As part of the circle around New Worlds magazine in the 1960s, Ballard was a major figure in the New Wave of science fiction, whose concerns were less with the familiar tropes of space opera than with experimentation in narrative form and with the hypothesized future as avenue for commentary on the current scene. One distinctive feature of Ballard's work was a preoccupation with natural and man-made disaster (global warming precipitated by solar radiation in 1962's The Drowned World, worldwide drought in 1964's The Burning World ). Another was the proliferation, whatever the ostensible subject matter, of hellishly grim cityscapes, collapsing under either the blows of external assault of one sort or another or the inescapable weakness of their own material and moral underpinnings.
As Jason Cowley noted in The Observer, Ballard's longer fiction often lingers for several hundred pages over the protracted decline of an elaborately constructed, but sterile artificial environment. Decay is sometimes presented as literal, with steel and glass yielding to proliferating jungle; but it almost always has a moral element as well, with the human nature that stretches socially dictated constraints until they shatter just as savage as the physical world that the designers of the modern metropolis cannot keep at bay indefinitely. Many of his protagonists are by training and outlook men devoted to order (architects and psychiatrists are among their favoured professions)who contend with, but often find themselves unexpectedly liberated by, its breakdown.
An early collection of linked stories, Vermilion Sands, carried the technologies of distraction and solipsism to their logical extreme in the desert resort of the title, where affectless sybarites seek the charge of lived experience through increasingly elaborate and desperate means, including mood-sensing houses and self-painting canvasses (well before either Bladerunner or William Gibson, Ballard anticipated both virtual reality and the aesthetic of cyberpunk). But the technological society has unintended consequences and can easily turn upon its creators, who can find both new dangers and the thrill of unmediated emotion in escape. In 1974's Concrete Island, an automobile accident strands an injured motorist on a traffic island; for days, he tries in vain to catch the attention of drivers racing by, but none will risk stopping to help. Eventually he gives up on returning to the world he knows, joining a primitive society of other accident survivors on the island. (A more cerebral Lost, if you will.) In the 1975 High Rise, the inhabitants of an apartment building where the abundance of amenities leads to a growing isolation from the outside world segregate themselves from their wider lives. Sporadic power failures and petty humiliations over matters of class and lifestyle lead to their dividing into rival tribes or clans, engaged in a localized but remorseless civil war; what was designed as impenetrable refuge becomes a Hobbesian nightmare.
No work of Ballard's acquired more notoriety than his 1973 Crash, which depicted the soul-deadening effects of the celebrity culture and the mindless hedonism the affluent society makes possible, as well as the possibility of sexual and personal release through the violence of the machine age. A group of car crash survivors seek to recapture the heightened awareness of their accidents through reenactments of celebrity crashes, engaging in sexual acts in damaged vehicles with wounds as apertures for penetration. Both the book and David Cronenberg's uneven film occasioned fierce, often intemperate, controversy.
Ballard's career path was far from the conventional series of writing workshops and teaching fellowships, including as it did abandoned medical training, a stint as an advertising copywriter, and service in the RAF (with training at CFB Moose Jaw). But Empire of the Sun illuminates what I take to be his formative experience as a writer. Ballard was born in China in 1930, and spent much of his early life in an English enclave in Shanghai's International Settlement. War destroys what the quasi-fictional 'Jim' of the novel comes to realize is a precarious simulacrum of a stable world. The 'Great Asian War', as its historians Chris Bayly and Tim Harper note, lasted longer and took more lives than the European conflict to which it is often seen as a sideshow or pendant. And as Ballard knew and demonstrates, its impact on individuals was as shattering as that on the rickety imperial system that Britain anchored and subsequently cobbled together again with spit and baling wire once Japan's imperial ambitions had been thwarted.
After Pearl Harbour the Japanese move into the Settlement and Jim spends several months, lyrically evoked by Ballard, scavenging from the ramshackle house from which his parents have been driven, eventually to be interned in Lunghua Internment Camp. While it is the Japanese who have shattered the illusory universe in which Jim blissfully lived, the plane-infatuated boy finds the enemy pilots figures of incredible glamour, despite, and because of, their association with the machinery of apocalyptic destruction. And if the evanescence of the mock-England of Shanghai is profoundly disorienting to Jim, freedom from parental stricture is liberating; the Japanese jailers may impose what is, by any impartial measure, a harsher rule, but that rule is more easily , and pleasurably, outwitted than that of Jim's father and mother. Worsening wartime conditions bring austerity and finally near-starvation before deliverance comes, through the agency of the American military might whose reliance on awesome technology is signaled by the flashes from Nagasaki that Jim sees toward the close.
Spielberg's film version focused on the director's pet theme of a child looking for his lost parents, and neglects the more interesting one of the dread and freedom that come with the downfall of what one thought was a rock-firm world. Commentators on Ballard's science fiction have often observed his affinity for surrealism (Delvaux and de Chirico were two of the artists in whose imagined worlds he was comfortable)and the extent to which the near-future of his work was an intensified present, its defining features exaggerated to the point of threatening parody.
The key to Ballard's world is the understanding that any society, whether the Britain in amber of 1930s Shanghai, the suburban Shepperton in which he lived for the latter decades of his life, or the seemingly safe city of the near-future whose outlines we can but dimly discern, is a ludicrously artificial undertaking, an inherently unconvincing approximation of some Platonic ideal of community. It is the apparent order of life that is inherently surreal, and in its annihilation that we find the bracing freedom of the savage reality for which, we must reluctantly conclude, we were finally made.
