Читать книгу Extreme Metaphors - Simon Sellars - Страница 13

Previously unpublished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 I think there are huge ranges of examples that one could pick.

But I’m more interested, actually, in looking farther ahead towards the future of technology, and I can see us making a much more intimate marriage of ourselves and technology. I mean, if I were to trot out a very simple equation, I would say ‘the future equals sex times technology’. And by sex I mean the whole organic expression of our personalities in terms of our bodies and our responses to life. I think all kinds of intimate junctions are going to be made between sex and technology, between life and technology, that will reverse the sort of logics that we accept today. One is moving almost towards a realm of morally justified psychopathology.

This is a frightening realm, but it’s the sort of logic that works, for example, when you go to any motor car race. The fact that people are mangled to death in these huge machines spinning around at 150 miles an hour is something that is accepted. We accept the thrills and spills of the speedway track. Now we accept all kinds of violence. For example: for ten years Vietnam was just a TV war; it was just wallpaper, mental wallpaper. I think one learnt to enjoy – it’s a terrible thing to say – but one learnt to enjoy some of the apparently insane marriages between violence and technology that took place.

ORR: Do you have some kind of faith in the future?

BALLARD: I think there are going to be enormous changes. The rate of change over the next fifty years is going to be greater. I think sometimes that more events took place in the last ten years than happened in the whole of previous history. The rate of change is just extraordinary. Where we are, in the early seventies, is in a sense a doldrums period. So much happened in the sixties that people were exhausted by the change – people can only take so much change. Once you could see the enormous changes that took place all over the world during the sixties, you knew it was pretty obvious that this couldn’t go on for ever and it became obvious that everyone needed a period of consolidation. This is taking place now. But I think the process of radical change is going to begin again.

Now the materials are at hand thanks to advances in transplant surgery, of developments like the extra-uterine foetus, above all the application of the computer and its various spin-off devices to every aspect of domestic life as well as commercial and political life. Computers above all are leading us into a realm of really stupendous change where we’ll have to look twice to even identify ourselves. I think they’re going to offer us in the next twenty to thirty years a realm of bizarre possibilities that will far transcend anything that’s happened so far.

ORR: Insofar as we are able to grasp the opportunities more correctly than perhaps we have in the past?

BALLARD: Yes, but we’re moving into a realm where it is getting increasingly difficult to make moral judgements, to know what is right. I can only speak chiefly of England, but for example, popular views on capital punishment, on drugs, on pornography, on sexual freedom – these have changed enormously over the last ten to fifteen years. Even though there’s a certain backlash against permissiveness, we’re still enjoying a range of freedoms in those fields which were unthinkable, say, twenty years ago.

This process will continue, but we’re moving into a realm where it’s going to become even more difficult to make a judgement about whether such and such an activity is morally reprehensible or not. Whether it’s of moral value to institutionalise, say, homosexual marriages between consenting adults, men or women, and the whole view of the sanctity of the family as the basic social unit on which society rests – whether that is going to be jettisoned simply because the range of experiences available to somebody in the future will preclude the establishment of very durable personal relationships of the kind that are necessary to bring up children, and the like.

Again, one sees this in the overlay of an enormous range of changes where it is difficult to make out what is right and what is wrong. The old yardsticks don’t really help. One can visualise all kinds of social behaviour which run quite contrary to the sort of social and moral principles which we have been brought up on – sex, drugs, etc. These are all topics which are crying out at us from the headlines. But it is very difficult to apply the old moral yardstick to the new situations. This is why, by retreating from technology, as I think a lot of people are, we are in danger of losing our grip on the changing situation.

ORR: What is your reaction to Frederik Pohl, who said that science fiction ought to be propaganda? Did Wells and Huxley and Swift write propaganda?

BALLARD: Well, yes. I think science fiction has always had a sort of a cautionary role – of warning people. Warning its readers against the possibilities of the future. But I also see science fiction having a propaganda role. I see the SF writer looking into the future and saying: ‘Well, twenty years from now black may be white, morally and every other way’. Think about a world in which this or that social relationship is something that may appal us. Now this might very well be the norm – it might be a social crime to think about having a child.

The whole tradition of valuing people who bring up large families, by giving them every conceivable welfare benefit and the like, tax advantages and so forth – that may be turned on its head. I mean, to think in terms of monogamous sexual relationships oriented around the idea of reproduction, of having children, may become morally offensive, it may be a crime on all levels to do this. One’s got to bear in mind that a complete reversal of that kind may take place. This sort of casualness in promiscuity may become much admired: they may be necessary virtues which society as a whole will encourage.

ORR: Except that there’s a difference we ought to draw here between propaganda and warnings. In order to write propaganda you must necessarily take a moral stance, mustn’t you?

BALLARD: Yes, I suppose that’s true but it’s a science fiction writer’s job, to some extent, to live on a sort of boom, on the bowsprit in front of the boat. I mean, he’s got to live at least a few minutes ahead of everybody else, if not a few years. He’s got to anticipate the sort of world which may exist and offer either encouragement or warning. And I think a lot of encouragement is needed. We must urge people to face the future, for I think that people turn their backs on the future. In a sense, our whole notion of past, present and future has become a little worn out.

One of the biggest casualties of World War II, for example, certainly as far as Europe was concerned, was that the past ceased to exist. The whole social order, based on an intimate, continuing understanding of the past and all its forms going back for many generations, underpinning the present in every conceivable way – that ended. I mean, you now meet people who have no idea who their grandparents were, which in this country, in England, was unthinkable twenty years ago.

But I think another casualty, in a sense, is the future. The present is throwing up so many options, so many alternatives, that it contains the possibilities of any future right now. You can have tomorrow today. And the notion of the future as a sort of programmatic device – a direction, a compass bearing that we can look forward to, a destination that we are moving towards psychologically and physically – I think that possibility is rather outdated.

We’re living in a kind of continuum of past, present and future, where anything is possible. The whole distinction between fiction and reality is turned on its head. The external environment now is the greatest provider of fiction. We are living inside an enormous novel, written by the external world, by the worlds of advertising, mass-merchandising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, and so on and so forth. The one node of reality left to us is inside our own heads.

ORR: This is the ‘inner space’ you were talking about?

BALLARD: In a sense. I suppose we are moving into a realm where inner space is no longer just inside our skulls but is in the terrain we see around us in everyday life. We are moving into a world where the elements of fiction are that world – and by fiction I mean anything invented to serve imaginative ends, whether it is invented by an advertising agency, a politician, an airline or what have you. These elements have now crowded out the old-fashioned elements of reality.

ORR: But surely that’s always been a part of any consumer society? That’s not something peculiar to the twentieth century.

BALLARD: It’s a matter of degree. Twenty or thirty years ago the elements of fiction, that is politics within the consumer society or within one’s private life, occupied a much smaller space. I can’t quantify this exactly but it was sort of fifty-fifty. But now I don’t think this is the case. I think we have seen the invasion of almost every aspect of our lives by fictions of one kind or another. We see this in people’s homes – the way they furnish their houses and apartments. Even the sort of friends they have seem to be dictated by fictions, fantasies, by standards invented by other people to serve various ends, not necessarily commercial. But we’re living more and more in a hot mix of fictions of every kind.

Now I think the writer no longer needs to invent the fiction. The fiction is already there. His job is to put in the reality. The writer’s task now is to become much more analytic, especially the science fiction writer. He has to approach the subject matter of ordinary lives the way a scientist approaches nature, his subject matter. You know, one devises some sort of hypothesis and then applies it to one’s material, to one’s subject matter, and tests it to see whether the hypothesis is correct.

In Crash, I took an apparently absurd – well, terrifyingly absurd – idea, that car crashes might conceivably have a beneficial role, and tested that against the reality that people were actually experiencing. It seems to me that it may well be the case, in some strange way, that my hypothesis is correct. It fits the facts. The writer’s role now is much more investigative.

ORR: I wonder if we could discuss one of the points Judith Merril was discussing with Frederik Pohl and Arthur Gibson: in planning for the future, which things do you go about altering? They were discussing reality in terms of altering human psychology, saying that you have to somehow inspire in people a desire to do what is either (a) of personal benefit, or (b) of social benefit. Now it seems to me that those two are contradictory.

BALLARD: I think it’s very difficult to stand outside one’s own time and take a completely dispassionate view of what’s happening. I think a kind of relativity applies that makes it extremely difficult to know who we are, where we are, and where we are going at any given time. So I’d be very wary of deciding what our destination should be and suggesting that people should change or conform to it.

ORR: For people living in the thirteenth century, the sixteenth century was just as far off as we are now from the eighteenth.

BALLARD: We are living now in a radically different environment. We share our environment with the manifold products of science and technology. I mean, you can’t say that a man driving a motor car is alone if he hasn’t any passengers – he’s sharing reality with the motor car and the highway. He’s not alone in any sense whatever. I don’t think people are getting weak minded, I think quite the contrary – they are getting very much more tough minded than ever before. I think they need to be.

We take in our stride a high degree of ruthlessness in ourselves, in our private lives. We take for granted a wide range of options that we exercise without any second thoughts, without any self-doubts. It’s only at the fringes of our lives that we question this or that. I think quite the contrary, that people are getting very tough minded. I think that is why the future is going to be a very electric and aggressive place.

ORR: Do you agree with Pohl that we need that kind of small apocalypse to force a change?

BALLARD: Well, I think all the disasters have taken place, haven’t they? I don’t think there’s any need for another Hiroshima or another World War II – I don’t think we need another involved preview of Armageddon. These changes are taking place all the time. I welcome them: the more information flowing, the better. I mean, I prefer high-density information to low-density. I’m all for more and more experience of a more and more random kind: I think it makes for a richer and more exciting life. I think one should embrace all kinds of possibilities, no matter how bizarre, or perverse, or morally reprehensible they may seem. Change is almost good in itself.

ORR: Couldn’t Hiroshima be used as an argument that mankind is bent on a kind of suicidal path?

BALLARD: No. I think nuclear weapons and the limited amount of nuclear warfare that has actually taken place shows that people are fully able to master these weapons in a way that campaigners for nuclear disarmament twenty years ago certainly wouldn’t have accepted. I think mankind as a whole – the small number of men who control the use of these weapons – have made intelligent and sensible decisions, and the proof is in the pudding. We haven’t had any nuclear war and I don’t think we’re likely to.

ORR: Surely the intelligent decision is not to have them.

BALLARD: I don’t think that’s the intelligent decision at all. The object of having these weapons is to preserve peace and national security and they’ve achieved that. No major power is likely to renounce them, so any argument about them is academic.

ORR: What about other forms of doomsday – ecology and pollution?

BALLARD: Personally, I’m not that opposed to pollution. I think the transformation of the old landscape by concrete fields and all that isn’t necessarily bad by definition. I feel there’s a certain beauty in looking at a lake that has a bright metallic scum floating on top of it. A certain geometric beauty in a cone of china clay, say, four hundred yards high, suddenly placed in the middle of the rural landscape. It’s all a matter of a certain aesthetic response. Some people find highways, cloverleaf junctions, overpasses and multi-storey car parks to be ugly, chiefly because they are made of concrete. But they are not. Most are structures of great beauty.

When Los Angeles is forgotten, probably what will remain will be the huge freeway system. I’m certain people in the future – long after the automobile has been forgotten – will regard them as enigmatic and mysterious monuments which attested to the high aesthetic standards of the people that built them, in the same way that we look back on the pyramids or the mausoleums in a huge Egyptian necropolis as things of great beauty – we’ve forgotten their original function. It’s all a matter of aesthetics. I think that highways for the most part are beautiful. I prefer concrete to meadow.

ORR: Why? I can see liking one or the other. I don’t understand preferring something …

BALLARD: I feel that a modern high-rise building, or a concrete seven-storey car park, or a cloverleaf roadway junction, reflects and embraces within itself all the aesthetic laws of good design that we apply to the sorts of things we regard as beautiful in our lives, like well-designed cutlery and kitchen equipment. They embrace all the aesthetic standards of modern sculpture.

The last 100 years have consistently led us towards industrial design and the set of standards and aesthetic yardsticks which we apply in our everyday lives – to our judgement of which washing machine we buy, which motor car we prefer, which coffee percolator we like. But we must apply these yardsticks right across the board. They’re the same yardsticks, the same criteria that you see in the design of motorway junctions. They are motion sculptures of great beauty. Now, to say because it’s a road, it must therefore be automatically ugly is illogical. I simply accept the logic of the world in which I live.

There was a tremendous outcry over here about a year ago, when a section of motorway was built in central London, called the Westway, a six-lane concrete highway built on pillars which ran through what had been one of the most shabby areas of London around Harrow Road. People living in terrible conditions in these old Victorian, or pre-Victorian, houses – slums for the most part – raised this enormous outcry about the ugliness of this huge structure that swept through their neighbourhood. The irony is that if you drove along the highway it was actually a thing of great beauty. It’s a motion sculpture beautifully constructed and designed. The ugliness resides in the landscape it is supposed to be desecrating, in these ancient, tilting, collapsing Victorian houses, which are a blot on the landscape, socially, aesthetically and in every conceivable way. That’s an example of the sort of absurd and paradoxical logic that people apply.

ORR: Well, that’s part of clinging to the past.

BALLARD: I think it is. But I think it’s clinging to a whole set of conventional ideas that need revisiting every so often, simply because they’re no longer relevant to the situation. We see the sort of general reaction against technology that is taking place, the conventional response that anything made of concrete is ugly. Quite the contrary. Le Corbusier, the great French [sic] architect, fifty years ago was claiming the great beauty of concrete, building in concrete. Architects all over the world followed him. Concrete is a beautiful material – handled intelligently it’s much more a twentieth-century material than, say, wood or brick. I think we ought to look very hard at many aspects of our lives, where we take for granted that such-and-such a thing is wrong or bad. If we look at that situation, we will find that we are being illogical.

ORR: You were talking about the role of the science fiction writer – how does that affect your style? You write in a style that is very difficult, I would say. For instance, the Kennedy piece [‘Plan for the Assassination of Jacqueline Kennedy’] from The Atrocity Exhibition.

BALLARD: Some of my experimental speculative writing is at first glance difficult, but in fact it’s merely unfamiliar. One could find analogies all over the place – in the visual arts, say, when a new school of painting appeared on the scene. When the cubists first arrived, everyone was appalled. What were they doing? Why didn’t they paint like the Impressionists? (Who, in their turn, in the late 1870s, horrified everybody who looked at their paintings.)

Look at every new school of painting in the same way as aboriginal peoples look at photographs and are unable to identify what’s in them because the visual conventions are so strong. Our whole perception of the visual world around us is based on a whole system of conventions that help us distinguish a door or a window, or a flat tyre, or what have you. Once you begin to provide a new set of conventions, a new set of objects, everybody is thrown into confusion.

ORR: Are you writing strictly in that style now, or in the style of The Crystal World?

BALLARD: My last two books have been written in a completely straightforward style. When I was writing about the Kennedys I was writing about the world of the 1960s, a world of multiplying confusions of every conceivable kind, and I used an episodic and, if you like, non-linear technique appropriate to the sort of television landscapes that we were living in then. Now, in Crash, my book about the motor car – and my next book, Concrete Island, about a man who’s marooned on a traffic island in a rather large city – I’m using what I think is the appropriate technique, straightforward narration, simply because the ideas themselves, particularly in Crash, are so unexpected, and incomprehensible to some people – challenging, if you like. The best way of expressing them is in a straightforward way.

ORR: You talked about whether or not there was a positive aspect to the automobile crash. Is man by nature a killer? Does he in fact want to improve his future?

BALLARD: That’s a very good question. I myself think that man, if you like, is a naturally perverse animal, that the elements of psychopathology or perversity or moral deviancy are a very large part of his character. I don’t think that can be changed. I think attempts in the past to provide a very rigid moral framework succeeded to some extent. I think they’re going to break down now, simply because the opportunities for limitless freedom are so great.

One is moving into a realm where one will be able to practise all kinds of perversions, perform all sorts of psychopathological acts without any feeling of corruption, or without any kind of sense of moral failure. One will be genuinely free to perform, to behave in ways that now seem perverse, just as we ourselves now in the mid-seventies have a degree of freedom, feel entitled to behave in ways that, say, our parents would be deeply shocked by.

I think we’re moving into a realm where moral yardsticks won’t apply anyway. These words, ‘psychopathology’, ‘moral perversity’ and the like, are so heavily loaded in their own disfavour, as it were, that it’s very difficult to use them. There simply isn’t any other vocabulary. But I think one’s got to face an event like the car crash – it does obviously satisfy people in ways they aren’t prepared to recognise. There might be something about violence that provides a necessary salt in our psychic diet. And this is the sort of thing people find very difficult to accept.

ORR: Well, whether you’re right or wrong it certainly means that you must ask the question if you are prescribing for the future. Does collective humanity want to improve its lot? In reading your novel The Drought, it seems to me that the character Ransom expresses that kind of ambiguity.

BALLARD: Right. I think we are on the threshold of a total moral ambiguity where it will be impossible to make a value judgement – yes or no, bad or good – in large areas of behaviour, because those areas aren’t going to be amenable to the conventional wisdom and morality of the past. Most of our behaviour now takes place in the realm of our own completely private worlds, where our imaginations can have full play, where there are no yardsticks to apply – one can behave in any way one wishes. I think this is the big change that is coming, made largely possible by our increased wealth. I mean, we all spend less and less of our lives actually supplying the basic necessities of food and shelter – most of our spending is discretionary, more and more in the field of what one could call entertainment, or of intelligent pleasure. This is indeed a realm where anything is possible.

ORR: In classic political theory, you could attribute it to the rise of the middle class.

BALLARD: Maybe. I think you are probably right. In Europe we have seen the decline of the so-called ‘working class’. In many countries of western Europe – Germany, Switzerland, Scandinavian countries – one has the impression that there is no working class, or there’s a very small manual or labouring class. Most people are middle-class. I think the same is sort of true of North America. But I think we’re moving into a realm where the middle class will be the next to go. To use a class terminology, everybody will be upper-class, everybody will be rich. We’re moving into a realm where it will be like, say, California.

It sort of ties in with the doomsday idea. People have had this obsession at various periods that the world was coming to an end, and in the last ten years the backlash against technology and all the anxieties about pollution and the energy crisis and so on tend to feed this doomsday obsession. I find highly unlikely the notion that Western civilisation as we know it is going to be over in ten years time, as various people – what I call ‘airport thinkers’ – pronounce it. No, man is much too aggressive and self-seeking and determined a character to go down that easily. I mean, if you ask me if there’s going to be a doomsday at all I will say ‘no’. I don’t think there’s going to be a doomsday.

If we could see the future fifty years from now, I think we’d all be absolutely shocked. We might regard it as absolute Babylon, in the same way that, let’s say, an Anglican clergyman of fifty years ago would regard life in England as being very close to that of Babylon – fifteen-year-old girls in miniskirts having their second abortions, that sort of thing. The whole freedom of the so-called permissive society would appal such a man, would have appalled my grandparents. Would have appalled my parents when they were my age.

I think we’d be shocked by the future, but I don’t think people living in the future – and this is the real criterion you must apply – in the time of this emotional doomsday would regard it as such. I think they’ll probably regard that doomsday in the same way the inhabitants of Las Vegas regard their city. And I think the future is going to be like Las Vegas, one enormous jukebox playing some very strange tunes. But it won’t be doomsday to the people living there then.

ORR: I wonder about some of your characters. The ‘Woman in White’ keeps reappearing, of course, and in some of the stories I have read she always seems to be more a part of the landscape than her own self. Is that a sort of ‘future’ person?

BALLARD: I think so. If you ask me for a visual picture of the future, I think it’ll be increasingly lunar. The psychological landscape is going to be somewhat like the physical landscape of the moon. It’s going to be a matter of sharp edges, of a very sharp and angular geometry. Individual actions and individual pieces of behaviour and individual thoughts will sit in isolation, like pieces of sculpture embedded in a dune.

I think the future is going to be angular, rather hard geometrically, stripped of ornament. Unpredictable, with rapid temperature changes from black to white in the sun. I think the future will be very lunar, and people will behave in a very lunar way, very isolated from each other. Does that appeal to me? Yes it does, because I think people will have more freedom there. I mean, the freedom of isolation, the freedom of complete choice in one’s behaviour. It’s the difference between being in an empty city or being in a resort out of season or being on a crowded beach.

ORR: But surely there’s something between that. That sounds absolutely horrifying to me.

BALLARD: I don’t think there are going to be any more in-betweens. That’s my latest prophecy! No, I think one’s moving into a realm where everything will become increasingly stylised. It’s quite obvious that nothing is going to exist at all that doesn’t serve some sort of imaginative role in the future. It won’t simply be because we won’t notice its existence – just as we don’t notice a piece of furniture unless it happens also to be an aesthetic object, if it conforms to various visual conventions of the day.

We tend to assume that people want to be together in a kind of renaissance city if you like, imaginatively speaking, strolling in the evening across a crowded piazza. I don’t think people want to be together, I think they want to be alone. People are together in a traffic jam or in a crowded elevator in a department store, or on airlines. That’s togetherness. People don’t want to be together in a physical sense, in an actual running crowd on a pavement. People want to be alone. They want to be alone and watch television.

ORR: I don’t.

BALLARD: Most people do, actually.

ORR: I don’t want to be in a traffic jam, but I don’t want to be alone on a dune, either.

BALLARD: No, I didn’t suggest that you should be. But I’m saying that you probably have more privacy in your life than you realise. One lives in a world where, even if one’s apartment or hotel room tends to be small, one tends to be the only occupant of it. One is not living in something like an eighteenth- or nineteenth-century city where it was, metaphorically speaking, like a crowded noisy tenement, where we knew every neighbour, where we were surrounded by relations of many generations, in an intimate sort of social context made up of hundreds of people. This isn’t the case.

Most of us lead comparatively isolated lives. ‘Being alone on a dune’ is probably a better description of how you actually lead your life than you realise, compared with the life you would have lived fifty years ago, or 150 years ago, where you would have been surrounded in a large tenement or a large dwelling in an overcrowded city, say. If you think of a medieval town, well, probably every inhabitant knew every other inhabitant intimately, or at least knew something of them. One’s not living in that world any more.

The city or the town or the suburb or the street – these are places of considerable isolation. People like it that way, too. They don’t want to know all their neighbours. This is just a small example where the conventional appeal of the good life needs to be looked at again. I don’t think people would want to have the sort of life that was lived 100 years ago or 200 years ago.

ORR: On that note we’re going to have to close up shop …