Cars, Girls and Science Fiction
Today is J.G. Ballard's 75th birthday.
I first ran across his work in a London airport bookstore - an odd place to find work like his, which isn't exactly aimed at a mainstream travelling audience (although come to think of it, much of his work is about finding the bizarre in the mundane and vice versa, so maybe a run-of-the-mill convenience store servicing those who are really doing something else is just the thing). Anyway, there I found two thin paperbacks, one about a world inundated with too much rain and one about a world lacking any rain at all. I didn't buy them because they looked like good books, you understand; I bought them because they were a matched set. I do things like that. You can read the details of his biography here; suffice to say that history seems to have knocked him off the normal path of life in his early teens and he never bothered to climb back on.
Michael Moorcock started up the British New Wave in science fiction as editor of New Worlds magazine, but Ballard was probably his most important writer. He was certainly the most inventive, kicking off his career with four deeply experimental disaster novels. Read the titles - The Wind from Nowhere, The Drought, The Drowned World and The Crystal World - and you can easily tell what they're about. Read them and you'll find yourself wondering what the landscape of your mind really contains.
That was just the beginning, though. In 1967, Ballard wrote a story called "The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race," ostensibly for a project that Harlan Ellison was working on at the time called Dangerous Visions.
How the story missed being in the collection remains something of a mystery - you can read Ellison's version in the introduction to Again, Dangerous Visions - but the story itself, remarkably, is exactly what the title says it is, and it bumped Ballard onto one of the most bizarre tracks sf has ever seen. The New Wave was in full swing by then, and Ballard was able to bring out a collection called The Atrocity Exhibition, his first exploration of the nexus point between sex, violence, modern medicine and automobiles. That pathway led Ballard to story titles like "Love and Napalm: Export USA," "Plan for the Assassination of Jacqueline Kennedy," and especially "Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan" and culminated with Crash a few years later. In short, Ballard's the one who introduced the sf audience to the notion that some people might get sexually aroused by automobile crashes. Once an idea like that makes the rounds, it has to be dealt with, and we've been trying to do that ever since. That alone makes Ballard a writer worth reading.
His more recent autobiographical novels wrestle with his years in prison (Empire of the Sun) and his explorations of and with sex and relationships (The Kindness of Women), and he continues to provide a bracingly imaginative and sometimes optimistic view of the world's end. He thinks about things we'd rather ignore, and while that's not as remarkable now as it was when he got started, it's still a service I'd rather was available than not.
Happy birthday, James Graham Ballard.
Benshlomo says, Anything you can't let yourself face will eventually get your attention somehow.
I first ran across his work in a London airport bookstore - an odd place to find work like his, which isn't exactly aimed at a mainstream travelling audience (although come to think of it, much of his work is about finding the bizarre in the mundane and vice versa, so maybe a run-of-the-mill convenience store servicing those who are really doing something else is just the thing). Anyway, there I found two thin paperbacks, one about a world inundated with too much rain and one about a world lacking any rain at all. I didn't buy them because they looked like good books, you understand; I bought them because they were a matched set. I do things like that. You can read the details of his biography here; suffice to say that history seems to have knocked him off the normal path of life in his early teens and he never bothered to climb back on.
Michael Moorcock started up the British New Wave in science fiction as editor of New Worlds magazine, but Ballard was probably his most important writer. He was certainly the most inventive, kicking off his career with four deeply experimental disaster novels. Read the titles - The Wind from Nowhere, The Drought, The Drowned World and The Crystal World - and you can easily tell what they're about. Read them and you'll find yourself wondering what the landscape of your mind really contains.That was just the beginning, though. In 1967, Ballard wrote a story called "The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race," ostensibly for a project that Harlan Ellison was working on at the time called Dangerous Visions.
How the story missed being in the collection remains something of a mystery - you can read Ellison's version in the introduction to Again, Dangerous Visions - but the story itself, remarkably, is exactly what the title says it is, and it bumped Ballard onto one of the most bizarre tracks sf has ever seen. The New Wave was in full swing by then, and Ballard was able to bring out a collection called The Atrocity Exhibition, his first exploration of the nexus point between sex, violence, modern medicine and automobiles. That pathway led Ballard to story titles like "Love and Napalm: Export USA," "Plan for the Assassination of Jacqueline Kennedy," and especially "Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan" and culminated with Crash a few years later. In short, Ballard's the one who introduced the sf audience to the notion that some people might get sexually aroused by automobile crashes. Once an idea like that makes the rounds, it has to be dealt with, and we've been trying to do that ever since. That alone makes Ballard a writer worth reading.His more recent autobiographical novels wrestle with his years in prison (Empire of the Sun) and his explorations of and with sex and relationships (The Kindness of Women), and he continues to provide a bracingly imaginative and sometimes optimistic view of the world's end. He thinks about things we'd rather ignore, and while that's not as remarkable now as it was when he got started, it's still a service I'd rather was available than not.
Happy birthday, James Graham Ballard.
Benshlomo says, Anything you can't let yourself face will eventually get your attention somehow.
posted by benshlomo at 2:37 PM
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