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.

Epochs drifted. Giant waves, infinitely slow and enveloping, broke and fell across the sunless beaches of the time-sea, washing him helplessly in its shallows. He drifted from one pool to another, in the limbos of eternity, a thousand images of himself reflected in the inverted mirrors of the surface.

To share Ballard with someone is to bridge unconscious minds. To describe his books is impossible. On the surface, The Drowned World is a post-apocalyptic story about solar radiation, melted icecaps, and the great cities of the Western world submerged in brackish water. But this scientific conceit is a formality, something to explain away the deliberately surreal environment: high-rise towers rising from viscous lagoons, fata morganas of light on the throbbing horizon, gymnosperms and iguanas poised like gargoyles among the heat-warped ruins of civilization. It’s a shockingly languid, sensuous book, a romance to the Precambrian era. I read it mostly at night during a heatwave, but it doesn’t need that context to feel like a half-remembered fever dream.

Driven by heady dreams themselves, the characters in The Drowned World all share an inexplicable urge to move South, towards the equator and, metaphysically, into the sun. Which is where the pulp paperback qualities of this novel break down and The Drowned World reveals what it really is: a tango between the motivations of a lost sacral brain and the higher power of symbol. There’s this idea that if we change our environment, we change our minds: as the Earth reverts to primordial stew, human consciousness seemingly falls deeper and deeper down the brainstem, into more primitive and inarticulate forms. Time slows to a glutinous wah; the sun becomes clock and master. Lizard brain, if you will. Ballard postulates a genetic memory of not only our own species, but the entire unbroken neurophysical history of life.

“As we move back through geophysical time so we re-enter the amniotic corridor and move back through spinal and archaeopsychic time, recollecting in our unconscious minds the landscapes of each epoch…this is no scenic railway, but a total re-orientation of the personality.”

With this fake science, Ballard speculates that cities order man, not vice-versa. Change the container and we ooze into premodern forms, content to gaze into the sun and occasionally dive below the water, to discover, say, a drowned planetarium, great symbol of the human past, recontextualized as a cosmic womb. This scene, incidentally, slays: deep underwater and within the uterine dome of a planetarium sky, our protagonist, Kerans, watches an unfamiliar zodiac form “before his eyes like the first vision of some pelagic Cortez emerging from the oceanic deeps to glimpse the immense Pacifics of the open sky.”

Our pelagic explorer has sunk deeply into the grey sweet mother of us all, and in this moment recalls Socrates’ metaphor, in Plato’s Phaedo, of a fish who gazes up at the sea and believes it to be the sky. Like sea-creatures who believe the void of corroding brine to be the limit of all there is, “we are dwelling in a hollow of the earth,” he says, “and fancy that we are on the surface; and the air we call the heaven, and in this we imagine that the stars move.” For Plato, this is a way of thinking in scales, of remembering that the sky begins at our feet; for Ballard, it represents a gradual, but welcome, contraction of perception back into a pre-evolutionary blip.

Simon O’Carrigan, Study for “Lagoon,” from The Drowned World, 2008.

The asphyxiating lagoon that was London is, at one point in the novel, briefly drained. The buildings and streets slowly emerge from their amniotic beds, dripping with brine and foul algae. Kerans roams the ruins at night, disembodied and completely unable to come to terms with the sudden return of what this once-ordered city represented: chronological time, form, society, and geographical specificity. The global cataclysm that triggered the floods has, by then, erased the notion of urbanity from human consciousness–made it feel as unnatural as it always-already was. It’s a relief when the levee breaks and the warm oozing tides of oblivion descend once more upon the stage.

Simon O’Carrigan, another Study for “Lagoon,” from The Drowned World, 2008.

The reborn sun dominates: one character goes blind navigating through the jungle to follow it. All of Ballard’s books feel like great unmade films. They are so visual, sensory. We, as readers, are all gazing into the same heat-warped lagoon, but the symbols which jump into our minds arrange themselves differently for each of us. Ballard is deft and unapologetic about his predilection for largely symbolic narratives. For many cultures that use magic, symbols are seen as a type of technology.

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.”

“What’s the most cyberpunk Photoshop filter?” “Oh, definitely Find Edges.”

[Before I even begin, let me say this.

BUY THIS BOOK

BUY THIS BOOK RIGHT NOW!

Honestly, if you’re not willing to drop $20 on a piece of pure, actual counterculture, get out of here. Semiotext(e) SF is an arcane book! Even in 2010, it feels like a relic from the future history of a parallel world where thieves, gnostic shamans, and cyberpunks were set free to run things. It’s like Again, Dangerous Visions, except instead of Harlan Ellison it’s Robert Anton Wilson (and Rudy Rucker and Hakim Bey/Peter Lamborn Wilson), and instead of “dangerous” it’s “probably against existing obscenity laws” and instead of Way Bwadbuwy and Tewwy Carr it’s William S. Burroughs, J.G. Ballard, and Philip José Farmer at their weirdest. I hold Semiotext(e) SF in my hands and I can’t believe the authorities aren’t knocking down my ceilings and walls, flakes of plaster flying everywhere as the sun spills into my darkened room, to come take it away. Semiotext(e) SF feels the same way about itself. In its own pages, it lovingly refers to itself as a “fucking crazy anthology” exploring the “lunatic fringes” of science fiction.]

When I saw Transformers 2 last summer, I marveled at its visual complexity. The proportions were inconceivable: millions of shards of metal, each individually rendered in gleaming chrome, assembling at impossible speeds into loathsome erectile machine-men, whipping the sands of the actual world around them into fluff. I wondered, if I had trouble even identifying what was happening in front of me, what if some person from the 1800s were teleported into this movie theater? Would they even be able to see anything? Wouldn’t the overwhelming visual stimulus just be an undifferentiated slop to them?

I became somewhat obsessed with the idea of being blinded by modernity. To understand the future, you can’t just be transported into it without reference — it would be meaningless and terrifying. A man born in 1790 is no less neurologically equipped than I am to operate an iPad, but his lack of familiarity with the incremental developments in technology that led to such a thing would render him gaga. Most science fiction doesn’t alienate the hell us because it tends to have an extrapolative quality: we recognize the present day, strung through time to some strange conclusion. Good science fiction takes us far away while still leaving us crumbs of context; bad science fiction is fantasy.

Ergo:

a) I think Semiotext(e) SF would just be carbon-based runes on paper to someone without context for it.
b) This is a cyberpunk anthology, and as such is almost more about the present than the future.

Cyberpunk — which this book is all about — is science fiction that doesn’t point up, up, and away; rather, it’s science fiction that spreads out laterally, in layers of increasing density. The crumbs of context, if you will, are piled up into rotting mounds all around us. This is SF of the visceral now, the encroaching slums, the increasing integration of biology and technology, the degradation of flesh, vacuity, political corruption, the corporatization of the world, social disorder, dark alleyways, new drugs, etc, etc.

The earnest (and archaic) belief that science holds the keys to a rational future — which permeates “Golden Age” science fiction — was shattered by the cyberpunks, because they realized that technology was only getting more populist, more ubiquitous, and more personal. “Science,” in this anthology and in so much cyberpunk writing, doesn’t belong to authorities or professionals; it’s found in secret sex clubs and experimental drugs, abandoned artificial intelligences, personal software and filthy hacker warrens. It may still be the most viable framework for discussing our the dark perimeters of our world — the medium most fit for the moment.

This cybernetic sex joke plays out along the bottom corner of each page, flip book-style.

In other words, as Bruce Sterling wrote in the introduction to his celebrated Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology, “for the cyberpunks…technology is visceral. It is not the bottled genie of remote Big Science boffins; it is pervasive, utterly intimate. Not outside us, but next to us. Under our skin; often, inside our minds.”

Hence the Ballard story which details, with clinical precision, Jane Fonda’s boob job. And the stories about de-evolution, Frankenpenises, cyborg sex clubs, televisual grotesque, erotic space colonization, re-programmed minds, brain parasites, and techno-psychedelic scrying, too. Stories with titles like, “I Was a Teenage Genetic Engineer” and “Gnosis Knows Best.” If any one adjective could sum up this mad compendium, it might be “physical,” but the kind of physical that can’t exist without its opposite, transcendence — because that’s what a merger of technology and humanity is essentially about, wires that lead to abstract space. Hardware and software. Wet and dry.

There is a kind of fucked hope in this. Yes, modes of being are being profoundly altered by hacked software and unnatural invasion of machinery into the human body, but at least the individual has control over their subjective reality. It’s liberation through modification of the individual. Mind over matter, right? At least in Semiotext(e) SF, this is cause for joy because it’s truly and totally anti-authoritatian to refuse everything but your own cybernetic pleasure — and to build a literature of the future that is good and blinding for everyone but those living right in the middle of it.

“Science fiction is liberation. Reality in the old Aristotelian sense is a crutch for those who are afraid to walk alone on their own feet, above the Abyss that yawns when we begin to break our mental sets and pause to wonder–really wonder.”

—Robert Anton Wilson, “ever eager for new dimensions of insanity,” from the Introduction

Supplemental Materials:

Full text of J.G. Ballard’s Jane Fonda’s Augmentation Mammoplasty
Full text of J.G. Ballard’s Report on an Unidentified Space Station, a kind of Borgesian Big Dumb Object tale
Rudy Rucker’s envy-inducing recollection of the early days of cyberpunk
Full Archives of Bruce Sterling’s early cyberpunk zine, Cheap Truth
“The Future of Sex,” a 1975 article for Oui by Robert Anton Wilson
Book: Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology
Book: Semiotext(e) U.S.A.