BALLARD, J. G.

(James Graham)

(1930-)

   UK writer, born in Shanghai and as a child interned in a Japanese civilian POW camp during WWII. He first came to the UK in 1946. He later read medicine at King's College, Cambridge, but left without taking a degree. JGB discovered sf while in Canada during his period of RAF service in the early 1950s. His first stories, "Escapement" and "Prima Belladonna", were published in E.J.CARNELL's NEW WORLDS and SCIENCE FANTASY, respectively, in 1956. His writing was influenced by the Surrealist painters and the early Pop artists. From the start, he opened a new prospect in sf; his interest in PSYCHOLOGY and in the emotional significance of deserted landscapes and wrecked TECHNOLOGY soon became apparent in such stories as "Build-Up" (1957; vt "The Concentration City"), "Manhole 69" (1957), "The Waiting Grounds" (1959), "The Sound-Sweep" (1960) and "Chronopolis" (1960). On the whole, he eschewed such sf themes as space travel, time travel, aliens and ESP, concentrating instead on NEAR FUTURE decadence and DISASTER. In 1962 he began using the term INNER SPACE to describe the area of his obsessions, and stated that "the only truly alien planet is Earth". "The Voices of Time" (1960) is his most important early story, an apocalyptic view of a terrible new EVOLUTION (or DEVOLUTION) faced by the human race. As with much of his work, its impressive quality is a result of JGB's painterly eye, as shown in his moody descriptions of landscapes. With "Studio 5, the Stars" (1961) JGB returned to the setting of "Prima Belladonna": a decaying resort, Vermilion Sands, where poets, artists and actresses pursue perverse whims. He subsequently wrote seven more stories against this background, and the series, which constitutes one of his most popular works, was collected as Vermilion Sands (coll 1971 US; with 1 story added rev 1973 UK). JGB's first novel, The Wind from Nowhere (1962 US), was written in a fortnight, and the money that he earned from it enabled him to become a full-time writer. It is his only work of formula sf, the formula being that of John WYNDHAM's disaster novels. In The Drowned World (1962 US) JGB inverted the pattern, creating a hero who conspires with rather than fights against the disaster that is overtaking his world. It was this novel, with its brilliant descriptions of an inundated London and an ECOLOGY reverting to the Triassic, which gained JGB acceptance as a major author. However, the self-immolating tendency of his characters drew adverse criticism; some readers, particularly devotees of GENRE SF, wrote JGB off, rather simplistically, as a pessimist and a life-hater. Certainly his next two novels, The Burning World (1964 US; rev vt The Drought 1965 UK) and THE CRYSTAL WORLD (fixup 1966), served further to polarize opinion. Each contains a lovingly described cataclysm towards which the protagonist holds ambiguous attitudes. Some commentators - e.g., Kingsley AMIS and Michael MOORCOCK - praised these works very highly. JGB is regarded by some as a better short-story writer than novelist, however, and his 1960s stories drew an enthusiastic audience. "Deep End" (1961), "Billenium" (1961) (spelt thus on its first appearance, and sometimes thereafter), "The Garden of Time" (1962), "The Cage of Sand" (1962) and "The Watch-Towers" (1962) are among the excellent stories reprinted in his collections The Voices of Time and Other Stories (coll 1962 US), Billenium (coll 1962 US) and The Four-Dimensional Nightmare (coll 1963; rev 1974; vt The Voices of Time 1984)"The Subliminal Man", "A Question of Re-Entry" and "The Time-Tombs" (all 1963) are masterpieces of desolation and melancholy, as is "The Terminal Beach" (1964), which shows JGB beginning to move in a new direction, towards greater compression of imagery and nonlinearity of plot. All these stories contain "properties", described objects, which have become JGB's trademarks: wrecked spacecraft, sand-dunes, concrete deserts, broken juke-boxes, abandoned nightclubs, and military and industrial detritus in general. Sympathetic readers regard JGB's unique "properties" and landscapes as being very appropriate to the contemporary world: they constitute a "true" dream vision of our times. (In an essay-"Myth-Maker of the 20th Century", NW \#142, 1964-JGB has himself acknowledged similar qualities in the work of William S.BURROUGHS.) Perhaps JGB's strongest single collection of stories is The Terminal Beach (coll 1964 UK), not to be confused with Terminal Beach (coll 1964 US): the titles have only 2 stories in common. (The earlier US collections of JGB's short stories are quite different from the contemporaneous UK editions, and normally have different titles. Most of the earlier short stories appear in at least two collections.) Other collections, all containing much good material, are Passport to Eternity (coll 1963 US), The Impossible Man (coll 1966 US) and The Disaster Area (coll 1967). One story, "The Drowned Giant"(1965; vt "Souvenir"), was nominated for a NEBULA, although the fact that JGB has never won an sf AWARD is indicative of his unpopularity with HARD-SF fans. He did, however, become a figurehead of the NEW WAVE of the later 1960s: younger UK writers such as Charles PLATT and M.John HARRISON show his influence directly."You and Me and the Continuum" (1966) inaugurated a series of stories - "condensed novels", as JGB has called them - in which he explored the MEDIA LANDSCAPE of advertising, broadcasting, POLITICS and WAR. Collected as THE ATROCITY EXHIBITION (coll 1970; vt Love and Napalm: Export USA 1972 US; rev 1990 US), these are JGB's most "difficult" works, and they provoked more hostility than anything that had gone before; the collection's intended 1970 US edition, from DOUBLEDAY, was printed but, on the instructions of a panicking executive, pulped just before publication. The hostility was partly due to the fact that JGB uses real people such as Marilyn Monroe, the Kennedys and Ronald Reagan as "characters". In the novel Crash (1973) JGB took his obsession with automobile accidents to a logical conclusion. Perhaps the best example of "pornographic" sf, it explores the psychological satisfactions of danger, mutilation and death on the roads; it is also an examination of the interface between modern humanity and its MACHINES. Brightly lit and powerfully written, it is a work with which it is difficult for many readers to come to terms; one publisher's reader wrote of the manuscript: "The author of this book is beyond psychiatric help." Concrete Island (1974) and High-Rise (1975) are also urban disaster novels set in the present, the one concerning a driver marooned on a traffic island between motorway embankments, the other focusing on the breakdown of social life in a multistorey apartment block. All three of these novels are about the ways in which the technological landscape may be fulfilling and reflecting our own ambiguously "worst" desires. In the mid-1970s JGB returned to the short-story form, in which he still excelled. Such pieces as "The Air Disaster" (1975), "The Smile" (1976) and "The Dead Time" (1977) are outstanding psychological horror stories on the fringes of sf. The collection Low-Flying Aircraft (coll 1976) contains an excellent original novella, "The Ultimate City", which projects JGB's urban obsessions of the 1970s into the future. Later volumes of stories are Myths of the Near Future (coll 1982), Memories of the Space Age (coll 1988 US) and War Fever (coll 1990), all of which contain a good deal of sf mixed with psychological fantasy. The Unlimited Dream Company (1979), JGB's first fully fledged fantasy novel, concerns a young man who crashes a stolen light aircraft into the River Thames, apparently dies and is reborn, finding himself trapped in the riverside town of Shepperton (where JGB in reality makes his home). The hero discovers the ability to change himself into various beasts and birds, and to transform the sleepy suburb around him into a vivid garden of exotic flowers. More sinisterly, he is able to "absorb" human beings into his body-before expelling them again, in the apocalyptic climax to the novel. The book is a remarkable fantasy of self-aggrandizement, colourfully and compellingly told. It was followed by JGB's most conventional sf novel in some years, Hello America (1981), a comparatively light work about the rediscovery of an abandoned 22nd-century USA. JGB moved away from sf again for his most commercially successful novel to date, Empire of the Sun (1984). Based on his childhood experiences in Lunghua POW camp near Japanese-occupied Shanghai, it gained him a vast new readership. The book has great merit as a psychological war novel, but for the sf reader part of its interest lies in its apparent revelation of the "sources" of many of JGB's recurring images and "properties" (those drained swimming pools, abandoned buildings, low-flying aircraft, drowned landscapes - they are all here). Although it is not at all an sf or fantasy work, it has much in common with all JGB's earlier fiction. The novel was filmed in 1987 by Steven SPIELBERG, and JGB wrote a sequel, The Kindness of Women (1991). This latter is told in the first person - Empire of the Sun is told in the third - and covers a 50-year timespan: heavily autobiographical, it is an intriguing work for anyone interested in JGB's career, but contains little direct reference to sf. Earlier JGB had written another psychological adventure novel, The Day of Creation (1987). Set in an imaginary African country, it is less overtly fantastic than The Unlimited Dream Company but resembles that novel in terms of theme and imagery. The narrator inadvertently causes a new river to well up from the parched earth, transforming a barren war zone into a luxuriant, although short-lived, jungle. Like all Ballard's novels it contains extraordinary descriptive passages embedded in a fairly simple plot peopled by perverse characters of some psychological complexity. This book was followed by an acute and entertaining novella, Running Wild (1988 chap), a Thames Valley murder mystery of marginal sf interest. Although most of his longer work of the past decade has been outside the field, the originality and appropriateness of his vision continue to ensure JGB's standing as one of the most important writers ever to have emerged from sf. Other works: The Drowned World and The Wind from Nowhere (omni 1965 US); By Day Fantastic Birds Flew through the Petrified Forest (1967), wall-poster incorporating text from THE CRYSTAL WORLD, sometimes wrongly included in JGB bibliographies as a book or chap; The Day of Forever (coll 1967; rev 1971); The Overloaded Man (coll 1967; rev vt The Venus Hunters 1980); Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan (1968 chap); CHRONOPOLIS AND OTHER STORIES (coll 1971 US); The Best of J.G.Ballard (coll 1977); The Best Short Stories of J.G.Ballard (coll 1978 US); News from the Sun (1982 chap); The Crystal World; Crash; Concrete Island (omni 1991 US); Rushing to Paradise (1994), associational.

   About the author: J.G.Ballard: The First Twenty Years (1976) ed James Goddard and David PRINGLE; Earth is the Alien Planet: J.G.Ballard's Four-Dimensional Nightmare (1979 US) by David Pringle; J.G.Ballard: A Primary and Secondary Bibliography (1984 US) by David Pringle; Re/Search 8/9: J.G.Ballard (1984 US) ed Vale and Andrea Juno; J.G.Ballard: Starmont Reader's Guide 26 (1985 US) by Peter Brigg; Out of the Night and Into the Dream: A Thematic Study of J.G.Ballard (1991) by Gregory Stephenson.

   See also: ABSURDIST SF; ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM IN SF; ARTS; BRITISH SCIENCE FICTION AWARD; CITIES; CONCEPTUAL BREAKTHROUGH; CRIME AND PUNISHMENT; CYBERPUNK; DEFINITIONS OF SF; ECONOMICS; ENTROPY; FANTASTIC VOYAGES; FRANCE; GREAT AND SMALL; HISTORY OF SF; HOLOCAUST AND AFTER; ISLANDS; LEISURE; MARS; MEDICINE; MESSIAHS; MUSIC; MUTANTS; OPTIMISM AND PESSIMISM; OVERPOPULATION; PERCEPTION; SEX; SPACE FLIGHT; TIME TRAVEL; UFOS.