Hello America
A terrifying vision of the future from one of the twentieth century’s most renowned writers – J. G. Ballard, author of ‘Empire of the Sun’ and ‘Crash’.Following the energy crisis of the late twentieth-century America has been abandoned. Now, a century later, an expedition from Europe returns to the deserted continent. But America is unrecognisable – the Bering Strait has been dammed and the whole continent has become a desert, populated by isolated natives and the bizarre remnants of a disintegrated culture.The expedition sets off from Manhattan on a cross-continent journey, through Holiday Inns and abandoned theme parks. They will uncover a shocking new power in the heart of Las Vegas in this unique vision of our world transformed.This edition is part of a new commemorative series of Ballard’s works, featuring introductions from a number of his admirers (including Ned Beauman, Ali Smith, Neil Gaiman and Martin Amis) and brand-new cover designs.
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J. G. BALLARD
Hello America
Fourth Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
77–85 Fulham Palace Road
London W6 8JB
This edition published by Fourth Estate in 2014
First published in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape in 1981
Copyright © J. G. Ballard 1981
The right of J. G. Ballard to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988.
Introduction © Ben Marcus 2014
‘The Sage of Shepperton’ © Travis Elborough 2008
Author’s Note © J. G. Ballard 1994
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Cover by Stanley Donwood.
Photography by Hecate Moon.
Ebook Edition © JUNE 2010 ISBN: 9780007346967
Version: 2014-07-11
Table of Contents
The United States has given birth to most of our century’s dreams, and to a good many of its nightmares. No other country has created such a potent vision of itself, and exported that vision so successfully to the rest of the world. Skyscrapers and freeways, Buicks and blue jeans, film stars and gangsters, Disneyland and Las Vegas have together stamped the image of America onto the maps of our imagination.
Recently the American dream may have faded a little, exposed to the harsh reality of violent crime and decaying inner cities, but throughout the rest of the world the core appeal of the American way of life is as strong as ever. Above all, Hollywood still rules our entertainment culture, projecting a fictional image of America far more powerful than the reality.
Whenever I visit the United States I often feel that the real ‘America’ lies not in the streets of Manhattan and Chicago, or the farm towns of the Midwest, but in the imaginary America created by Hollywood and the media landscape. Far from being real, the sidewalks and filling stations and office blocks seems to imitate the images of themselves in countless movies and TV commercials. Even the American people one meets in hotel lobbies and department stores seem like actors in a huge televised sitcom. ‘USA’ might well be the title of a 24-hour-a-day virtual-reality channel, broadcast into the streets and shopping malls and, perhaps, the White House itself – certainly during the Presidency of Ronald Reagan, whose first year in office coincided with the original publication of Hello America.
Cadillacs, Coca-Cola and cocaine, presidents and psychopaths, Norman Rockwell and the mafia … the dream of America endlessly unravels its codes, like the helix of some ideological DNA. But what would happen if we took the United States at its face value and constructed an alternative America from all these images? The simulacrum might well reveal something of the secret agenda that lies beneath the enticing surface of the American dream.
A curious feature of the United States is that this nation with the most advanced science and technology the world has ever seen, which has landed men on the moon and created the supercomputers that may one day replace us, amuses itself with a comic-book culture aimed for the most part at bored and violent teenagers. In Hello America I suggest that the hidden logic of the American dream might one day lead to a President Manson playing nuclear roulette in Las Vegas, a less far-fetched notion than it seems, bearing in mind the Hollywood actor who occupied the White House through most of the 1980s, his head filled with the debris of old movies as he dreamed his Star Wars fantasies of laser-armed missiles.
Nonetheless, as the reader will find,
