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1968: Uncredited. Munich Round Up – Interview with J.G. Ballard

Originally published in German as ‘Interview mit J.G. Ballard’ (uncredited), Munich Round Up 100, 1968. Translated by Dan O’Hara

Early in 1968, Bavarian TV ran a four-part educational series on science fiction, the third episode of which featured excerpts from an interview with Ballard. The footage of this episode is no longer available, and is presumably now lost. Like so much valuable TV footage of that era, it was probably shot on tape which, owing to its expense, was reused, thereby erasing the interview. Later that year the director of the series, Brian Wood, published a translation of a full transcript of the interview in a German-language science fiction fanzine called Munich Round Up. The ’zine also contained ‘Notiz aus dem Nirgendwo’, a German translation of Ballard’s 1966 piece ‘Notes from Nowhere’.

Although I have retranslated this interview into English, inevitably such a process is unsatisfactory – after all, one must read Ballard’s words through the lens of another language. Yet it is striking just how difficult it is to strip Ballard’s words of their distinctive character, and very little of his meaning is lost in translation. It seems likely that this 1968 interview is in fact a transcript of the German subtitles used in the TV programme, as the interview here contains no questions. I have therefore chosen to translate back into English as literally as possible, preserving some of the odder and more interesting artefacts produced by the original translator, Gary Klüpfel. One of the most obvious of these is Ballard’s assertion that he uses the diamond (‘Diamant’) as a symbol of timeless structure in The Crystal World. Clearly the original translator decided that Ballard intended a more conventional symbol of eternity. [DOH]

On the early works

BALLARD: I believe that SF is important because it is the sole form of literature we have today that looks forward. All forms of literature other than science fiction are oriented towards the past. Their character is backwards-looking, whereas SF concerns itself with the future and interprets the present day in terms of the future, rather than of the past. It uses a vocabulary that is on the whole exclusively oriented towards the world of tomorrow, with all its science, its technology, and with all its developments in politics, sociology, advertising and so forth.

I have written three novels – The Drowned World, The Drought and The Crystal World – which form a trilogy dealing with the topic of time. In The Drowned World I deal with the past, and employ water as the central metaphor. In The Drought I deal with the future, taking sand as the central image. In The Crystal World I am concerned with the present, the symbol of which is the diamond or the precious stone which – so I believe – possesses a timeless structure.

In The Drowned World I describe the return of the entire planet to the era of the great Triassic forests, which covered the earth some 200 million years ago. I tell how human beings likewise regress into the past. In a certain sense, they climb down their own spinal column. They traverse down the thoracic vertebrae, from the point at which they are air-breathing mammals, to the lumbar region, to the point at which they are amphibious reptiles. Finally they reach the absolute past, which on one hand represents the birth of life itself in the hot womb of the primeval jungle, and which in another sense represents their own origins and birthplace in the mother’s womb. I show humanity face to face with the difficulty of making sense of this decline in their status to non-entities.

I use this portrait of the spinal column as a vessel containing a reflection of the memory of the past, and the details of the entire evolutionary development of the human race, as a literary device, as I was dissatisfied with the traditional forms used by SF writers to realise time travel. It seems to me that the method of investigating the imaginative capacities of the central nervous system gives a more reliable and more precise account of how the human race has evolved in time, and of how we as individuals have evolved in our own time, than Wells’ time machine.

In my novel The Drought, I see the future as a world dominated by sand. It is the end of the planet, and the few people who survive on the planet are governed by perfectly abstract relations, through an entire geometry of space-time, of emotion and action. It is a completely abstract world, as abstract as the most abstract of painters or sculptors one can imagine.

On SF

I believe that SF will become more and more an aspect of daily reality. It has migrated from the bookshelf to daily life. One sees the landscapes and imagery of SF, one sees their contents playing a part in the world of pop music, of film, even that of psychedelic experiences. The reason being, that SF was always concerned with psychological perceptions, and the world of pop music, film and psychedelic experience is now greatly concerned with the senses, with perspectives of our own psychological space-time, and has not so much to do with questions of individual histories, the past and so forth, as were the prejudices of the literature and cinema of the past.

I believe that in the last ten years the entire basis of SF has changed rapidly. Modern SF began at the end of the 1920s and the beginning of the thirties, and was at that time an authentically vernacular vision of the future, a future seen through the lens of science and technology and, above all, in the light of outer space, so I believe. Now in the last ten years SF as I see it has turned full circle. The physical sciences now play less of a major role than do the biological, inner space, the world of the mind – which once more reflects the altered attitudes of people towards science in general. After Hiroshima, the whole magic and authority of science was called into question. Now, I don’t think that the authority of biologists was attacked to such an extent, and to a considerable degree the biologist and the psychologist took over something of the functions of a lay church, in exploring man’s place in the universe.

On inner space

I define inner space as an imaginary realm in which on the one hand the outer world of reality, and on the other the inner world of the mind, meet and merge. Now, in the landscapes of the surrealist painters, for example, one sees the regions of inner space; and increasingly I believe that we will encounter in film and literature scenes which are neither solely realistic nor fantastic. In a sense, it will be a movement in the interzone between both spheres.