All this, of course, will be mere electronic wallpaper, the background to the main programme in which each of us will be both star and supporting player. Every one of our actions during the day, across the entire spectrum of domestic life, will be instantly recorded on video-tape. In the evening we will sit back to scan the rushes, selected by a computer trained to pick out only our best profiles, our wittiest dialogue, our most affecting expressions filmed through the kindest filters, and then stitch these together into a heightened re-enactment of the day. Regardless of our place in the family pecking order, each of us within the privacy of our own rooms will be the star in a continually unfolding domestic saga, with parents, husbands, wives and children demoted to an appropriate starring role.

My impression of Ballard has always been a writer who lived somehow outside of time, in a dreamlike precognitive amnion. Despite my headline above, it’s not that he was a prophet, and it’s hugely reductive of his work to just credit him, now, for “nailing” social media; rather, he understood the most base tendencies of human desire and saw in technology various nodes in which those desires could be sublimated. In the Ballardian worldview, the subconscious can never be separated from our higher operating functions. Sporting white coats, we can edify the race, but behind closed doors, we are still human, dominated by strange, primeval needs and fears, which will have us deconstructing our modern high-rise apartments into concrete terrors, perverting our technologies, and licking our windshields in no time. Ballard was one of the first writers to port human sexuality over to technology, most famously in Crash, a novel of automotive lust and carnage, and it’s not surprising that he foresaw the rise of the selfie–they’re both clear expressions of the fact that technology can’t be separated from the egos of its makers.

In the Vogue interview, Ballard talks about how the “apotheosis of all the fantasies of late twentieth-century man” is the “transformation of reality into a TV studio, in which we can simultaneously play out the roles of audience, producer and star.” He used TV as his primary metaphor–interesting, considering he once referred to the 1960s as an enormous electronic novel governed by simultaneity–but today, our dramas play out over fragmented media on the hand-held micro-screens which dominate our everyday. It’s particularly boggling to me that Ballard not only got the gist of how our inherent narcissism might play out in a world of total access to tech, but even presumed we’d be kicking around “kind filters” for the images of ourselves. Touché, J.G.

I recently had the great fortune of interviewing three of the surviving editors of the late, great OMNI magazine, a publication which, for 17 years, blew minds with its gonzo blend of science fiction and science. From 1978 to 1998 (it switched to full-time online publication in the mid-1990s) OMNI regularly featured extensive Q&A interviews with some of the top scientists of the 20th century–E.O. Wilson, Francis Crick, Jonas Salk–tales of the paranormal, speculative fantasy art by the likes of H.R. Giger, and some of the most important science fiction to ever see magazine publication: writers like Orson Scott Card, William Gibson, Stephen King, Harlan Ellison, and even William S. Burroughs graced its pages.

Ben Bova was the editor of OMNI for five years. He’s also a six-time Hugo award winner, author of 120 books of science fiction and fantasy, and was the direct successor to John W. Campbell at the helm of Analog Science Fiction and Fact.

Universe: You went to OMNI after seven award-winning years editing Analog. How did the two publications differ?

Bova: Analog was published in those days by The Condé Nast Publications, Inc., a major magazine house that published Vogue, Glamour, Mademoiselle, House & Garden, etc. They had acquired Analog when they bought out Street & Smith, around 1960. The management of Condé Nast didn’t know anything about the science fiction magazine except that it made a small profit every month, and it was regarded as the leader in its field. They just let John W. Campbell Jr. run the magazine as he saw fit. Campbell, of course was a giant in the field, and had discovered most of the major science fiction writers of the time. I was picked to take over the magazine’s editorship when Campbell unexpectedly died, and tried to continue I his tradition. My only staff was Katherine Tarrant, who had been Campbell’s assistant since he first took over the editorship in the mid-1930s. I had an art director, and one of the circulation department’s senior men handled Analog’s circulation business. I made all the decisions, with no one looking over my shoulder.

Omni, of course, was a very different affair. We had an editorial staff, an advertising staff, and a circulation staff. It was a major magazine, breaking new ground in the industry. And it was, for me, a dream come true: a big, national (even international) magazine, heavy with advertising, read by millions every month. There were always issues of one kind or another with the staff, but they were minor. We worked together quite well, actually.

Universe:  You once pitched a magazine of science fiction and nonfiction, Tomorrow Magazine, to Condé Nast: did that vision turn into your work at OMNI?

Bova: I felt that Analog, good as it was, only spoke to the relatively small science fiction community. I proposed a major national magazine that focused on the future, both with fiction and fact articles. The management heard me out, but decided that they didn’t know enough about the subject matter to invest in a major effort. They knew the women’s magazine market, so they launched instead Self magazine, which had done quite well for them.

Universe: How much freedom did you have at OMNI, and what kinds (if any) of commercial expectations did you need to meet?

Bova: I had a very wide field of operations. Kathy Keeton was the actual publisher of Omni, the idea for the magazine was hers. She was in the office every day, but she hardly ever interfered with editorial decisions. She made suggestions aplenty, and many of them were good. Those that weren’t, we discussed openly, and she almost always gave in to our editorial opinions. As long as the magazine sold well, everyone was happy. And Omni did sell spectacularly well, thanks to its editorial content, its visual quality, and a very talented circulation department.

Kathy Keeton was the de facto publisher of the magazine. Bob Guccione was the boss, but he usually stayed clear of the editorial process. He was more interested in the magazine’s visual appeal. Both Kathy and Bob were vitally interested in showing the world that Bob Guccione was more than a copycat of Hugh Hefner. Omni broke new ground and succeeded when most of the pundits said it would fail. That made both Bob and Kathy very happy.

Universe: Can you roughly characterize for me what your editorial imperatives were: what was the tone of “OMNI under Bova”?

Bova: I emphasized that Omni is not a science magazine. It is a magazine about the future. Science magazines came and went: some of our editors had worked at half a dozen different science magazines, all of which folded. I tried to get across to the editorial staff (and everyone else) that the public’s conception of science is that it’s like spinach: good for you but not terribly appetizing. Our approach was to present the future, which is like lemon meringue pie: delicious and fun. Of course most of our nonfiction pieces dealt with science in one way or another. But our approach was to talk about the future; readers swallowed the science because we made it palatable.

Universe: Did you feel that you had any predecessors, or peers?

Bova: Omni was sui generic. Although there were plenty of science magazines over the years (most of which failed eventually) Omni was the first magazine to slant all its pieces toward the future. It was fun to read and gorgeous to look at. I don’t think we had any direct competition, although our success prompted other publishers to bring out other science magazines.

Universe: How was OMNI perceived in the science fiction community?

Bova: The science fiction community was initially leery of a magazine that included science fiction in its pages but was published by the man who published Penthouse. A large part of my responsibilities was to show the science fiction community that Omni was the real thing. I also worked to convince potential advertisers and overseas publishing houses that Omni was far more than “Penthouse in space.” The fact that our payment rates for fiction were ten times the rates of ordinary science fiction magazines helped to bring the writers to us. But I had to impress on them the fact that Omni’s audience included tons of people who never read science fiction. Our writers had to be able to write for a much more general audience, and eschew the jargon that dedicated science fiction people took for granted, but was unknown to the wider audience. Some of the best-known writers in the science fiction field were not able (or perhaps willing) to do this. Most of them were personal friends. But they couldn’t write for Omni, alas.

Universe: What do you think is OMNI‘s greatest legacy?

Bova: I think Omni’s greatest legacy is that there is a tremendous audience for fiction and nonfiction about science–if it is presented in an attractive, understandable way.

Check out my piece, Omni: The Forgotten History of the Best Science Magazine That Ever Was, live today on Motherboard & browse some of its greatest hits.

We are all haunted by the totemic images of our subconscious. They rise, seemingly of their own volition, out of the dreaming depths of our minds to color our experience of the world. While there are socialized symbols that have been codified within individual cultures by centuries of thought and mythology — the moon is woman, the sun is man, for example — we can’t all adhere to the same sets of visual references. Our semiotic experience, particularly in this highly mediated age, is personal. The British writer J.G. Ballard referred to the pop culture of the 1960s (his period of greatest popularity, at least in the States) as an electronic novel we all lived inside, governed by instantaneity. It’s easy to draw a parallel to the present day — but this sentiment can also be applied to Ballard’s own oeuvre: a richly visual place, utterly simultaneous.

I decided to read J.G. Ballard because it’s a good idea to be well-versed in authors whose names have become adjectives. From the kinds of things I’ve heard described as “Ballardian,” I knew I was in for bleak suburban landscapes, grotesque televisual feasts, and tales of technological anomie.

However, the atmosphere of the short stories contained in Ballard’s Myths of the Near Future and The Venus Hunters is clouded with persistently recurring images — wings, drained swimming pools, visual trails, cameras, hotels, the slowing down of time, feminine features blown up to the point of abstraction — that smack of personal obsession, not deconstructionist sci-fi attitude. Ballard seems entirely comfortable within the matrix of his working mythologies. He unfolds his pet compulsions repeatedly, from different angles: in one story, a high-rise holiday hotel is merely a setting, in another, it’s a concentration camp for unemployable expatriates, doomed to spend their lives forever waterskiing. Drained swimming pools* are time machines and refuges, totemic pieces of landscape that even Ballard doesn’t seem to understand. In the story, “Myths of the Near Future,” the American Space Race has somehow caused a time-disease, an affliction which makes it so that every iteration of oneself exists simultaneously; in “News from the Sun,” the same time disease causes increasingly long fugues that eventually slow an individual’s existence down to a single point.

In a sense, all images are metaphors: they trigger sets of associations within us, often in ways that a writer cannot anticipate. J.G. Ballard is keenly aware of this; as particular as his work is, as much as it seems like a closed box with its own set of narrative rules, he doesn’t seek to unpack his own spiritual mechanics — he simply lays them out, trading in symbols like a Surrealist painter. In a 1984 interview with the Paris Review, Ballard cited the Surrealists not as inspiration, but corroboration: he explained, “the surrealists show how the world can be remade by the mind.”

1965 edition of Ballard’s The Drowned World, with an appropriately Surrealist cover: The Palace of Windowed Rocks, by Yves Tanguy.

As a consequence, it’s difficult to speak to the incredible power of his stories; they bypass the mind and kick directly to the subconscious. They are wildly sensuous and strange, lovingly detailing obsessed men with the loving detail of an obsessed man. In the words of symbolist painter Odilon Redon, they place the logic of the visible at the service of the invisible.

From that same genuinely enlightening interview with the Paris Review:

INTERVIEWER

Let’s start with obsession. You seem to have an obsessive way of repeatedly playing out permutations of a certain set of emblems and concerns. Things like the winding down of time, car crashes, birds and flying, drained swimming pools, airports, abandoned buildings, Ronald Reagan…

BALLARD

I think you’re completely right. I would say that I quite consciously rely on my obsessions in all my work, that I deliberately set up an obsessional frame of mind. In a paradoxical way, this leaves one free of the subject of the obsession. It’s like picking up an ashtray and staring so hard at it that one becomes obsessed by its contours, angles, texture, et cetera, and forgets that it is an ashtray—a glass dish for stubbing out cigarettes….Presumably all obsessions are extreme metaphors waiting to be born. That whole private mythology, in which I believe totally, is a collaboration between one’s conscious mind and those obsessions that, one by one, present themselves as stepping-stones.

I’ll go so far as to posit that Ballard is a science fiction writer only in the sense that his references overlap with recognizable emblems of the genre. He writes about astronauts, time, and the universe, but with an awareness that they are tropes manifested by the collective unconscious, rather than actual objects — what he does with those images is more Dalí than Delany. Digital tombs catacombed in sand, an abandoned Cape Kennedy thick with tropical birds which hang in the air like insects preserved in amber, drained swimming pools full of broken sunglasses, a woman’s silhouette fractured across bathroom tile, nude and Hockney-eqsue…

I love Ballard’s idea of these obsessions as “extreme metaphors waiting to be born,” and I love that he sees the writer’s private vocabulary of symbols as the iceberg tip of their subconscious. Indeed, Ballard was one of a handful of science-fiction writers who argued that the future of fiction lies not outward, but inward. Keyed as we all are to our own obsessions, we’re all prone to reading Ballard differently. While the other New Wavers ported the psychosymbiotic mystery of the LSD experience into their tales of “inner space,” however, Ballard’s work isn’t druggy at all: rather, it has the time-signature of dreams. I, for one, see these subtropical lizard brain landscapes as portholes into the richness of a stranger’s liminal brain-space; I find it thrilling to imagine a man in suburban post-war Britain being driven by visions of sun-bleached concrete and the jeweled vicissitudes of time. At this point, it’s become what “science fiction” is all about to me: the iterative, and forever-magic, power of minds.

*“Ah, drained swimming pools! There’s a mystery I never want to penetrate—not that it’s of interest to anyone else. I’m never happier than when I can write about drained swimming pools and abandoned hotels.”