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J. G. Ballard
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 J. G. Ballard is one of the two most significant contemporary English writers to emerge from the
science fiction field since the 1950s (the other is Brian W. Aldiss). Of the two, Ballard is the one whose work
is frequently a form of hard sf, or in dialog with hard sf. But his style is so overtly antithetical to the
transparent journalistic prose so often held up as ideal by Campbell and others, and his attitude toward science and
technology so far removed from the problem-solving and faith-based assumptions of Modern science fiction,
that he has most often been perceived as writing something that is not Modern science fiction at all, or is
antithetical to it, and therefore irrelevant to a consideration of it. There is some truth in these assertions, but
Ballard remains persistently relevant. What are we to make of his claim to being one of the few real hard sf
writers today? "I feel very optimistic about science and technology," says Ballard. "And yet almost my entire
fiction has been an illustration of the opposite. I show all these entropic universes with everything running down."
We choose here to reprint Ballard's first major sf story, that burst upon the scene in 1957, heralded by
an enthusiastic reprint in Judith Merril's influential year's best SF anthology. "Prima Belladonna" introduces the
setting of many of Ballard's famous early stories, later collected in
Vermillion Sands (1971). Vermillion Sands is a bizarre future Southern California of the mind, decadent, flamboyant, metaphorical. It is in a
sense Ballard's version of Ray Bradbury's Mars. This story is Hawthorne's "Rappaccini's Daughter" transformed,
an injection of Gothic sensibility and perverse sexuality into a literature (and to an audience) unprepared.
During his early, fertile, genre years, until 1965 or so, Ballard continued to write in this mode, including the contents
of his well-known collections The Voices of
Time (1962), Billenium (1962), Passport to
Eternity (1963), The Terminal Beach (1964),
The Impossible Man (1966), and novels , including his famous disaster novels,
The Wind From Nowhere (1962), The Drowned
World (1962), The Burning World (1964 ),
The Crystal World (1966). The effect on the sf field was startling: in 1965 he was proclaimed by editor Michael Moorcock as
the avatar of the New Wave in England; in America, he was the subject of a series of full-scale attacks,
starting with an essay by Algis Budrys in 1966 -- "a story by J. G. Ballard, as you know, calls for people who
don't think. One begins with characters who regard the physical universe as a mysterious and arbitrary place,
and who would not dream of trying to understand its actual laws" -- and continuing to this day.
"Prima Belladonna" is rigorously logical, given its premises -- it plays with the conventions of reading
sf literally to amusing and disturbing effect. The protagonist is perfectly able to cope with the scientific side of
things . . . it's the human element that is the problem. This is a story of abnormal psychology.
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The Ascent of Wonder copyright © 1994 by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer. | ||
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Cramer: On Science & Science Fiction || Hartwell: Hard Science Fiction
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Interactive Intoduction to THE ASCENT OF WONDER copyright © 1995-1997 by Kathryn Cramer.