Ballard was an eager advocate of science fiction at the start of his career as an alternative to the conventions of the 19th century realist novel, which he saw as being ill-equipped to deal with an emerging post-war society in the West that was “ruled by fictions of every kind—mass merchandising, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the instant translation of science and technology into popular imagery, the increasing blurring and intermingling of identities within the realm of consumer goods, the preempting of any free or original imaginative response to experience by the television screen.” Reality had become so hard to decipher in the external world, the inner world of the self so fragmented, that the author could no longer claim to faithfully reproduce it naturalistically on the page. Science fiction of a type that sought to explore inner, rather than outer space (“Earth is the only alien planet,”) was a form that had a better chance of getting at the truth of late-20th century existence. No journeys to distant galaxies, no time-travel. The type of SF stories he approved of were “extrapolations of the immediate present, nightmares at noon earned from the abrasive dust of the pavements we all walk.” He liked to think of himself as a kind of scientist and his stories as laboratories where he could test a hypothesis on his characters in extreme situations and see where it led.
[…]—a new stimulation of interest in Ballard is to be welcomed. Too often classified as a bleak dystopian, his dark fables are driven by a powerful moral instinct and a passionate urge to engage with the world as it is. His role, he would say cheerfully and without any shred of sanctimony, was to be the man standing at the roadside with a sign reading, “Dangerous bends ahead. Slow down.” In the vagueness of life as it passes, it is very difficult to accurately gauge how personal and societal norms are shifting. We could do worse at this time of “inner migration,” as he called it, the “opting out of reality” made available to us by rapidly evolving technologies that push us ever deeper into our own heads, than to stop and take a look at what Ballard had to say.
via A Love Letter to J.G. Ballard’s ‘High-Rise’ | VICE.
astound me: D.A. Królak 