 |
|
|
 · · · · · · · · · · · · · | ||
J. G. Ballard
| ||
 After the mid-60s, J. G.
Ballard's work became more experimental in style, culminating in his
collection, The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), which was followed by a trilogy of urban disaster novels set in the
present: Crash (1973); Concrete
Island (1974); and High-Rise (1975).
They explore the ways in which the technological landscape may be our own worst desires come true.
For the most part, hard science fiction readers were appalled. Ballard's name became a symbol for the opposite
of hard science fiction-pessimistic, experimental, non-genre, and totally unlike real sf in attitude and affect.
Interviewed in the late 1970s, Ballard defended himself to the sf world. "Most of my fiction, whatever its
setting may be, is not pessimistic. It's a fiction of psychological fulfillment. . . . All my fiction describes
the merging of the self in the ultimate metaphor, the ultimate image, and that's psychologically fulfilling. It
seems to me to be the only recipe for happiness we know."
In the 1980s, Ballard produced novels and stories that combined elements and images of his early
style and concerns with non-genre facets of his 1970s work, most significantly the autobiographical
masterpiece Empire of the Sun (1984), The Day of
Creation (1987), a psychological adventure novel, and
Running Wild (1988), a dystopian murder mystery. And in the 1990s, his literary reputation outside the science fiction
field is that of an important living English writer. It seems clear that his literary goals diverged from those of the
sf field in the later 1960s so that by the 1970s the majority of his writing was postmodern fiction in dialog
with genre sf; it remains so today.
Still, his stories of the early sixties form a striking and innovative part of the genre, widely
influential and very much a challenge to hard science fiction. "Cage of Sand" (1962) is a story of the space age
turned sour, written as real space flight was under construction and all astronauts were heroes, while most test
rockets blew up.
The dying spaceman, from Ray Bradbury's
Martian Chronicles through Theodore Sturgeon's "The
Man Who Lost the Sea," was one of the conventional tragic figures in the sf of the 1950s (and beyond-see Arthur
C. Clarke's "Transit of Earth"). The dead spaceman in satellite orbit was also a similar figure, from James
E. Gunn's "The Cave of Night." Ballard stripped the imagery of its associations with the wonders of space,
and transformed it into a symbol of the inhumanity of space travel and the coldness of the inimical universe.
His mountains of Martian sand burying Cape Canaveral are complex, symbolic, and link this landscape to
his Vermillion Sands. He also stripped it of romanticism and optimism, and used the minutiae of real-life space
programs for verisimilitude. He thus violated nearly all of the attitudes and conventions of Campbellian
SF, while remaining quite faithful to many of the details of real space engineering and technology. Ironically, it
is the Ballardian strain of sf that seems to predict the boring and dehumanizing aspects of the governmental
space programs of the sixties and beyond, and even such tragedies as the Challenger disaster.
And the ironies of the ending constitute a psychological fulfillment that is as powerful as a
problem solved -- but also a radically different mode of discourse from conventional hard sf. The characters in this
form are a priori not in a position to deal with the problem, and are controlled by their own powerful
psychological obsessions, which are brought to the fore by the set premise of the story. This is not merely non-genre sf; it is a
radical departure from the base line of hard sf: by constantly alluding to conventional images of sf
(while transforming them), it calls the whole traditional sf enterprise into doubt by making solutions impossible. This
is actually the vision of the entropic universe that underlies hard sf pushed to its extreme, different in
execution but not in kind from, say, Latham's "The Xi Effect."
| ||
|
The Ascent of Wonder copyright © 1994 by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer. | ||
· · · · · · · · · · · · ·
Cramer: On Science & Science Fiction || Hartwell: Hard Science Fiction
David G. Hartwell || Kathryn Cramer || About Tor Books || Ordering Info
Interactive Intoduction to THE ASCENT OF WONDER copyright © 1995-1997 by Kathryn Cramer.