whatsoever. I wouldn’t have thought if there were any danger to life on this planet it would come from the possibility of nuclear warfare. Far more from the misuse of, say, antibiotics, the misuse of computers or of overpopulation as a product of better health, better nutrition and the like, and a general lack of control. What I’m concerned with is that people, by reacting against technology, by taking a very Arcadian view of what life on this planet should be, may no longer be able to deal with the real threats when they begin to come from technology, which they probably will.
Threats to the quality of life that everyone is so concerned about will come much more, say, from the widespread application of computers to every aspect of our lives where all sorts of science fiction fantasies will come true, where bank balances will be constantly monitored and at almost any given time all the information that exists about ourselves will be on file somewhere – where all sorts of agencies, commercial, political and governmental, will have access to that information.
By turning our backs against technology, I think to some extent we are going to prevent ourselves from learning how to cope with it. Because this is something that’s got to be done: it’s like refusing to learn to drive a motor car.
ORR: Do you agree with Alvin Toffler that we should be adapting ourselves to the inevitable technological change?
BALLARD: We’ve got to, as far as possible, control the growth of technology, to steer it in the right direction. We’ve got to make extremely important judgements about our lives and not let technology force its judgements on us. I think we have to look very hard at the extent to which, for example, one is going to allow the widespread use of computers, of data-processing and storage devices, by commercial and governmental agencies. This is a judgement one has to make.
We might reach a point where, say, massive fingerprint files held by agencies like the FBI and Scotland Yard would have to be destroyed after a certain period. One would have, say, an automatic destruction after five years of all information about ourselves. There might be a legal requirement that all sorts of information would have a finite life, and we couldn’t go on accumulating, stockpiling information about people. That’s just a minor example, but