GODDARD:
Why are the female characters in Vermilion Sands all movie-queen
types?
BALLARD:
Well, those stories are frolics of a kind, aren't they? I've never been to Palm
Springs, but I dare say if you go there in season, or to St. Moritz in season,
which are equivalent places, you'll find a lot of movie-queens and all the rest
of them. You'll find a lot of pink Cadillacs and men in rafia trousers these
are all elements of that kind of place. If you wander around Shepperton on a
Saturday in high summer - Shepperton being a modest cut-price Malibu down by
the river, a Malibu of the Thames Valley -you'll find that sort of atmosphere,
an exurbia of the future. The more well-off places are particularly like
that.
GODDARD:
Why have you never produced a work with a sympathetic male/female
relationship?
BALLARD: That's an interesting question, actually! Such as in who's
novels? What other writer does that sort of thing?
PRINGLE: It's in the great tradition' of
the English novel!
BALLARD: Being serious, of the twentieth-century writers which would
you say do this?
GODDARD: Some of. Hemingway...
BALLARD: Now that's interesting,
really. What? Which? Where? You're thinking of the film version of For Whom the
Bell Tolls presumably?
GODDARD: No, I've never seen
that.
BALLARD: I
suppose the relationship in To Have and Have Not, between the tough guy and his
wife, is happy in a way. What I'm really saying is that sympathetic male/female
relationships - and your question is quite a pointed one - are not all that
common in fiction, are they? The serious answer to your question is that my
fiction is all about one person, all about one man coming to terms with various
forms of isolation - the total sense of isolation, that the hero of 'The Voices
of Time' feels, various other kinds of isolation, psychological isolation of
the kind the hero of 'The Terminal Beach' feels. Tie protagonists of most of my
fiction feel tremendously isolated, and that seems to exclude the possibility
of a warm fruitful relationship with anybody, let alone anyone as potentially
close as a woman. I don't think this has anything to do with any quirks of my
own. I've got three children with whom I'm extremely close, and yet I've never
introduced a child into any of my stories.
PRINGLE: There have been one or two dead
children.
BALLARD:
Yes, that's true, but there are no living children in my fiction - yet all the
people who know me closely know that I'm a very fond father and all the rest of
it. It's just that children are not relevant to my work.
GODDARD: Could you tell us more
about your four disaster novels, which you insist aren't disaster novels? The
Wind from Nowhere, The Drowned World, the Drought and The Crystal World all
have disaster in them, in the classic British SF form.
BALLARD: You're right when you say
that it's a classic English SF form, but that's the reason why I used the
formula of the disaster story. Usually these disaster stories are treated as
though they are disasters, they're treated straight, and everyone's running for
the hills or out of the hills or whatever. If it's going to be cold they're all
pulling on overcoats. I use the form because I deliberately want to invert it-
that's the whole point of the novels. The heroes, for psychological reasons of
their own, embrace the particular transformation. These are stories of huge
psychic transformations -I'm talking retrospectively now . and I use this
external transformation of the landscape to reflect and marry with the internal
transformation, the psychological transformation, of the characters. This is
what the subject-matter of these books is: they're transformation stories
rather than disaster stories, The Day of the Triffids, I think it's probably
fair to say that there's absolutely no psychological depth. The characters
react to the changes that are taking place, but they are not in any
psychological way involved with the proliferating vegetation, or whatever else
is going on. They cope with the situation in the same way as the inhabitants of
this town might cope with, say, a reservoir bursting. In the classic English
disaster story there's no involvement on a psychological level with whatever is
taking place. My novels are completely different, and they only use the form
superficially.
GODDARD: Why did you stop writing them when the plot permutations
seem endless?
BALLARD: Did I? That's a good question. I don't think I did, Crash is
a disaster novel, an urban disaster story, so is Concrete Island. So is the one
I've just finished about a high-rise apartment block.
PRINGLE: The disaster 'has happened' in
your more recent stories - or that's the implication.
BALLARD: Well, it is happening. Even
the stories in The Atrocity Exhibition are disaster stories of a kind. The book
is about the communications explosion of the '60's. From my point of view, the
'60's started in 1963 with the assassination of President Kennedy - his death
and Vietnam presided over the whole of the '60's. Those two events, transmitted
through television and mass communications, overshadowed the whole decade - a
sort of institutionalised disaster area. But what you mean ~s why did I stop
using the SF formula? I don't know. I probably got more interested in other
things. You say in your question that there axe limitless possibilities -well,
what are they? You've got to have a convincing and interesting transformation
of the physical landscape.
PRINGLE: You've mentioned your admiration for Ray Bradbury. Did you
try to 'do' a Bradbury in your story The Time Tombs, with it's dying planet
setting reminiscent of The Martian Chronicles?
BALLARD: I don't know why I wrote
that. I certainly wasn't imitating him. Maybe you can't write about a dying,
abandoned planet without sounding like Bradbury.
GODDARD: I think that was the first
Ballard story I ever read.
BALLARD: Was it? A mistake. In a
way, it's very, easy to extract those elements of nostalgia, a sense of past
time never to be regained, by using those sorts of landscapes, the
clichés of interplanetary SF. You describe an abandoned planet, empty
palaces, silent computers that haven't ticked for ten thousand years, fossil
seas and all that stuff. It's very easy to do that. It's much more difficult to
do it here and now, to find those dimensions of time, nostalgia, dream,
imagination and all the rest of it, in the real world.
PRINGLE: On the question of space
travel: you imply that it's an improper subject for SF writers, but of course
increasingly it is taking place.
BALLARD: No, you're wrong.
Decreasingly it's taking place. I wrote a review of some book, a mad book . .
.
PRINGLE: The
Next Ten Thousand Years?
BALLARD: Yes. I wrote a review of it
in New Society, in which I said The Space Age lasted about ten years. It's
true. That's the extraordinary paradox. At the time of Gagarin's first flight
in '61, everybody really thought that the Space Age would last for hundreds of
years. One could say: 'Now the Space Age begins, and it's going on for ever'.
In fact, it ended with the last Skylab mission.
PRINGLE: You really believe
that?
BALLARD:
Absolutely. It happened. I'm sure there will be a Space Age, but it won't be
for fifty, a hundred, two hundred years - presumably when they develop a new
means of propulsion. It's just too expensive. You can't have a Space Age until
you've got a lot of people in space. This is where I disagree, and I've often
argued the point when I've met him, with Arthur C. Clarke. He believes that the
future of fiction is in space, that this is the only subject. But I'm certain
you can't have a serious fiction based on experience from which the vast body
of readers and writers is excluded. It's absurd. In fact there are very few
manned flights, if any, planned now. I think there are none.
PRINGLE: There's the
Soviet-American linkup flight this year.
BALLARD: Sorry, yes - orbital
flights, but not lunar flights. Public uninterest became evident in the '70's,
really. People weren't even that touched by Armstrong landing on the moon. That
was a stupendous event. I thought the psychological reverberations would be
enormous, that they'd manifest themselves in every conceivable way - in
department store window displays and styles of furnishing, etc. I really did
believe that the spin-off from that event, both in obvious terms and in
psychological terms, would be gigantic. In fact it was almost nil. It's quite
amazing. Clearly, the Space Age is over. Also, I think it's rather difficult
because, when SF writers have a monopoly of space travel they can define, they
can invent the machinery literally, and they are the judges of their own
authenticity. This is one of my objections to SF, that the decks are all
stacked, the reader doesn't have a chance. As I've said for years, the stuff
isn't won from experience. It lacks that authority therefore. Now the SF
writers are competing with the facts of real space flight. I haven't read any
recent SF. Perhaps it's good, I don't know.
GODDARD: Could you tell us something about
what it was like to work for New Worlds during the time of its change from an
SF magazine to a literary magazine in a wider context?
BALLARD: What's the period you're
actually thinking of? The period of Mike Moorcock's editorship
basically?
GODDARD: Basically that, but more specifically the time when it
changed from paperback format to glossy magazine format.
BALLARD: Right. I've been
tremendously lucky - that was the most exciting time, there's no question about
it. The ]ate '60's was a period of totally unprecedented excitement in almost
every field. I think by the time the change from a small to a large format
magazine took place it was really the final break with the American dominated
SF of the '40's and '50's - the break was complete, the battle had been won.
The group of writers that Moorcock published in New Worlds, myself included,
had proved their point, and the old guard had run out of gas. At that time New
Worlds was not just the most exciting SF magazine in the world - it made all
the American mags like Analog terribly dull - it was one of the most exciting
magazines of any kind in this country and was extremely lucky to have Mike
Moorcock running it. I think, with the benefit of hindsight, it ceased to be an
SF magazine at all, even within my elastic definition of the term, and became
something much closer to avant garde experimental writing. Perhaps that was
inevitable.
GODDARD: Why did it change from an SF magazine to an avant garde
magazine?
BALLARD:
Why? Well, it's not a case of blaming anyone....
GODDARD: No. I mean was it a matter of
editorial policy, or did the writers orchestrate it?
BALLARD: Oh, I think it was that the
writers themselves rather lost touch with SF. A group of writers came along who
weren't really interested in SF. Many of them are close friends of mine and
they won't mind me saying this, but writers like Sladek, Disch, Spinrad, Pam
Zoline, Mike Moorcock himself, none of these are really science fiction writers
in the sense that I am a science fiction writer. These dominant New Worlds
writers began writing outside the genre. I think the magazine suffered from
that, but for heaven's sake don't make too much of it. I'm not knocking New
Worlds. I'm extremely grateful to Mike Moorcock, and before him to Ted Carnell
- without those two it's hard to see how I would have published any of my
fiction at all over the years. It was a very exciting period, and it's a pity
there's no magazine like it now.
GODDARD: For a few years in the mid-60s
your work had a sort of Jekyll-and-Hyde nature about it. You were producing
both linear SF stories and the so-called experimental stories. Were you testing
the water before taking the plunge, gauging public reaction?
BALLARD: They weren't called
experimental by me - I dislike that term. It implies a test procedure of
uncertain outcome. The trouble with most British experimental writing is that
it proves one thing, and that is that the experiment has not worked. I wasn't
influenced by market considerations at all. In fact, all through the '60's 1
was writing conventional short stories at the same time - there weren't very
many of them but 1 was still writing them. I've started writing some more now.
In a review that Peter Linnett wrote he said something about my giving up
writing those Atrocity Exhibition pieces for financial reasons. I don't know
where he got that idea from. The simple fact is that the ideas that went into
that book, good or bad, took years to generate. I'd like to write a follow-up
to it, but it will take me ten years, probably, to accumulate the material
inside my own head.. Also, the climate is wrong now.
PRINGLE: There may have been no financial
reasons for you to stop writing them, but were you at all influenced by adverse
criticism?
BALLARD:
Criticism by whom? By the SF readership? The literary critics or reviewers? I
don't know. Obviously a book like that is not going to be as popular as a
conventionally-written book, there's no doubt about that, just as a book like
Crash is not going to be popular. I found those stories in The Atrocity
Exhibition produced more response from people than anything else I've ever
written; people whom I'd never had any contact with, from all over the world,
took the trouble to get in touch with me, which is a sure test of something. I
felt the response to that book was better and larger than anything else I've
ever had. In fact, I was encouraged to go on, because as I wrote the stories
over a period of four or five years the response grew.
PRINGLE: Have you written some stories in
this mode since the book was published?
BALLARD: Only one, actually. They've
more or less come to an end.
PRINGLE: I'd like to ask about the change
from the non-linear style of The Atrocity Exhibition to the more conventional
style of the two recent novels. Does this reflect a change of mind on your part
about the worth of such techniques?
BALLARD: No. Maybe, when I was
writing the stories and people questioned me about why I broke everything up, I
tended to exaggerate a bit in the hope of getting something through. I may have
made overlarge claims for non-linear narrative or whatever you want to call it,
but basically 1 still feel that the subject matter comes first and the
technique you adopt comes second. It was the subject-matter of those stories
that defined the way in which they were written. At the same time it's true
that once you develop an approach like that it, of itself, opens up so much
more territory. I once said those condensed novels, as I called them, are like
ordinary novels with the unimportant pieces left out. But it's more than that -
when you get the important pieces together, really together, not separated by
great masses of 'he said, she said' and opening and shutting of doors,
'following morning' and all this stuff - the great tide of forward conventional
narration -it achieves critical mass as it were, it begins to ignite and you
get more things being generated. You're getting crossovers and linkages between
unexpected and previously totally unrelated things, events, elements of the
narration, ideas that in themselves begin to generate new matter. I haven't
read any of those stories for a long time, but I remember it comes out of them
- the crossovers become very unusual. It was very exciting to do. But those
stories were written very much about their period, which was the middle to late
'60 s. I know I shall write more stories m that style, but a) it takes a long
time to generate material, and b) - Mary McCarthy said somewhere that the novel
should be news, and those things were news - they were like newsreels above
all. There isn't any news in that sense, nothing is happening. It sounds silly,
I suppose, but in a way the events in the external world are not equal to the
requirements of that narrative approach. It would be very difficult to write
stories of that kind about 1975. But I'm waiting for the subject matter to come
along. Meanwhile, other ideas occur to me. |
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