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Excerpted from the original published in James Goddard and David Pringle (eds), J.G. Ballard: The First Twenty Years, Hayes: Bran’s Head Books, 1976

Anyone studying Ballard’s work owes a debt of gratitude to David Pringle. For over forty years, he has excavated almost everything there is to know about Ballard’s career and the forces that shaped his writing. From 1975 to 1995, Pringle conducted seven interviews with him. With James Goddard, another respected SF editor and critic, who had previously interviewed Ballard in 1970 for his fanzine Cypher, he edited the first book-length publication on the author’s work, J.G. Ballard: the First Twenty Years (1976). It included an expanded version of the interview excerpted here.

Pringle published two further books on Ballard, Earth is the Alien Planet: J.G. Ballard’s Four-Dimensional Nightmare (1979) and the exhaustive J.G. Ballard: A Primary and Secondary Bibliography (1984), which contained another long interview. From 1981 to 1996, he produced twenty-five editions of JGB News, a Ballard newsletter with frequent input from Ballard himself. He compiled the material for Ballard’s non-fiction collection, A User’s Guide to the Millennium (1996), and produced special Ballard editions of the journal Foundation and the science fiction magazine Interzone (he was editor of both at different stages). In 1982, based on a conversation of several hours’ duration, he pieced together Ballard’s remembrances about Shanghai, the pressures of war and his first years in England, resulting in an oral biography, ‘From Shanghai to Shepperton’, published in Foundation 24. At the time, it was Ballard’s longest meditation on his war years, a taste of what was to come in Empire of the Sun.

This interview, conducted at Ballard’s Shepperton home on 4 January 1975, takes place just after Ballard had written High-Rise and covers much ground: the Shanghai years, the mystery of ruins and abandoned buildings, Ballard’s aversion to being branded an ‘experimental’ writer, his tenure in the RAF, the leisure class of the future, the habits of French drivers and the death of the Space Age. [SS]

GODDARD: Do you think your period of internment under the Japanese has had any effect on the kind of fiction you produce?

BALLARD: I would guess it has. The whole landscape out there had a tremendously powerful influence on me, as did the whole war experience. All the abandoned cities and towns and beach resorts that I keep returning to in my fiction were there in that huge landscape, the area just around our camp, which was about seven or eight miles from Shanghai, out in the paddy fields in a former university. There was a period when we didn’t know if the war had ended, when the Japanese had more or less abandoned the whole zone and the Americans had yet to come in. All of the images I keep using – the abandoned apartment houses and so forth – must have touched something in my mind. It was a very interesting zone psychologically, and it obviously had a big influence – as did the semi-tropical nature of the place: lush vegetation, a totally waterlogged world, huge rivers, canals, paddies, great sheets of water everywhere. It was a dramatised landscape thanks to the war and to the collapse of all the irrigation systems – a landscape dramatised in a way that it is difficult to find in, say, western Europe.

PRINGLE: Your Far Eastern childhood interests me. Did you live anywhere else apart from Shanghai?

BALLARD: No, but we travelled a fair amount in the Far East. We made a trip to America in 1939, just before the outbreak of the war, across the Pacific via Hawaii. By the time I came to England at the age of sixteen I’d seen a great variety of landscapes. I think the English landscape was the only landscape I’d come across which didn’t mean anything, particularly the urban landscape. England seemed to be very dull, because I’d been brought up at a much lower latitude – the same latitude as the places which are my real spiritual home, as I sometimes think: Los Angeles and Casablanca. I’m sure this is something one perceives – I mean the angle of light, density of light. I’m always much happier in the south – Spain, Greece – than I am anywhere else. I think a lot of these landscapes meant a great deal. The English one, oddly enough, didn’t mean anything. I didn’t like it, it seemed odd.

England was a place that was totally exhausted. The war had drained everything. It seemed very small, and rather narrow mentally, and the physical landscape of England was so old. The centre of London now is a reasonably modern city – so much of it has been rebuilt. Then, of course, none of these high-rise office blocks existed, only the nineteenth-century city. The rural landscape of meadow didn’t mean anything to me. I just couldn’t latch on to that. That’s why the SF of John Wyndham, [John] Christopher and so forth I can’t take. Too many rolling English meadows. They don’t seem landscapes that are psychologically significant, if that means anything.

PRINGLE: The visual values are a strong element in your writing. Is this just from growing up in a place like Shanghai, or did you have any artistic background?

BALLARD: Not particularly. I’ve always wanted really to be a painter. My interest in painting has been far more catholic than my interest in fiction. I’m interested in almost every period of painting, from Lascaux through the Renaissance onwards. Abstract expressionism is about the only kind of painting I haven’t responded to. My daughter, about two years ago, bought me a paint set for my birthday. I’m still waiting to use it. When I start painting I shall stop writing!

I’ve said somewhere else that all my fiction consists of paintings. I think I always was a frustrated painter. They are all paintings, really, my novels and stories. The trouble is I haven’t any talent – that’s a bit of a handicap. I approach many of these stories of mine, like the Vermilion Sands stories – even the novels like Crash – as a sort of visual experience. I’m thinking particularly of painters like – I hate the phrase pop art because it has the wrong connotations – the British and American pop artists, or people close to them, like Hamilton and Paolozzi over here, and Wesselmann, Rosenquist. Warhol above all: a tremendous influence on me. I composed Crash to some extent as a visual experience, marrying elements in the book that make sense primarily as visual constructs.

PRINGLE: I recall in ‘The Assassination Weapon’ where you simply say: ‘Guam in 1947’, and this evoked for me the landscape of some American airbase littered with rusty wire, etc. Have you actually seen these things?

BALLARD: Yes, I have, absolutely. A lot of that post-technological landscape stuff that people talk about is a straight transcript. After World War II, the American war machine was so prolific – you got B-29s stacked six deep on the ends of airfields. The riches of this gigantic technological system were just left. Right from early on I was touched not just in an imaginative way – but as though some section of reality, of life, and movements of time, were influenced by the strange paradoxes that are implicit in, say, a field full of what seem to be reasonably workable cars, washing machines or whatever, which have just been junked there. The rules which govern the birth and life and decay of living systems don’t apply in the realm of technology. A washing machine does not grow old gracefully. It still retains its youth, as it were, its bright chrome trim, when it’s been junked. You see these technological artefacts lying round like old corpses – in fact, their chrome is still bright. All these inversions touch a response to the movements of time and our place in the universe. There’s no doubt about this. I think perhaps my childhood was spent in a place where there was an excess of these inversions of various kinds.

I remember when the Japanese entered China after Pearl Harbor, in December 1941. I was going to do the scripture exam at the end-of-term examinations at the school I went to. Pearl Harbor had just taken place, the previous night, I suppose, and I heard tanks coming down the street. I looked out the window and there were Japanese tanks trundling around. It doesn’t sound very much, but if tanks suddenly rolled down this street you’d have a surprise – Russian tanks, say. The Japanese took over the place, and they segmented Shanghai into various districts with barbed wire, so you couldn’t move from Zone A to Zone B except at certain times. They’d block off everything for security reasons, and on certain days the only way of going to school was to go to the house of some friends of my parents who lived on one of these border zones, between I think the French Concession and the International Settlement. There was an abandoned nightclub, a gambling casino called the Del Monte – this is just a trivial example – a huge building in big grounds. We’d climb over the fence and go through, and go up the main driveway on the other side of the border zone, and go to school. This abandoned casino, a huge multi-storeyed building, was decorated in full-blown Casino Versailles style, with figures holding up great prosceniums over bars and huge roulette tables. Everything was junked. I remember a roulette table on its side and the whole roulette wheel section had come out, exposing the machinery inside. There was all this junk lying around, chips and all sorts of stuff, as if in some sort of tableau, arranged, as I’ve said, by a demolition squad. It was very strange.

Now I was only about eleven when this was going on. Examples like this could be multiplied a hundred times. Our camp was a former university campus, occupying I suppose about one square mile. In fact, we occupied about two-thirds of the campus. There was a section of buildings which for some arbitrary reason – maybe the Japs were short of wire – they’d left out. Something like fifteen buildings were on the other side of the wire. You can imagine a little township of big, two- or three-storey buildings, the nearest of which was about twenty yards away. A complete silent world, which I looked out on every morning and all day from my block.

After about a year the Japs agreed to allow these buildings to be used as a school, so we used to enter this place every day, and walk through these abandoned rooms. Military equipment was lying around all over the place. I saw rifles being taken out of a well. All rifles were taken away, but spent ammunition, ammunition boxes and bayonets, all the debris of war, was lying around. We used to walk through this totally empty zone. It had been deserted for years. I’m sure that that again must have had a great impact on me. There were curious psychological overtones. One’s the product of all these things.

PRINGLE: Do you regret the world of the past, the pre-war world, in any way? I’m thinking of your story, ‘The Garden of Time’, where one man appears to be trying to halt history.

BALLARD: No, I don’t. I think some social changes that took place in this country in the mid-sixties are the best and greatest thing that ever happened here. It’s slid back now, but for about five years this country entered the twentieth century, and a whole new generation of people emerged – the youth explosion. The class divisions began to break down, which was so marvellous. It all slammed into reverse a couple of years ago, which is a shame. But I certainly don’t feel nostalgic, because I came from a background where there was no past. Everything was new – Shanghai was a new city. The department stores and the skyscrapers were about my age. I’m exaggerating a bit, but not much. The place didn’t exist before the year 1900. It was just a lot of mosquito-ridden mudflats. I was brought up in a world which was new, so the past has never really meant anything to me. The use in that story of an old aristocrat, or whatever he was, was just a convention.

PRINGLE: You studied medicine at Cambridge. Many of the protagonists of your stories have in fact been doctors. Is there a rationale for this?

BALLARD: Well, I suppose if I hadn’t become a writer I would have been a doctor. So in a sense the protagonists of 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 got three children with whom I’m extremely close, and yet I’ve never introduced a child into any of my stories.

PRINGLE: There have been one or two dead children.

BALLARD: Yes, that’s true, but there are no living children in my fiction – yet all the people who know me closely know that I’m a very fond father and all the rest of it. It’s just that children are not relevant to my work.

GODDARD: Could you tell us more about your four disaster novels, which you insist aren’t disaster novels? The Wind from Nowhere, The Drowned World, The Drought and The Crystal World all have disaster in them, in the classic British SF form.

BALLARD: You’re right when you say that it’s a classic English SF form, but that’s the reason why I used the formula of the disaster story. Usually these disaster stories are treated as though they are disasters, they’re treated straight, and everyone’s running for the hills or out of the hills or whatever. If it’s going to be cold they’re all pulling on overcoats. I use the form because I deliberately want to invert it – that’s the whole point of the novels. The heroes, for psychological reasons of their own, embrace the particular transformation. These are stories of huge psychic transformations – I’m talking retrospectively now. And I use this external transformation of the landscape to reflect and marry with the internal transformation, the psychological transformation, of the characters. This is what the subject matter of these books is: they’re transformation stories rather than disaster stories.

If you take that classic among English disaster stories, The Day of the Triffids, I think it’s probably fair to say that there’s absolutely no psychological depth. The characters react to the changes that are taking place, but they are not in any psychological way involved with the proliferating vegetation, or whatever else is going on. They cope with the situation in the same way as the inhabitants of this town might cope with, say, a reservoir bursting. In the classic English disaster story there’s no involvement on a psychological level with whatever is taking place. My novels are completely different, and they only use the form superficially.

PRINGLE: On the question of space travel: you imply that it’s an improper subject for SF writers, but of course increasingly it is taking place.

BALLARD: No, you’re wrong. Decreasingly it’s taking place. I wrote a review of some book in New Society, a mad book – The Next Ten Thousand Years – in which I said the Space Age lasted about ten years. It’s true. That’s the extraordinary paradox. At the time of Gagarin’s first flight in 1961, everybody really thought that the Space Age would last for hundreds of years. One could say: ‘Now the Space Age begins, and it’s going on for ever.’ In fact, it ended with the last Skylab mission.

PRINGLE: You really believe that?

BALLARD: Absolutely. It happened. I’m sure there will be a Space Age, but it won’t be for fifty, 100, 200 years – presumably when they develop a new means of propulsion. It’s just too expensive. You can’t have a Space Age until you’ve got a lot of people in space. This is where I disagree, and I’ve often argued the point when I’ve met him, with Arthur C. Clarke. He believes that the future of fiction is in space, that this is the only subject. But I’m certain you can’t have a serious fiction based on experience from which the vast body of readers and writers is excluded. It’s absurd. In fact there are very few manned flights, if any, planned now. I think there are none.

PRINGLE: There’s the Soviet–American link-up flight this year.

BALLARD: Sorry, yes – orbital flights, but not lunar flights. Public disinterest became evident in the seventies, really. People weren’t even that touched by Armstrong landing on the moon. That was a stupendous event. I thought the psychological reverberations would be enormous, that they’d manifest themselves in every conceivable way – in department store window displays and styles of furnishing, etc. I really did believe that the spin-off from that event, both in obvious terms and in psychological terms, would be gigantic. In fact it was almost nil. It’s quite amazing. Clearly, the Space Age is over. Also, I think it’s rather difficult because, when SF writers have a monopoly of space travel they can define, they can invent the machinery literally, and they are the judges of their own authenticity.

This is one of my objections to SF, that the decks are all stacked, the reader doesn’t have a chance. As I’ve said for years, the stuff isn’t won from experience. It lacks that authority therefore. Now the SF writers are competing with the facts of real space flight. I haven’t read any recent SF. Perhaps it’s good, I don’t know.

GODDARD: For a few years in the mid-sixties your work had a sort of Jekyll-and-Hyde nature about it. You were producing both linear SF stories and the so-called experimental stories. Were you testing the water before taking the plunge, gauging public reaction?

BALLARD: They weren’t called experimental by me – I dislike that term. It implies a test procedure of uncertain outcome. The trouble with most British experimental writing is that it proves one thing, and that is that the experiment has not worked. I wasn’t influenced by market considerations at all. In fact, all through the sixties I was writing conventional short stories at the same time – there weren’t very many of them but I was still writing them. I’ve started writing some more now. In a review that Peter Linnett wrote, he said something about my giving up writing those Atrocity Exhibition pieces for financial reasons. I don’t know where he got that idea from. The simple fact is that the ideas that went into that book, good or bad, took years to generate. I’d like to write a follow-up to it, but it will take me ten years, probably, to accumulate the material inside my own head. Also, the climate is wrong now.

PRINGLE: There may have been no financial reasons for you to stop writing them, but were you at all influenced by adverse criticism?

BALLARD: Criticism by whom? By the SF readership? The literary critics or reviewers? I don’t know. Obviously a book like that is not going to be as popular as a conventionally written book, there’s no doubt about that, just as a book like Crash is not going to be popular. I found those stories in The Atrocity Exhibition produced more response from people than anything else I’ve ever written; people whom I’d never had any contact with, from all over the world, took the trouble to get in touch with me, which is a sure test of something. I felt the response to that book was better and larger than anything else I’ve ever had. In fact, I was encouraged to go on, because as I wrote the stories over a period of four or five years the response grew.

PRINGLE: I’d like to ask about the change from the non-linear style of The Atrocity Exhibition to the more conventional style of the two recent novels. Does this reflect a change of mind on your part about the worth of such techniques?

BALLARD: No. Maybe, when I was writing the stories and people questioned me about why I broke everything up, I tended to exaggerate a bit in the hope of getting something through. I may have made overlarge claims for non-linear narrative or whatever you want to call it, but basically I still feel that the subject matter comes first and the technique you adopt comes second. It was the subject matter of those stories that defined the way in which they were written. At the same time it’s true that once you develop an approach like that it, of itself, opens up so much more territory. I once said those condensed novels, as I called them, are like ordinary novels with the unimportant pieces left out. But it’s more than that – when you get the important pieces together, really together, not separated by great masses of ‘he said, she said’ and opening and shutting of doors, ‘following morning’ and all this stuff – the great tide of forward conventional narration – it achieves critical mass, as it were, it begins to ignite and you get more things being generated. You’re getting crossovers and linkages between unexpected and previously totally unrelated things, events, elements of the narration, ideas that in themselves begin to generate new matter.

I haven’t read any of those stories for a long time, but I remember it comes out of them – the crossovers become very unusual. It was very exciting to do. But those stories were written very much about their period, which was the middle to late sixties. I know I shall write more stories in that style, but a) it takes a long time to generate material, and b) Mary McCarthy said somewhere that the novel should be news, and those things were news – they were like newsreels above all. There isn’t any news in that sense, nothing is happening. It sounds silly, I suppose, but in a way the events in the external world are not equal to the requirements of that narrative approach. It would be very difficult to write stories of that kind about 1975. But I’m waiting for the subject matter to come along. Meanwhile, other ideas occur to me.

GODDARD: How do you view your books since The Atrocity Exhibition in the greater science fiction context, in which you maintain they still have a niche?

BALLARD: You’re entirely right, and I’ve said so myself, they do still have a niche. I was tremendously exhilarated when I started reading American science fiction – the excitement, the enormous power of imagination, etc. But I felt they weren’t really making the most of their own landscapes and subject matter. Right from the start what I wanted to do was write a science fiction book that got away from spaceships, the far future, and all this stuff which I felt was basically rather juvenile, to writing a kind of adult science fiction based upon the present. Why couldn’t one harness this freedom and vitality? SF is a form, above all else, that puts a tremendous premium upon the imagination, and that’s something that seems to have left the English novel in the last 150 years. Imagination is enormously important, and I felt that if one could only harness this capacity to think imaginatively in an adult SF, one would have achieved something.

Right from the beginning I tried with varying success to write a science fiction about the present day, which is more difficult to do than one realises, because the natural tendency when writing in a basically allegorical mode is to set something at a distance because it makes the separateness of the allegory that much more obvious. I wanted to write about the present day, and I think Crash, Concrete Island and the book I’ve just finished, which are a kind of trilogy, represent the conclusion of the particular logic I’ve been trying to unfold ever since I began writing. Are they SF? I don’t know – maybe the science fiction of the present day will be something like Crash. They come into the category of imaginative fiction, don’t they? With a strong moralistic, cautionary and exploratory note. But I don’t know whether they’re SF or not.

PRINGLE: What do you mean by ‘moralistic’?

BALLARD: Trying to say something about the quality of one’s moral direction in the ordinary sense of the term.

PRINGLE: There’s one thing that people who dislike your work often talk about, and that’s a lack of moral standards, a lack of some sort of touchstone, where you stand. This disturbed a lot of people who reviewed Crash.

BALLARD: They were supposed to be disturbed. When I set out to write Crash, I wanted to write a book in which there was nowhere to hide. I wanted the reader, once I’d got him inside the book, never to lose sight of the subject matter. As long as he continued reading he was face to face with the subject matter. It would have been very easy to write a conventional book about car crashes in which it was quite clear that the author was on the side of sanity, justice and against injuring small children, deaths on the road, bad driving, etc. What could be easier? I chose to completely accept the demands of the subject matter, which were to provoke the reader by saying that these car crashes are good for you, you thoroughly enjoy them, they make your sex life richer, they represent part of the marriage between sex, the human organism and technology. I say all these things in order to provoke the reader and also to test him. There may be truth in some of these sentiments, disagreeable though they are to consider. Nobody likes that they’ll think ‘God, the man’s mad’, but any other way of writing that book would have been a cop-out, I think.

GODDARD: Why did you call the protagonist of Crash ‘Ballard’?

BALLARD: Well, that was part of the whole business of being absolutely as honest as I could. I wanted a first-person narrator to stand between Vaughan and the reader – the honest thing to do was to give him my own name. Although the superficial landscapes of the book’s ‘Ballard’ and my life are different, there are many correspondences. Also, I wanted to anchor the book more in reality; I had a named film star [Elizabeth Taylor], who never speaks, of course.

The constant striving of the writer over the last few years has been to lower the threshold of fiction in what he writes, to reduce the amount of fiction. One’s seen this in the theatre over the last fifteen years, and in the visual arts it started a long, long time ago. The move is to reduce the fictional elements in whatever one is doing and get it to overlap reality as much as possible, rather than keep it separate from reality and ordinary experience.

GODDARD: How do you react to criticism of your books? I’m thinking particularly of inane criticisms. Going back to Martin Amis and his review of Crash, he said something like ‘he uses the word penis 147 times’.

BALLARD: I didn’t read that. I didn’t read any of the reviews of Crash in this country. There didn’t seem any point after the reviews of The Atrocity Exhibition – nobody read the book. Having been a reviewer myself, I can always tell when somebody has stopped reading the book he’s reviewing. As for criticism in general, well, science fiction writers have always been handicapped by a lack of intelligent critical response. That’s why it’s so encouraging to find intelligent magazines like Cypher around now, and intelligent critics like David Pringle here – they didn’t exist ten years ago.

On the other hand, in America particularly, the critical response to SF has got totally out of hand. Now and then someone shows me a copy of the New York Review of Books, and I recently saw an ad for some of the most extraordinary stuff, either a series of lectures someone was giving, or a series of publications – sort of Levi-Strauss and Heinlein’s such and such – all of them sounding like self-parodies, the application of serious literary criticism to popular SF authors.

GODDARD: In Billion Year Spree, Brian Aldiss said of your early work that you had never resolved the problem of writing a narrative in which the central character pursues no purposeful course of action. That seemed rather harsh.

BALLARD: It ties in with what I was saying earlier. I think Brian is at heart an SF fan, and he approaches my stuff – about which he is very generous and always has been – like an SF fan. He judges what he sees. To him, these books have a sort of vacuum at their centre – the character’s behaviour superficially seems to be either passive or meaningless in the context of the events. Why don’t they just run for the hills? Why don’t they head north? There won’t be a problem – there won’t be a novel either, of course. Therefore I think he fails to realise that, in a novel like The Drowned World – and this applies to all my fiction – the hero is the only one who is pursuing a meaningful course of action.

In The Drowned World, the hero, Kerans, is the only one to do anything meaningful. His decision to stay, to come to terms with the changes taking place within himself, to understand the logic of his relationship with the shifting biological kingdom, and his decision finally to go south and greet the sun, is a totally meaningful course of action. The behaviour of the other people, which superficially appears to be meaningful – getting the hell out, or draining the lagoons – is totally meaningless. The book is about the discovery by the hero of his true compass bearings, both mentally and literally. It’s the same in the others: in The Crystal World the hero decides to go back and immolate himself in a timeless world. In ‘The Terminal Beach’ why does the man stagger ashore on an abandoned island, what is he doing there? I can well understand that to the SF fan his behaviour is meaningless or lacks purpose – this, I think, means that Brian may have read too much SF.

PRINGLE: Can you tell us about your physical methods of writing, and whether they’ve changed over the years?

BALLARD: They haven’t changed. I don’t find that I work late in the evening now unless I really have to. My eyes are tired. But basically I haven’t changed my approach. I set myself a target, about a thousand words a day – unless I just stare out of the window, which I do a lot of anyway. I generally work from a synopsis, about a page when I’m writing a short story, longer for a novel. Unless for me the thing works as a story, unless it works on the anecdotal level, unless I feel it holds the attention of the reader, I don’t bother with it. It’s got to work on that level, as a pure piece of storytelling. If it does I begin writing.

I spend a tremendous amount of time, I won’t say doing research, but just soaking myself in the mental landscapes, particularly of a novel. Most of the time I’m thinking about what I’m writing, or hope to write. Particularly with Crash and The Atrocity Exhibition. I was carrying these for something like six or seven years. I was totally immersed mentally in this very overcharged world. It was an exciting time, but very tiring.

PRINGLE: Did you actually visit motorways and inspect the landscape?

BALLARD: Oh yes, I did a lot of research of that kind. I photographed this, that and the other.

PRINGLE: Was the inspiration for Concrete Island an actual place?

BALLARD: No. I’ve always been interested, since it was built, by the Westway motorway near Shepherd’s Bush, where I set the novel. It always struck me, driving around these complex interchanges, what would happen if someone stood by the wayside and tried to flag you down? Of course, nobody would stop. You can’t stop – you’d just have a multiple pile-up. You’d be dead if you tried to stop. France is a much more technologically oriented country than England, with the big high-speed boulevards that circle Paris. You can drive on the motorway from the Channel – it’s not the outskirts of Paris by any means, you can see the Eiffel Tower half a mile away – on their equivalent of our circular road. You can circle Paris if you want to, and you can pick up the motorway going south without stopping at a single traffic light. It’s an enormous complex of interchanges and multilevel high-speed avenues, and the French seem to drive much more aggressively than people do over here.

It often struck me there, every summer if you were marooned up on one of those balustrade ramparts – it’s not just a two-dimensional island, they’ve got three-dimensional islands up in the air – you’d never get off. The traffic seems to be flowing twenty-four hours a day. The French are ruthless, they don’t stop for anybody. Jesus Christ himself could be crucified by the wayside and nobody would stop. It was an obvious sort of idea to have. What’s so interesting about the technological landscape is the way it plays into people’s hands, people’s possibly worst motives. It’s difficult to maroon yourself on the A1, but much easier to maroon yourself on Westway.

GODDARD: Would you care to tell us something about what your future plans are?

BALLARD: Well, I finished a novel about three weeks ago, and since then I’ve written a couple of short stories and am writing a third now, and just catching my breath a bit.

PRINGLE: What’s the new novel called?

BALLARD: I call it The High Life provisionally [renamed High-Rise]. I may change it, I may stick to it. I don’t know.

GODDARD: You’ve no plans for another trilogy of novels on the lines of the last three?

BALLARD: I just tend to write whatever comes mentally to hand, and what I find interesting at a particular time. These decisions as to what one’s going to write tend to be made somewhere at the back of one’s mind, so one can’t consciously say ‘that’s what I’m going to write’. It doesn’t work out like that!