SAJ2 contributor Tim Chapman has contributed some excellent photographs to the new Re/Search anthology, JG Ballard Conversations, a fine collection of interviews with the author by the likes of V Vale, Mark Pauline and Graeme Revell.
It’s a finely produced book in a new handbag – or manbag – size, and certainly one that any Ballard obsessive, and you know who you are, will want to own. Ballard comes across as a warm, private man and a highly prescient writer: recent news images of 100-mile traffic jams outside Houston as people fled hurricane Rita, or passengers on a flaming jetliner witnessing their predicament unravelling live on televisions inside their own aircraft, appear to have come straight out of his fiction. This is, for me, where the Ballard Paradox comes into play: his futures share so much with our present, that they can now feel a little old-fashioned, making even his earlier writing seem increasingly less like science fiction as time marches on.
The interviews date from 1983 to 2004, during which time Ballard’s opinions and obsessions – power, celebrity, media domination, war, politics and the future (and what else is there?) – have remained fairly constant in a changing world, perhaps because he was already into his 50s when the first interviews took place. Our man in Shepperton reveals a solid grasp of the broad sweep of both historical and contemporary geopolitical affairs, as well as the human, and inhuman condition. On a more personal note you’ll find insights into the origins of Crash, The Atrocity Exhibition, Ballard’s childhood experiences in a Japanese POW camp (the basis for Empire pf the Sun, his experience of success and Hollywood following Steven Spielberg’s film of that “breakthrough” book. And he likes cats. A lot. It’s also interesting to discover that while Ballard has always been something of a respected, almost canonical, late 20th century author in the UK, his earlier books were difficult to obtain for American readers, where he has developed a cult following akin to that of William S Burroughs, largley thanks to the work of Re/Search. While not a Ballardophile myself, reading these interviews has driven me to dig out some of his short story collections, so the programme works.
Find a copy via Re/Search, or The Ballardian or at the usual bookshops.
–> MOP <---
