Original Creators: J.G. Ballard

Each week we pay homage to a select "Original Creator"—an iconic artist from days gone by whose work influences and informs today's creators. These are artists who were innovative and revolutionary in their fields. Bold visionaries and radicals, groundbreaking frontiersmen and women who inspired and informed culture as we know it today. This week: J.G. Ballard.

James Graham Ballard's death in 2009, which triggered the mandatory retrospective outlook of his career, helped the literary community realize the importance of his body of work in the advancement—and some say transformation—of science fiction. When the British novelist shyly began his writing career in the early 1960s, science fiction was still widely considered a non-genre, or a subgenre at best, of literature. Apart from few dystopian novels that were somehow made 'canon' and deemed worthy of academic interest, science fiction was at the time enclosed in a cultural ghetto set aside on the margins of 'legitimate' literature, very much like the 'noir' genre. Ballard's spectacular tour de force is considered to be both a skillful master of science fiction writing, as well as an overall respected author.

His dystopian style often successfully combined the typical science fiction construction of a (bleak) fantasy world set in the near future, with a set of acute observations of human behavior. These narratives create a stunning mix of fantasy and realism that blur the boundaries between science fiction and other genres. At the very core of Ballard's world vision lies the hypothesis, shared by Marxist doctrine, that objects (usually technological ones) mediate everyday relationships and social interactions between human beings. This mediation is regularly broken or unstable, filled with a tension that feeds the drama leading to the novel’s eventual climax.

The dystopian and fundamentally pessimistic vision of the world postulates that technology, created by man as a means of emancipation, will be the source of his upcoming destruction. This defiance towards technology is a strong gathering motto for all members of the ‘new wave science fiction’ genre, a rather loose label born after WWII. This movement shared two strong principles: the urge to move science fiction out of its 'pulp' and 'stodgy' tradition, and the aforementioned relationship with technology, inherited and justified by the moral trauma of WWII, which effectively turned science and technology into weapons of mass destruction. Here’s a brief look at how his influence has been interpreted.

Crash: directed by David Cronenbeg (1996)

Ballard’s novel Crash, considered a landmark in his writing career, was published in 1973 in the midst of a harsh controversy that almost led to its censorship. It was followed by a mastery—and also controversial—film adaptation by Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg. The attention surrounding the controversy contributed to Ballard's fame—and not just as another science fiction writer. The novel deals with every taboo of 1970s American society: unconventional and misfit sexual practice, consumerism, car fetish, dropouts, delusion, celebrity worship and self-destruction. The dark hero of the story, Dr. Vaughan, is traumatized by a car crash and develops a neurotic fascination and sexual attraction to car accidents. He gathers a small cultish community of deluded car crash-victim and outcasts, devoted to gloomy reenactments of famous celebrities' crashes, like the death of James Dean.

The 'love' story focuses on a painful and perverse sexuality, initiated and performed in violent outbursts among the wreckage of a car crash that reaches a troubling climax in the last scene of the novel. The narrator’s statement, “a new sexuality, born from a perverse technology” symbolizes the aforementioned ambiguous role of objects in human relations, directly aimed at the American cult of technological progress. The story itself seems to endorse Paul Virilio's famous statement that "the invention of the ship was also the invention of the shipwreck" meaning that the possibility of accident and catastrophe is becoming the new paradigm of Western scientifically advanced nations. The choice to intertwine sexuality is highly relevant, illustrating the complex and perverse way in which our most primitive and animal impulses become intertwined with technology. This troubling plot, and those deadpan characters, set in contemporary America, are highly revealing of Ballard's outlandish take on science fiction, and the 1996 film adaptation is as highly regarded as the book.

Joy Division: “Atrocity Exhibition” (1980)

In the same way it is virtually impossible to encompass all the worlds and characters created by Ballard throughout his career, it is a tricky exercise to round up all the influence he had on contemporary culture. The numerous half-cryptic references to his short stories and novels in modern pop culture prove he's considered a landmark in both legitimate and counter cultures and an author to be inevitably read in formative years—and not only by science fiction 'geeks.’ One of these examples is the Joy Division song “Atrocity Exhibition” whose name was taken from the compilation of short stories Ballard published in 1970. His influence has mainly infiltrated literature, mostly on the cyberpunk genre, a sci-fi subgenre born in the beginning of the 1980s in strong opposition and mockery towards the technological fantasies of the time.