“Earth is the only alien planet”.
You might not guess it, but these words came from a writer who is mostly associated with the science fiction genre. But to James Graham "JG" Ballard (1930-2009), our familiar surroundings bore more strangeness and even horror than any Martian landscape. His protagonists weren't astronauts or space crews navigating unknown galaxies in futuristic spaceships but psychiatrists, pilots, or film executives on odysseys through the psychological abysses of gated communities, seaside resort towns, apartment blocks and other middle-class enclaves. The reader of Ballard might find that these places are often far more unsettling than the Death Star. The term “Ballardian” has since entered the dictionaries: “resembling or suggestive of the conditions described in Ballard's novels and stories, especially dystopian modernity, bleak man-made landscapes, and the psychological effects of technological, social or environmental developments”, according to Harper-Collins. In other words, the New Normal this magazine is positioning itself against is of a very Ballardian nature.
Ballard’s protagonists were psychiatrists, pilots, or film executives on odysseys through the psychological abysses of gated communities, seaside resort towns, apartment blocks and other middle-class enclaves—places often far more unsettling than the Death Star.
Ballard's life was anything but ordinary. Born in 1930, as the son of a chemist and businessman in Shanghai, he spent his first years in in the Shanghai International Settlement, an enclave for Western foreigners. In 1943, after the Battle of Hong Kong, the Imperial Japanese army occupied the settlement and imprisoned its inhabitants. The Ballards were forced to live in a two-story residence for forty families until the end of the war. These events, Ballard admitted later, shaped him for the rest of his life and informed the themes of his works tremendously. His experiences as a child “prisoner” served as the basis for his acclaimed semi-autobiographical novel Empire of The Sun, later made into a movie by Steven Spielberg, starring a very young Christian Bale. After returning to England in 1945, Ballard went on to study medicine at Cambridge in 1949 with the intention of becoming a psychiatrist, but he soon changed his subject to English literature.
What might appear as a surprising turn had a good reason: Ballard had begun writing in earnest and thought that a medical career might be too much of an interference. Ultimately, he dropped out of Cambridge. He worked odd jobs till joining the Royal Air Force in 1954. The Air Force stationed him in Canada. Afterwards he worked as an editor for scientific magazines and started a family, settling in Shepperton, Surrey, in 1960, where he remained for the rest of his life. His wife died in 1964 after a bout of pneumonia, leaving Ballard to raise their three children on his own.
Through all this, Ballard never stopped writing. As someone with a keen interest in the avantgarde of his day, he found himself frustrated by the work of his contemporaries, rating them trite and “philistine”. Together with Michael Moorcock, a friend who would also go on to make a name for himself, he concluded that literature could be revitalized by using the tropes of science fiction or other fantastical writings while not writing yet another science fiction story. In fact, Ballard drew influences from a wide range of sources—Freud's psychoanalysis as well as surrealist artists like Magritte and the writings of Franz Kafka. Ballard's stories are best understood as a modern kind of fable, serving as parables for social and moral developments, deploying elements of science fiction, surrealist prose, speculative fiction, and black comedy.
In 1962, already a prolific short story writer, Ballard published his first novel, The Wind From Nowhere. His second novel, The Drowned World, established him as one of the key voices of the “new wave” of science fiction. Ballard’s first novels all focused on a central theme: natural disasters like floods, droughts, or pandemics and their grim impact on modern societies. This was decades before Greta Thunberg was even born or anyone had ever heard the name Anthony Fauci. From there on, Ballard examined (and sometimes exorcized) the weirdness of modern civilization.
Novels like Concrete Island, High Rise (turned into a film in 2015) or the radically experimental The Atrocity Exhibition, displaying very clear influences from one of Ballard's greatest heroes, William S. Burroughs (the admiration was mutual), shed a critical, often darkly satirical light on modern man and his new world of technology and convenience.
The most striking example is High Rise (1975), which chronicles the descent of a modern Le Corbusier-style 40-storey apartment building into chaos, violence and ultimately the formation of a sort of pre-civilizational tribal society. At first, the high rise is the very height of modern living, with its own supermarkets, schools and swimming pools—and very clear vertical hierarchy, where the wealthy “on top” reside in their own penthouses. Things fall apart when power outages begin to plague the building and maintenance services break down, including a janitor committing suicide.
From then on, the residents are found increasingly giving in to their base impulses, all the while documenting the destruction of societal norms with polaroids and on film. Although YouTube and TikTok weren't even ideas back then, livestreams from the high rise would have earned colossal viewing numbers. The constant need for self-documentation and thereby “staging” of oneself was a recurring theme in Ballard's books, long before it became an integral part of social media culture.
Ballard’s prose had a very English feel to it: detached, precise and peppered with dry and black humor. The protagonists in his stories are recruited from the world of educated professionals: medical doctors, writers or architects, very much the “modern man”—but world-weary, bereft of any illusions, and with a cynical bent. It is therefore little wonder that this quaint man from Surrey became one of the biggest inspirations for the UK punk and post-punk scene of the late 70s, counting the likes of Joy Division’s Ian Curtis among his fans, as well as other writers such as Michel Houellebecq, Don DeLillo or anti-humanist philosopher John N. Gray.
This quaint man from Surrey became one of the biggest inspirations for the UK punk and post-punk scene of the late 70s, counting the likes of Joy Division’s Ian Curtis among his fans.
Some of Ballard's works, like 1973's Crash, later adapted to film by David Cronenberg, another admirer, aroused controversy. Crash became known as the book about people with a fetish for automobile accidents. But beneath the surface it touches on one of the central themes of Ballard's work. The urban environment, as described in Crash, is completely sterile. It is impossible to imagine a single tree in this landscape of car parks and airport terminals. Just as sterile as the environment are the relationships between people: everything feels transactional and, even in its sexual aspects, cold. The novel, just as many other works by Ballard, asks about the connection between “inner space” and “outer space”, how men shape their environments, and how their environments change them in return. Not a “space odyssey”, but an odyssey through the human psyche “with all mod cons”.
Note that this does not boil down to a simple case of “Man vs Machine”. That concept is now largely irrelevant: modern life simply means living with the machine. Technology is not “evil”; it simply IS. Moreover, machines, in Ballard's opinions, were “moral structures” in themselves, the last bastion of “rationality” in an irrational world, like a thermostat regulating temperatures. Crash focuses on the moment “the machine” (in this case, the car) becomes a fetish, re-shapes human behavior as well as relationships, and is the only way to generate any kind of sexual arousal.
