J. G. BALLARD
Crash
Fourth Estate An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 77–85 Fulham Palace Road Hammersmith, London W6 8JB First published in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape in 1973 Copyright © J. G. Ballard 1973, 1995 Introduction copyright © Zadie Smith 2014 ‘The Road to Crash’ © Travis Elborough 2008 ‘Autopia’, first published in Drive magazine in 1971 and subsequently in The User’s Guide to the Millennium (1996) © J. G. Ballard 1971 The right of J. G. Ballard to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins. Source ISBN: 9780007287024 Ebook Edition © 1973 ISBN: 9780007324309 Version: 2014-07-03 Table of Contents
THE ROAD TO CRASH by Travis Elborough
THE MARRIAGE OF reason and nightmare that 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. Thermo-nuclear weapons systems and soft-drink commercials coexist in an overlit realm ruled by advertising and pseudo-events, science and pornography. Over our lives preside the great twin leitmotifs of the 20th century – sex and paranoia. Increasingly, our concepts of past, present and future are being forced to revise themselves. Just as the past, in social and psychological terms, became a casualty of Hiroshima and the nuclear age, so in its turn the future is ceasing to exist, devoured by the all-voracious present. We have annexed the future into the present, as merely one of those manifold alternatives open to us. Options multiply around us, and we live in an almost infantile world where any demand, any possibility, whether for life-styles, travel, sexual roles and identities, can be satisfied instantly. In addition, I feel that the balance between fiction and reality has changed significantly
