Abstract
In 1973 a manuscript reviewer for a major British publisher sat horrified by what she was reading. As she turned the pages she grew increasingly disturbed by the tale of a group of Londoners who are sexually fascinated by car crashes. The wife of a prominent psychiatrist, she was certain the manuscript was the product of a mind that was utterly deranged. What she was reading was not a novel at all; it was evidence of hopeless psychopathology. She returned the manuscript with the recommendation: “This author is beyond psychiatric help. DO NOT PUBLISH.”1
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Notes
See Graeme Revell, “Essay on J.G. Ballard,” RE/Search no. 8/9 (1984): 144. See also Ballard’s own account in “J.G. Ballard,” interview by Alan Burns, in
Alan Burns and Charles Sugnet, eds., The Imagination on Trial: British and American Writers Discuss Their Working Methods ( London: Allison and Busby, 1981 ), 22–23.
John Baxter in The Inner Man: The Life of J.G. Ballard (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2011) has suggested that Ballard may have embellished his account of this incident over the years (see page 230).
Michael Moorcock, “A New Literature for the Space Age,” New Worlds 142 (May–June 1964): 2. Italics in original.
Brian Aldiss, The Shape of Further Things (New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1971), 91. First published in the U.K. by Faber & Faber in 1970.
J.G. Ballard, interview by Thomas Frick, in Paris Review 94 (Winter 1984): 158.
Norman Spinrad, The Star Spangled Future ( New York: Ace, 1979 ), 6.
Patrick Parrinder, Shadows of the Future: H.G. Wells, Science Fiction, and Prophecy ( Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1995 ), 145.
J.G. Ballard, “The Terminal Beach,” in idem, Chronopolis and Other Stories (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1971), 51. First published in New Worlds in 1964.
J.G. Ballard, interview by Graeme Revell, in RE/Search no. 8 /9 (1984): 44.
See Olaf Stapledon, “Preface to English Edition,” Last and First Men (New York: Dover, 1968; London: Methuen, 1930 ), 9–11
C.S. Lewis, “On Science Fiction,” in idem, Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories ( London: Geoffrey Bles, 1966 ), 59–73
J.B. Priestley, “They Came From Inner Space,” in idem, Thoughts in the Wilderness ( London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1957 ), 20–26
Raymond Williams, “Science Fiction,” The Highway 48 (December 1956): 41–45.
J.G. Ballard, The Kindness of Women ( London: Harper Collins, 1991 ), 197.
J.G. Ballard, “Disasters,” interview by Rodney Smith, in The Listener, 14 February 1980, 208.
J.G. Ballard, “Fictions of Every Kind,” RE/Search 8/9 (1984): 99. The piece originally appeared in Books and Bookmen in 1971.
J.G. Ballard, “The New Science Fiction: A Conversation Between J.G. Ballard and George MacBeth,” interview by George Macbeth, in Langdon Jones, ed., The New S.F.: An Original Anthology of Modern Speculative Fiction ( London: Hutchinson, 1969 ), 53; 54.
J.G. Ballard, Crash ( London: Cape, 1973 ), 53.
Andrzej Gasiorek, J.G. Ballard ( Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005 ), 112.
J.G. Ballard, “Quotations by Ballard,” RE/Search 8 /9 (1984): 154.
See Ballard, “The Consumer Consumed,” User’s Guide to the Millennium, 259–61. First published in 1971.
Qtd. in Jerome Tarshis, “Krafft-Ebing Visits Dealey Plaza: The Recent Fiction of J.G. Ballard,” Evergreen Review no. 96 (Spring 1973): 145–46.
See for example Ballard, Concrete Island (London: Cape, 1973), 22; and idem, “The Terminal Beach,” 62.
Roger Luckhurst, “A Writer and His Quirk,” Science Fiction Studies 26, no. 2 (July 1999): 333.
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© 2013 Matthew Sterenberg
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Sterenberg, M. (2013). Coping with the Catastrophe: J.G. Ballard, the New Wave, and Mythic Science Fiction. In: Mythic Thinking in Twentieth-Century Britain. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137354976_5
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