these stories are myself. I couldn’t make them writers – the obvious thing to do was to make them doctors. My training and mental inclination, my approach to everything, is much closer to that of a doctor than to that of a writer. I’m not a literary man. But I am interested in – admittedly popular – science. I approach things as a scientist would, I think. I’ve a scientific bent; it’s obvious to me that these characters are what I would have been if I hadn’t been a writer.
PRINGLE: Your National Service period in the RAF – did that influence you at all? Were you a bomber pilot?
BALLARD: No, I did a sort of basic training course but I left after a while. In fact, I didn’t do National Service. I was exempt. I thought I’d like to try flying, to see what it was like. I thought I’d like to try service life, because it was at least sort of forward-looking and that helped. This was in 1954. I was in a bit of a dead end. I hadn’t started reading SF. I wanted to be a writer. I was writing short stories, planning a novel like any novice, but I wasn’t organised. It struck me – I was very interested in aviation – that it might be worth going into the service for a couple of years – one of those short service commissions they had then. You could go in for a very short space of time, just to see what it was like.
But in fact it wasn’t anything. It was completely unlike anything I imagined. I didn’t like service life at all. Also, I spent my entire period in Canada, out in the back of beyond. I was writing while I was there. The moment I got myself organised I wanted to get out of the RAF and get back to London, and start churning the stuff out. So I resigned my commission and came back to England. I had to get a job. Ted Carnell arranged for me to get a job with the parent company, on a technical journal. I moved from there to being assistant editor of a scientific journal. I stayed there until about 1961.
PRINGLE: You were actually writing before you’d read any SF?
BALLARD: Oh yes. I wasn’t writing SF, though. It never occurred to me. I started writing SF partly because it seemed very exciting – and the sorts of things I wanted to do in SF had not been done by anybody else – also because there were so many magazines. You could write for so many. This was when I was a complete novice, hadn’t published a single story. I could see at a glance. There were ten American magazines and about four English ones. So there was a market greater than the literary field then. There were very few literary journals of any kind, and they were very prestigious – you know, Horizon, etc. It was obvious you couldn’t make a career out of writing short stories for Horizon. It wasn’t a matter of making money, but of actually being able to write a good deal, to write with freedom too, which you could do in the SF magazines. You were free, within the rough conventions of the field. You don’t have that sort of freedom in literary journals.
PRINGLE: The picture you draw of yourself as being interested in science, editor of a science journal and so on, makes me wonder for the first time why you wanted to be a writer at all.
BALLARD: If one’s got an imagination, if the imagination’s going overtime, you have to start writing it down. If you’ve got a talent for that sort of thing, you write it down without too much difficulty. As a child, I was good at essays, writing stories. Even at school, I was writing short stories. It was something that just grew out of childhood. I would have qualified as a doctor, without any doubt, but for the fact that the imaginative pressure to write was so strong. I was beginning to neglect medicine altogether. I was primarily interested in anatomy and physiology. These were the subjects that I did for two years. Once I had covered the basic course in those subjects, I found more advanced medicine so technical that it didn’t relate to the system of metaphors that, say anatomy is so rich in, or physiology, or pathology. Once you’ve dissected the cadaver – thorax, abdomen, head and neck, etc. – you go on to more exhaustive anatomy, of, say, the inner ear, and the metaphors aren’t so generously forthcoming.
So I’d had enough of it in two years. I could see it then became a very technical matter and also became applied. I’d go into hospital and actually be lancing boils and looking at people with skin diseases. I didn’t want that. I was more interested in the general scientific underpinning of medicine. In some ways I wish I had become a doctor. Such a mind-blowing course. If you’ve known anybody that’s gone through the medical degree course, they all say that you leave half your mind behind. The feats of memory required are really absolutely gigantic.
GODDARD: One of the most popular areas of your work is the series of Vermilion Sands stories. A critical reading of these shows that they are all, to some extent, variations on the same theme. Could you tell us something about why you wrote these stories?
BALLARD: I’ve never really analysed them myself. I suppose I was just interested in inventing an imaginary Palm Springs, a kind of world I imagined all suburbs of North America and northern Europe might be like in about two hundred years’ time. Everyone will be permanently on vacation, or doing about one day’s work a year. People will give in to any whim that occurs to them – like taking up cloud sculpture – leisure and work will mesh in.
I think everybody will be very relaxed, almost too relaxed. It will be a landscape of not so much suburbia but exurbia, a kind of country-club belt, which will be largely the product of advanced technologies of various kinds, for leisure and so forth. So you will get things like computers meshed into one’s ordinary everyday life in a way that can be seen already. I’m just writing about one direction that the future is taking us. I think the future will be like Vermilion Sands, if I have to make a guess. It isn’t going to be like Brave New World or Nineteen Eighty-Four: it’s going to be like a country-club paradise.
PRINGLE: Is this a sort of literary conceit, or what you really think the future’s going to be like?
BALLARD: I’m not a literary man at all. That’s my guess at what the future will be like!
PRINGLE: It’s not the impression of the future people would get from your books as a whole, where you tend to write about disaster and doom.
BALLARD: I think that’s a false reading of my stuff. I don’t see my fiction as being disaster-oriented, certainly not most of my SF – apart from The Wind from Nowhere, which is just a piece of hackwork. The others, which are reasonably serious, are not disaster stories. People seem to imply that these are books with unhappy endings, but the reverse is true: they’re books with happy endings, stories of psychic fulfilment. The geophysical changes which take place in The Drought, The Drowned World and The Crystal World are all positive and good changes – they are what the books are about. The changes lead us to our real psychological goals, so they are not disaster stories at all.
I know that when The Drowned World was accepted by my American publisher about twelve years ago he said: ‘Yes, it’s great, but why don’t we have a happy ending? Have the hero going north instead of south into the jungle and sun.’ He thought I’d made a slight technical mistake by a slip of the pen, and had the hero going in the wrong direction. I said: ‘No, God, this is a happy story.’ I don’t really understand the use of the word ‘disaster’. I don’t regard Crash as a disaster story. In a sense, all these are cataclysm stories. Really, I’m trying to show a new kind of logic emerging, and this is to be embraced, or at least held in regard. So I don’t really see any distinction between any of my work – between Vermilion Sands on the one hand, and the rest on the other.
GODDARD: Why have you never produced a work with a sympathetic male/female relationship?
BALLARD: My fiction is all about one person, all about one man coming to terms with various forms of isolation – the total sense of isolation, that the hero of ‘The Voices of Time’ feels, various other kinds of isolation, psychological isolation of the kind the hero of ‘The Terminal Beach’ feels. The protagonists of most of my fiction feel tremendously isolated, and that seems to exclude the possibility of a warm fruitful relationship with anybody, let alone anyone as potentially close as a woman. I don’t think this has anything to do with any quirks of my own. I’ve