Ballard, Actually

Ballard, as everyone who knows Ballard knows, stopped writing proper SF like, forever ago.

Everyone, that is, except D. Harlan Wilson.

For those of you who are reading this and wondering what in the world SF is, and who in the nine hells Ballard is (and you'd be right about that), an introduction is well in order.

J.G. Ballard is without question one of the most dystopian figures in literary history, let alone SF (science fiction) history, and that's saying something. Bleak, offensive, surreal, ambiguous, depraved, perverse, his work is possessed of a blackly delicious, psycho-sexual, techno-fetishistic moral bankruptcy precisely because he has robbed the bank of morality, burned it to the ground, and killed everyone inside (and not necessarily in that order).

And that's just for starters.

An existentialist by nature, and deep admirer of Kafka, he was heavily influenced by psychology (especially Freud) and the Surrealists, and shared much with "pessimistic" philosophers like Marshall Mcluhan and John Gray. Like Ballard, Mcluhan argues that technologies are simply the living, outward manifestations of our inner psyches, and Gray (himself a reader of Ballard) is committed to the notion that human "progress," especially fueled and funded by technology, is a myth precisely because barbarism, degeneracy, and forgetfulness are ineluctably woven into the very fabric of our being. Hence, all human progress is doomed from the beginning both to ascend to greater and greater heights of technological prowess, and also to descend into greater and greater depths of (inter) personal turpitude and monstrosity.

Indeed, in his short story "The Drowned Giant," one quickly gets the sense that for Ballard humanity's greatest criminal pastime is its inbred, boredom-driven partnership with entropy in the degradation and debasement of ancient, natural beauty.

This pessimism is understandable. In his 1963 essay, "Time, Memory, and Inner Space," Ballard admits that his own upbringing, like that of so many writers, provides a heavy influence on his writing, and that in the drowned and nightmarish settings of his work can be seen the drowned floodplains and nightmarish memories of his early years. Born and raised in Shanghai, he witnessed the technological growth and martial horrors of the twentieth century. During the Japanese occupation he and his family were relocated to an internment camp where he regularly witnessed the pointless and incomprehensibly savage brutality not only of his captors, but also, and perhaps especially, of his fellow captives.

This pessimism, thinly veiled in his earliest works, becomes increasingly evident over the span of his career. Beginning with relatively straightforward genre-SF, Ballard quickly became the unwilling face of the New Wave movement of the 1970s, and from there moved increasingly into experimental, controversial, and offensive territory. And it is precisely this pessimism, expressed more and more speculatively, and with more and more graphic depravity, that has led many to argue that, in his rejection of outer for inner space, Ballard abandoned the genre of SF altogether in favor of an entirely new style all his own.

This line of assessment is difficult to cast aside, especially because Ballard himself publicly espoused it. Even in his early career Ballard criticized standard SF forms, themes, and devices, preferring always to focus on interpersonal rather than intergalactic struggles, and on psychological meditations rather than technological achievements. His essay on inner space, noted above, indicates that his own writing, what he calls "speculative fantasy," occupies the "more serious fringe of science fiction." Of course, the implication is not difficult to infer, namely that mainstream SF is simply not serious. Moreover, as Wilson notes, in his essay "I Really," Ballard explicitly stated that he had "abandoned the genre for good" following his 1970 novel The Atrocity Exhibition, because SF had simply "come to an end." And the reason it had come to an end is because the world had, both literally and figuratively, caught up to it. This is a sentiment that Ballard expressed frequently over the course of his subsequent career.

Against this overwhelming tide of literary opinion Wilson...