Extreme Metaphors

The conditions of J.G. Ballard’s childhood in wartime Shanghai are well known, exposed by the success of his semi-autobiographical novel Empire of the Sun (1984), and Steven Spielberg’s film version of that compulsive self-mythology. Yet pre-Empire, Shanghai was admitted only in metaphor to Ballard’s writing, and the war mentioned en passant in the ubiquitous mini-biographies adorning the front-papers of his novels. A typical example might have read: ‘He was born in Shanghai in 1930 to English parents. The Japanese interned him for almost three years in a civilian war camp. He came to England when he was sixteen. He studied medicine at King’s College, Cambridge. He worked as a copywriter, then as a Covent Garden porter, then as an editor on a scientific journal. He trained to become an RAF pilot. His first professionally published short story was “Prima Belladonna” in 1956. He was a leading light in the so-called “New Wave” of science fiction. He lives in Shepperton, England. Crash is his most notorious novel …’ Occasionally, there would be self-reflexive variations, statements so intense they were surely the handiwork not of bored copywriters but of Ballard himself: ‘He believes that science fiction is the authentic literature of the twentieth century’ (or that ‘science fiction is the apocalyptic language of the twentieth century’). ‘He also believes that inner space, not outer, is the real subject of science fiction.’

Today, given Ballard’s post-Empire canonisation, it’s easy to forget he began as a writer of science fiction, although in the 1960s he established his name with a quartet of end-of-the-world disaster novels that keenly anticipated current conditions surrounding climate change: The Wind from Nowhere (1961), The Drowned World (1962), The Drought (1964) and The Crystal World (1966). In that decade, he also produced a number of short stories that inverted science fiction via one of its most cherished tropes, time travel, using the premise to formulate the fabled theory of inner space informing those early bios. Anticipating Marshall McLuhan and Jean Baudrillard, Ballard demonstrated how encroaching advertising and mass consumer culture played on submerged desire, implanting new, artificial subjectivities to create a schizophrenic underclass. In response to such conditions, his characters retreated into the private imagination – ‘inner space’ – cordoning it off as a virtual ‘nature reserve’, preserving its sovereignty by any means possible. A recurring theme was the idea of escaping or cheating time, precipitated by a period of psychic turmoil. Recording the Dalí-esque motif of stopped or ‘melting’ time, Ballard uses the symbolism of time (that is, the unit of measurement; clock time) as an arbitrary, man-made construct imposing order and control on the free reign and chaos of the unconcious. Faced with the reality of life in that tumultuous decade, inner space for Ballard was a far more strange and compelling setting for science fiction than its traditional environs in