JG Ballard Interviews, Articles, Bibliographies & Book Collection

Hello, and welcome to my JG Ballard collection. For a single look at almost all of JGB's print output from 1951 to 2008, check out The Terminal Timeline below. Otherwise, simply click on a date to see what Ballard was published during that time. There are over 300 scans in total.

1956-1959	1960-1961	1962-1963
1964-1965	1966-1967	1968-1973
1974-1977	1978-1984	1985-1999
	2000-2008

Terminal Timeline

JG Ballard Criticism

Interzone Magazines

Doubleday Atrocity Exhibition

Ambit Magazine, 1965 - 1988

Scroll down for a selection of interviews, JGB non-fiction, JGB's youth in Shanghai, serious articles, reviews, bibliographies, conjectures and miscellaneous tidbits, or hit the links:

Non-Fiction by JGB

Articles About JGB

JGB's Shanghai Days

Miscellaneous

Bibliographies

Interviews with JG Ballard

1967: George MacBeth BBC3 interview
George begins: Perhaps the most striking feature to someone reading "You and Me and the Continuum," for example, for the first time, is that it is constructed not in continuous narrative, but in a sequence of short paragraphs, each of which has a heading -- in fact, they're arranged in alphabetical order. But the key point, I think, is that they are broken up. Why did you move on to using this technique of construction? And away we go on a discussion of the "condensed" technique -- three years before The Atrocity Exhibition is published.

1969 Jannick Storm Interview
This is sort of cool, as it was done early (July, 1968) and published in 1969. JG is still interested in talking about his "condensed novels" and gives an overview of SF in the 1960s: "I feel that the nineteen sixties represent a marked turning-point. For the first time, with the end of the cold war, I suppose, for the first time the outside world, so-called reality, is now almost completely a fiction. It's a media landscape, if you like. It's almost completely dominated by advertising, TV, mass-merchandising, politics conducted as advertising. People's lives, even their individual private lives, are getting more and more controlled by what I call fiction."

1970 Penthouse interview with Lynn Barber
I guess I learnt enough medicine to cure myself of wanting to be a doctor. That sounds pat but I wanted to be a doctor for neurotic reasons and once I'd got over the neurosis, solved whatever problems I'd had, I found that medicine was a sort of fiction -- all that anatomy and physiology. Gray's Anatomy is the greatest novel of the 20th century. By comparison with our ordinary experience of our bodies, to read Gray's Anatomy is to be presented with what appears to be a fantastic fiction, an epic vastly beyond War and Peace and about as difficult to read. This is serious. Text transcribed by Mike Holliday

1971: Eduardo Paolozzi, J.G. Ballard, and Frank Whitford
What follows is an edited version of a conversation between Ballard, Paolozzi and myself conducted in Paolozzi's studio in July of this year. We touched on many subjects, on Surrealism, on violence, on the nature of reality and, especially, on technology as the subject-matter for art of all kinds. Inevitably, much of the conversation otherwise concerned with technology was taken up with discussions about whether or not the tape recorder was working properly. I began by putting it to Ballard that both he and Paolozzi are working within a surrealist tradition, a tradition which, especially in this country, has never been taken very seriously.

1973 CBC Interview: "How To Face Doomsday Without Really Dying"
Here's something very special: an early 1970s interview with JGB that's never been published. It was conducted by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation for a radio show called Ideas, with this specific series featuring science-fiction writers discussing Doomsday scenarios. The program was organized by Judith Merril, and this is a slightly edited version of the raw tape transcript. It's 8,000 words of JGB at his prophetic best, with an interviewer, CBC employee Carol Orr, who wasn't that sympathetic to JGB's more, ahh, interesting ideas. And it's never been published until now.

1974 Intro to the French Crash! & Robert Louit interview
The original english text to the French edition of Crash!, plus an interview with Robert Louit, who translated the novel.

1974: Alan Burns interview
JGB: Take the novel out of the context of the university Modern Literature Department, push back those plywood partitions and actually see the writer in his professional role, having all the problems (quite apart from the problems of writing) of persuading the publisher to publish what he's done -- writing in the context of whatever one's doing. And that's the beginning of a long, fascinating interview about how and why JGB writes.

1983: The Art of Fiction Interview
In the case of an imaginative writer, especially one like myself with strong affinities to the surrealists, I'm barely aware of what is going on. Recurrent ideas assemble themselves, obsessions solidify themselves, one generates a set of working mythologies, like tales of gold invented to inspire a crew. I assume one is dealing with a process very close to that of dreams, a set of scenarios devised to make sense of apparently irreconcilable ideas, just as the optical centers of the brain construct a wholly artificial three-dimensional universe through which we can move effectively, so the mind as a whole creates an imaginary world that satisfactorily explains everything, as long as it is constantly updated. So the stream of novels and stories continues...

1984: Peter Ronnov-Jessen Literary Review Interview
JGB: It's a misreading to assume that because my work is populated by abandoned hotels, drained swimming pools, empty night clubs, deserted airfields and the like, that I am celebrating the rundown of a previous psychological and social order. I am not. What I am interested in doing is using these materials as the building blocks of a new order. This must have been an odd one, appearing as it did one month before the publication of Empire. Text transcribed by Mike Holliday.

1985: JGB talks with the New Musical Express
Punk was so interesting -- I still haven't recovered from it. Not knowing anything about the music I saw it as a purely political movement, the powerful political and social resentment of an under-caste who reacted to the values of bourgeois society with pure destructiveness and hate. Bourgeois society offered them the mortgage, they offered back psychosis. Transcribed by Mike Holliday

1987 Globe & Mail Interview: "The Science Fiction label sticks like glue"
In October of 1987 JG Ballard made his third, and final, trip to Canada -- this time for his first-ever public reading from a novel, The Day of Creation, as part of Toronto's Harbourfront International Festival of Authors. While he was here he did a mini-interview with H.J. Kirchhoff, a writer with Toronto's Globe & Mail newspaper. He talks about public speaking, UK literary events, and his writings. "The Day of Creation," he says, "has obviously been affected by the great success of Empire of the Sun, as one would expect."

1988 Publisher's Weekly Interview/Article about The Day of Creation
This interview was published in the March, 1988 issue of Publisher's Weekly and was written by London freelance writer Michelle Field. Best part? The boy in The Empire of the Sun, Ballard says with a smile, grows up to be Dr. Mallory, the main character in his new novel, The Day of Creation -- not a science fiction writer in Shepperton. In a way, Ballard says, it is the story of Empire of the Sun turned inside-out: "The circumstances in Empire of the Sun completely enclose the boy and shape him; in The Day of Creation it is Mallory himself who creates the landscapes in the book, and he imposes himself on the landscapes, not the other way around." Fascinating.

1988: "Myths Of The Near Future" ZG Magazine Interview
I can see a time, probably about midway into the next century, when time will virtually cease to exist. The present will annex both the future and the past into itself. All desires will be fulfilled and people will live in a perpetual present. Transcribed by Mike Holliday

1988 The Face Magazine Interview with Paul Rambali
There's no music in my work," states J. G. Ballard. He smiles, quoting the Futurist manifesto, "The most beautiful music in the world is the sound of machine guns."

1988: JGB talks with Impulse Magazine
I assume that it is no accident that human beings have been endowed with prodigious imaginations and a remarkable capacity to enter various hallucinatory or delusional states -- as in dreams, hypnagogic imagery, flashes of deja vu, etc.

1988 BBC4 Interview with Mariella Frostrup
I've been at it now for a long time — whatever it is, 40 years — and people have always accused me of being very humourless as a writer, and I've genuinely been surprised by that. I mean, I think there's a great deal of humour in Millennium People — some of it's pretty deadpan. I'd like to just say that I never poke fun at the middle-classes, I take them seriously, and I take their complaints seriously — but of course there is something inherently comic about the idea of a middle-class revolution. Text transcribed by Mike Bonsall.

1990: JGB talks with Jeremy Lewis
You've got to remember to some extent that the communication/ media landscape sets the agenda: a media landscape dominated by TV that thrives on sensation. This itself has a numbing effect. And whenever there is a major tragedy one sees that these images exhaust their own potential to evoke pity in a very short space of time. With repetition the audience of course becomes bored. The whole thing has a numbing effect.

1996: JGB and David Cronenberg in Conversation with Chris Rodley
Cronenberg: Eventually we’ll get the pornography of pornography, I’m waiting for that.
Ballard: Could be your next movie.
Cronenberg: I think we have our hands full with this one.
Ballard: You’ve already made your next movie – it’s called Crash.
Cronenberg: You’re right… Well, what next?
Transcribed by Mike Holliday

1996: "Seconds Chance" JGB and George Petros talk Death
Within the fact packed pages of his speculative fiction, James Graham Ballard killed more people and caused more damage than anyone. His dystopian dramas employ catastrophe as a catalyst for the evolution of characters. Ultimately, his victims adapt, learning to groove with it, whatever it may be -- however deadly, however devious. Other writers have obliterated most of the human race, but silver linings exist around their dark clouds of destruction - otherwise, from what vantage point would they write? Ballard doesn't have that problem -- he's out of the picture. Transcribed by Mike Holliday

1998 Jason Cowley Interview: "Pump Up The Pumice Stone
I found this very interesting 1998 article/interview on the website of one Jason Cowley, a journalist, cultural critic and editor in the UK. He is an editor and writer on the Observer, contributing editor of the New Statesman, and is soon to become the new editor of Granta. JG is his usual erudite self: "Yet surely the radical imagination is what we seek in a writer; when we read we want to encounter a very different world that will make sense of our own."

1998 Zinovy Zinik Interview: Russia On My Mind
An obscure interview tracked down by Mike Holliday: JGB talks with Zinovy Zinik in 1998: "All this leaves the human race extremely vulnerable to any master-manipulator. I've remarked elsewhere that messiahs usually emerge from deserts, and I expect the next Adolf Hitler or Mao to emerge from the wilderness of the vast North American and European shopping malls. The first credit card Buddha, at its best, or, at its worst, the first credit card Stalin."

2001 BBC Interview with Richard Coles about The Complete Short Stories
JGB: I think there's something about the intensity of the short story, it's very obsessive in the way it tackles whatever the situation may be — a single theme usually, and comparatively few characters who don't need to be developed. You can take a single mood and focus on it, almost in the way the scientist focuses on something down through the lens of a microscope. I think that fits into my particular temperament, which is a mix of, sort of, the obsessive and roving imagination.

2001: JGB talks with Sebastian Shakespeare
Shakespeare: How did you dream up the ideas of sonic statues, psychotropic houses and singing flowers? Did you derive any of your conceits from hallucinogens?
Ballard: Pure imagination, the most potent hallucinogen of all. Transcribed by Mike Holliday

2002 Empire Of The Sun BBC4 Interview with James Naughtie
I think the character of Jim is fairly true to, you know, the boy that I was. The whole point of the book, really, is that — he's learning to love the war. Because the war represents security, and that's a, sort of, nightmare truth about war. And however unpleasant things are, people get used to it, and they begin to rely on it — even people in prison camps, people under enormous physical and mental pressure. You know, it's the Stockholm syndrome in a kind of way, you begin to love your captors because they represent security. I think there's a strong element of that in Jim's character. Text transcribed by Mike Bonsall

2002 Super-Cannes BBC World Service Interview with Harriett Gilbert
I'm never happier than when writing about drained swimming pools. There's something about them that touches a deep nerve. It may derive from my wartime experiences, as the Europeans abandoned their houses in Shanghai the swimming pools began to drain, and many were emptied during the war. I used to go round these empty houses after the war, and really there is a certain sort of melancholy beauty about these huge, empty pools. There's something about a drained swimming pool that suggests the end of an epoch, the end of a season. I think I thought of water really as a medium of, you know, of transformation. Text transcribed by Mike Bonsall.

2002 Hans-Ulrich Obrist Interview: Nothing Is True, Nothing Is Untrue
Another obscure interview found by Mike Holliday: JGB talks with Hans-Ulrich Obrist in 2002: "I think that my imagination was fully formed from the beginning, though that is probably true for most painters, novelists, poets and so on. I've always believed in the radical imagination that sets out to change reality - probably a doomed ambition. I wasn't interested in accepting the social consensus. I wanted to unsettle and unnerve, to provoke the reader. I never consciously shaped my ideas or my style. I simply followed my obsessions, and was confident that they would take me to strange destinations beyond the edge of the map."

2003 BBC3 interview with Philip Dodd about Millennium People
JGB: Ten or 15 years ago I went to Chelsea Harbour, which is a much more upmarket, purpose-built enclave of luxury flats and townhouses, and looking around it I remember thinking this is a stage set. The whole thing was engineered on the drawing board, including, I suspect, a sort of psychology of the place — and if it's a stage set the fact remains that the scenery could be moved at a moment's notice. Looking around one can imagine something going wrong here. Text transcribed by Mike Bonsall

2004 Italian TV Video Interview
In January of 2004 an Italian book publisher sent a crew to JGB's Shepperton home, and for 25 minutes The Man discussed his books, his art, and his observations about society. It's great, and JGB really gets into it. The files are Real Player.

2005 V. Vale Interview: JGB Beats Around The Bush And Finds Hollywood
From his home in Shepperton, J.G. Ballard wonders over the phone with V.Vale of Re/Search if there is something fundamentally flawed about the American take on reality. This interview was first published in Arthur Magazine on February 15, 2005, and was excerpted from J.G. Ballard Interviews. It and sister volume J.G. Ballard Quotations are now available from Re/Search Publications at www.researchpubs.com Chuckle along as JGB toasts George Dubya.

Non-Fiction By JG Ballard

Time, Memory and Inner Space
A fascinating article JG Ballard wrote in 1963 for The Woman Journalist Magazine. Although most of the article is about The Drowned World, he does offer insights into his creative techniques: "I feel that the writer of fantasy has a marked tendency to select images and ideas which directly reflect the internal landscapes of his mind, and the reader of fantasy must interpret them on this level, distinguishing between the manifest content, which may seem obscure, meaningless or nightmarish, and the latent content, the private vocabulary of symbols drawn by the narrative from the writer's mind. The dream worlds, synthetic landscapes and plasticity of visual forms invented by the writer of fantasy are external equivalents of the inner world of the psyche, and because these symbols take their impetus from the most formative and confused periods of our lives they are often time-sculptures of terrifying ambiguity."

Images Of The Future
As David Pringle notes in his introduction: "this article was written in 1966 for a British fanzine called Fusion, edited by Jim Grant; never published at the time, it was passed to me by Mike Ashley who had been given it many years ago by Jim Grant. Thanks to Mike, and to J. G. Ballard for permission to publish it here for the first time -- ". OK, so this isn't the first time, but it's still full of pithy JG comments about form & content: "Above all, then, the future presents itself to us as a series of quantified images and relationships. To make any kind of fiction out of these elements demands techniques appropriate to them, and it is precisely here, I feel, that science fiction has failed. The principal literary technique of retrospective fiction, the sequential and consequential narrative, is wholly unsuited to analyse events that have not as yet taken place, let alone produce that free play and rapid association of ideas and images that is what we perceive of the future."

Fictions Of Every Kind
Another fascinating article by JG Ballard, published in the February 1971 edition of Books & Bookmen. He's surprisingly aggressive: "In essence, science fiction is a response to science and technology as perceived by the inhabitants of the consumer goods society, and recognizes that the role of the writer today has totally changed -- he is now merely one of a huge army of people filling the environment with fictions of every kind. To survive, he must become far more analytic, approaching his subject matter like a scientist or engineer. If he is to produce fiction at all, he must out-imagine everyone else, scream louder, whisper more quietly. For the first time in the history of narrative fiction, it will require more than talent to become a writer."

The Coming Of The Unconscious
A fascinating article by JG Ballard, published in the July 1966 edition of New Worlds Magazine. While ostensibly a review of two books, this is really an opportunity for JGB to expound on one of his favourite topics: The pervasiveness of surrealism is proof enough of its success. The landscapes of the soul, the juxtaposition of the bizarre and familiar, and all the techniques of violent impact have become part of the stock-in-trade of publicity and the cinema, not to mention science fiction. Much of the content pertains to The Atrocity Exhibition.

Notes From Nowhere
Another fascinating article by JG Ballard, published in the October 1966 edition of New Worlds Magazine. As Michael Moorcock writes in his introduction: Reader interest in J.G. Ballard's recent work has been high. We invited Mr. Ballard to produce these notes explaining some of his current ideas. They take the form of a dialogue with himself -- the answers explaining the unstated questions. Here's Ballard's lucky "dialogue" #13: Dali: "After Freud's explorations within the psyche it is now the outer world of reality which will have to be quantified and eroticised." Query: at what point does the plane of intersection of two cones become sexually more stimulating than Elizabeth Taylor's cleavage? There's 24 of these little JG gems in total.

Terminal Documents: J.G. Ballard Reviews William S. Burroughs
In a 1966 issue of Ambit, JGB "reviews" the works of WSB: "The first mythographer of the mid-20th century, and the lineal successor to James Joyce, to whom he bears more than a passing resemblance... Burroughs nevertheless reaches certain conclusions not only about society at large but also about our notions of reality, of the hierarchies of the mind and senses that underpin our consciousness, that seem to me to be questionable."

Mein Kampf Reviewed
In the December 1969 issue of New Worlds JGB takes a look at Hitler's infamous blueprint for irrationality. "Certainly, Nazi society seems strangely prophetic of our own - the same maximising of violence and sensation, the same alphabets of unreason and the fictionalising of experience. Goebbels in his diaries remarks that he and the Nazi leaders had merely done in the realm of reality what Dostoevski had done in fiction. Interestingly, both Goebbels and Mussolini had written novels, in the days before they were able to get to grips with their real subject matter - one wonders if they would have bothered now, with the fiction waiting to be manipulated all around them."

JGB's foreword to the 1969 Danish edition of Atrocity Exhibition
Oriiginally written in English, then translated into Danish, and then back into English. Still great.

Articles About JG Ballard & His Fiction

White Light: J. G. Ballard’s Empire of the Sun as a War Story

"War narratives as a rule follow a logic that is based on a paradoxical premise. War is depicted as a set of circumstances or a condition of existence that is the opposite of peace, that is, of ordinary existence: it is extreme and excessive, unreal, distorted, the opposite of what goes on in a civilised human community. On the other hand, war is seen as an ontologically superior realm or condition inasmuch as it allows an insight into something “deeper” than normal existence." This article by Tamás Bényei was first published in The Anachronist: The Literary Journal of the Department of English Studies, (Online journal of the University of Eötvös Loránd University, Hungary) Issue 2000, and found its way here by the usual nefarious means.

J.G. Ballard and the Mediascape
Stanford prof Scott Bukatman, in his book Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction, spends six pages analysing JGB in terms of what he calls the Mediascape – "Reality becomes an extension of the mass media – television especially, but also color magazines, billboards, rock and roll radio, and even cinema and newspapers (TRAK news agency – "We don't report the news – We write it"). First the public's response to reality and finally reality itself are affected." Turn on and tune in

“A Secret Code of Pain and Memory”: War Trauma and Narrative Organisation in the Fiction of J.G. Ballard
"It seems likely that J.G. Ballard sustained some degree of psychological trauma as a result of his incarceration in a Japanese prison camp during World War II. My aim in this paper, however, is not to attempt to establish the nature or extent of Ballard’s putative psychopathology. I want to suggest that there are striking affinities between the changing role played by his wartime experiences in his writing, and the ways in which trauma is registered and 'worked through' by its sufferers." JGB scholar Paul Crosthwaite takes a look at JGB's fiction in light of his wartime incarceration.

You and Me and the Continuum: Doorman To The Atrocity Exhibition?
"Instead of the code music of the quasars, the sky now reveals the iconic presences of 1960s cultural figures, looking forward to the later sections of The Atrocity Exhibition." JGB scholar Mike Holliday takes a look at You and Me and the Continuum.

JGB's Experimental Fiction
JGB has forayed into the experimental on a number of occasions, most notably his famous Ambit "advertisements" of 1967-1971. Did you know he also wrote a novel for billboards in 1958? Well, he did.

Thy Kingdom Come, Thy Ads Be Run
For some particular reason, they call it shopping -- Richard Pearson. Other reviewers have looked at JGB's latest novel, Kingdom Come, from its main themes of suburban fascism, consumerism, and violence, but because of my career with advertising agencies, I have decided to look at a specific aspect of this novel: the character of (m)adman Richard Pearson, and the crucial ad campaign he creates which brings the book to its ultimate resolution.

The Portals Of Hell: Ballard and the Gated Community
This fascinating study by Sarah Blandy was presented to a Housing Studies Conference a week before 9/11, 2001. I've edited it down to the cogent Ballard bits, but you can access the whole paper, as well.

The Work of Emotion: Ballard and the Death of Affect
Postgrad scholar Matt Smith has written an outstanding thesis which examines four novels of J.G. Ballard: The Atrocity Exhibition, Crash, Concrete Island and High Rise. Citing these novels and several of JGB's seminal short stories, Matt examines the notion of a ‘Death of Affect’, charts its contours and movements, and comes to a very interesting conclusion. Comes complete with a comprehensive critical bibliography.

Krafft-Ebing Visits Dealey Plaza
Jerome Tarshis reviews The Atrocity Exhibition and interviews JGB about same in this obscure 1973 piece from The Evergreen Review. "In a sense the whole book is about violence," Ballard told me in an interview at his home, near London. "I mean, about violence as a spectator pastime. I see that people's lives these days are saturated with images of violence of every conceivable kind. The strange thing is that although in the past we perceived violence at our nerve endings, in terms of pain and pumping adrenalin, now we perceive violence purely intellectually, purely as an imaginative pastime."

The "Second Wave" of JG Ballard Short Stories
JGB scholar John Boston picks up Ballard's trail in 1959 and discusses the four short stories that got him back into writing science fiction: Now: Zero (SCIF 12/59), The Sound-Sweep (SCIF 2/60), The Waiting Grounds (NW 11/59), and Zone of Terror (NW 3/60).

Reconstructing High-Rise
A night patrol creeps along a dark hallway past a barricade of desks; a flash of white birds leap into the air like a fluttering flag of surrender; a dog lies drowned in the middle of a community pool... welcome to High-Rise, JG Ballard's deeply subversive study of a society in transformation. It had been almost 30 years since I read this mid-70s masterpiece. When I read it again I couldn't believe its complexity and paradox -- not the least of which is feeling good about running amok in an expensive building and cooking dogs on the balcony.

You, Me and the Continuum: David Pringle Searches For JGB's "Lost" Novel
Evidence points to the possibility that two JGB's of early works have gone missing. One JGB wrote at Cambridge, the other he says he hoped to finish by the end of 1956. Whatever happened to that work?

Fact & Fiction in The Kindness Of Women
The Kindness of Women was published in 1991, and in 1993 David Pringle published an article in which he sorts out the facts and the fictions in JGB's quasi-autobiographical novel.

Is JG Ballard A (Gasp) Reactionary?
Benjamin Noys is Lecturer in English at the University of Chichester. He is the author of Georges Bataille (2000) and The Culture of Death (2005). In this essay for Sage Publishers he addresses the question of whether J.G. Ballard is reactionary. He uses the work of the psychoanalytic thinker Slavoj Zizek to analyse the ways in which his recent fiction -- Cocaine Nights (1996), Super-Cannes (2000), Millennium People (2003), and Kingdom Come (2006) -- poses disturbing questions concerning order, community and transgression within contemporary capitalist society. The analysis traces the shifting and ambiguous political effects of Ballard’s attempts to provide warnings concerning emergent cultural pathologies. This leads to an examination of how Ballard puts the generic conventions of contemporary fiction under pressure by his subversion of the crime/thriller novel. The conclusion focuses on the relative lack of controversy aroused by Ballard’s provocative fiction in Britain.

Terminal Tapes
From Shanghai To Shepperton: The First International JG Ballard Conference I managed to record about half the presenters at this fantastic two-day conference at the University of East Anglia, Norwich. Listen to: Toby Litt, Dr Roger Luckhurst, Prof Philip Tew, David Pringle, Prof Vic Sage, and many more!

Peter Brigg Plunges Into The Drowned World
Professor Peter Brigg of the University of Guelph, Canada, had this article published in the 1979 Survey of Science Fiction Literature. "The sophistication of Ballard's storytelling is perhaps why he is not given credit for strongly original ideas. Yet there is a breathtaking moment when, at some point in The Drowned World, each reader suddenly grasps the daring of the concepts being carried to their true resolution." Wade in.

2006 Kingdom Come BBC TV Newsnight discussion
Rosie Boycott: Oh, incredibly cardboard-cutout characters, no emotion in it, you don't care about the characters. And I thought it was extraordinary to write a whole novel, which is really about the effects of consumerism — and a lot of the stuff, say, that professor Layard's been writing about — the study of happiness, the weakness of consumerism, and that it doesn't emotionally fulfil you or satisfy — and yet there's nobody in the book who is an actual consumer — and that he's very, very weak on his sense of product... Text transcribed by Mike Bonsall

1990: "Tales From The Darkside" NYT article by Luc Sante
From his first book... Ballard has been depicting the dark underside of civilization, a darkness that seems to increase in the human psyche in inverse proportion to what we call progress. His novels are complex, obsessive, frequently poetic and always disquieting chronicles of nature rebelling against humans, of the survival of barbarism in a world of mechanical efficiency, of entropy, anomie, breakdown, ruin.

JG Ballard In Shanghai

The Ballard Family Home, 31A Amherst Avenue, Shanghai
In 1984/85 Canadian Professor Peter Brigg was teaching in Shanghai, and at JG Ballard's request, he took the time to visit and photograph what was left of the home JG Ballard lived in from 1930 to 1945, with time off for a few years at Lunghwa Civilian Assembly Centre, courtesy of the Japanese. See Peter's pictures, JG's hand-drawn map showing the location of the house, as well as JG's reaction to seeing the photos 40 years after leaving Shanghai. UPDATE: In February, 2007, I found the area where his house should be on Google Earth and sent the printout to JGB... he marked up the map showing his house and mailed it back! UPDATE, UPDATE: In June, 2007 I made contact with Andy Best, who lives in Shanghai a few blocks from JGB's old home. He took some fantastic photos and sent them to me. UPDATE, UPDATE, UPDATE: In September 2007 I travelled to Shanghai myself, met Andy, and explored JGB's house -- now a fancy restaurant! -- the Lunghua Airfield, Lunghua Camp, and the Amherst Avenue neighbourhood. Quest completed.

JG Ballard's Shanghai Neighbourhood
In September of 2007 Shanghai resident Andy Best did a complete tour of the neighbourhood around Amherst Avenue, taking pictures of the old mansions, schools, colleges and cathedrals which would have existed during the 1930s when the young Jim Ballard roamed this area. He took 120 pictures and drew two great maps.

JG Ballard's Shanghai Haunts
After visiting JG Ballard's Shanghai home, I set out to take in other areas of the city mentioned either in Ballard interviews, letters and novels. Here's a collection of pictures taken by myself and Andy Best showing The Bund, Pudong, People's Park, the Lunghua Pagoda, Lunghua Airport, Country Clubs, the Peace Hotel and more. Comes complete with a short video.

Memories Of The Sparse Age: The Recollections of Lunghwa Civilian Assembly Camp Internees
A number of British nationals all survived incarceration at the hands of the Japanese in the Lunghwa Civilian Assembly Centre outside of Shanghai from 1943 to 1945. They shared the camp with the young JG Ballard and his parents, but only a few make reference to Empire Of The Sun. Still, fascinating stuff.

JG Ballard Miscellanea

Michael Foreman Sorta Remembers JGB, Maybe
I was emailing with the nice people at Ambit Magazine about back issues, and I happened to ask offhandedly if Michael Foreman, Ambit Art Editor during the JGB years, was still active. It turns out Michael is still at the office, and he agreed to answer some questions about those times. And then he didn't. OK, there's one interesting revelation about an unpublished JGB children's story called The Last Rocket To Mars. If you're interested in the current whereabouts of Michael, he's still the Art Editor of Ambit magazine, which also has a funky website.

Berkley's Cover Man For JGB
Ultra-prolific "sorta surreal" artist Richard M. Powers did the art for nearly all of JGB's Berkley Press book covers. In a 1977 interview, Powers called Ballard's The Drowned World, "one of the best pieces of surrealist writing I've ever read".

JGB Radio Dramas From The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in MP3 Format
In 1988 the CBC's science fiction radio drama show, Vanishing Point, commissioned, produced and broadcast seven radio dramatizations of JGB's short stories. Amazingly, audio copies of the complete series have recently been unearthed. Info on the series, and my cd cover designs (including a commentary postcard from JGB), plus MP3 versions of all the plays, can be seen and heard.

JG Ballard "Preliminary Inventory"
Library-speak for a clinical description of the contents of a box of drafts of The Unlimited Dream Company, which JGB almost named "Fury", or "The Stunt Pilot". Crazy.

JGB Bibliographies

The Terminal Timeline
A movie of my collection: all the pulps, magazines, paperbacks, novels, special editions and early variant editions laid out in a single horizontal timeline from 1951 to 2007. Each image links to a much larger version. It's amazing to see all that output listed by month and year...

Complete Bibliography of JG Ballard Short Stories
Not only does this chronological bibliography tell when & where all JGB's short stories were published, but bibliographer David Pringle also speculates as to when the stories were first written.

The Critical Exhibition: Secondary Literature Online Bibliography
Umberto Rossi manages The James Graham Ballard Secondary Literature Online Bibliography. Over 170 essays and articles from over 150 writers and critics are currently listed. Email link to Umberto provided.

JG Ballard Early Secondary Sources
The neat thing about this David Pringle list is its depth: the sources start in 1951, with a review of a winning short story JGB wrote while a student at Cambridge, and ends in 1974.

What Did Jamie Ballard Read As A Young Man?
Ever wonder about JGB's early reading? David Pringle has. Using information from JGB's essay in a 1992 book, The Pleasure Of Reading, plus other, more obscure sources, David has compiled an extensive and highly plausible list of what comprised JGB's youthful library. It's quite the collection!

The Doubleday Edition of The Atrocity Exhibition

The rarest book in my collection is this Doubleday edition of The Atrocity Exhibition. No one knows the actual number of copies that escaped the hopper, but most experts believe there are fewer than ten unshredded. I believe six or seven survived: JGB's copy, my copy and the "Ashmead" copy, almost concurrantly sold by Lloyd Currey in 1996 -- I had first choice and went for the signed copy -- a copy at the University of Texas, the Mike Holliday copy in the UK, and, at the time of writing this -- May/06 -- there are two for sale; one by Currey, another on eBay.

In April, 2007, I received this info from Gerry Kleier, a JGB collector and bookstore owner in Australia: "I do have the Doubleday AE. I had two copies at one time, even! One I bought over the counter when I worked at a Berkeley used book store. The other I acquired in a trade. One copy I traded to Andy Richards (Cold Tonnage Books) many years back and I think he sold it through Lloyd Currey. It was a copy with about 12 blank pages (a printing error) so it is pretty distinctive. It might be the copy you have. [It isn't] Sci Fi Editor David Hartwell had a copy for many years - it might be the 'Ashmead' copy. I think he sold it through Lloyd too. I can't recall for certain. I think the San Fran copy is still for sale on ABE... The copy I traded for came from the Strand Bookstore in NYC. The person who bought it (not the person I traded with) said it had been in a stack of "5 or 6 copies" on a remainder table. The person I bought a copy from did not remember where he got the book from - he had lived in NYC though. The date of acquisition of the 1st copy is unremembered by me, but presumably the early 1970s."

When was this edition scheduled to go to press? That's a question which has long interested Dave Pringle, who has found the answer, thanks to the detective work of University of Minnesota Librarian Denny Lein, who writes: "I checked the quarterly announcements issues of Publishers Weekly for the 1970 spring and summer book trade, and found on page 10 of the 27 April 1970 issue a two-page ad, "News From Doubleday," listing their forthcoming May-August titles. Under the general fiction list (e.g. not the science fiction list) I found: Ballard, J.G. The Atrocity Exhibition. Illustrated by Michael Foreman. June 12. $4.95.

As Dave Pringle further points out, this edition would have preceeded the Jonathan cape UK edition by about a month.

Click here to go to see the book, the signatures, two postcards I received from JGB about him signing it, and all 13 of Michael Foreman's stylized pen & ink illustrations.

In The Beginning... The Violent Noon

A photo of James Graham Ballard in the Saturday, May 26, 1951 issue of The Varsity, Cambridge University's student newspaper. He was six months into his 20th year. Click on the pix below to see a larger, photoshopped version...

Ballard's winning short story entry is called The Violent Noon, and even in 1951 it reveals a basic ballardian theme: the surprising characteristics that emerge when people are immersed in unexpected, brutal situations... in this case, from an obsessionally-described armed ambush on a car filled with British ex-pats in Malaya.... and how an unsatisfactory revenge is extracted.

As David Pringle explains: "The Violent Noon" is a story set in the early stages of the so-called "Malayan Emergency" -- when the British took on the communist insurgents and, after 12 years of hard slogging, won the battle (unlike a certain other power when it intervened in another South-East Asian country in the following decade). You don't hear much about the Malayan Emergency these days -- perhaps because it was a success story from the British and Western point of view, and so doesn't fit many people's Weltanschauung.

For an Acrobat file of The Violent Noon, click here.

JGB's writing area, 2007.

Writers' Rooms: JG Ballard

My room is dominated by the huge painting, which is a copy of The Violation by the Belgian surrealist Paul Delvaux. The original was destroyed during the Blitz in 1940, and I commissioned an artist I know, Brigid Marlin, to make a copy from a photograph. I never stop looking at this painting and its mysterious and beautiful women. Sometimes I think I have gone to live inside it and each morning I emerge refreshed. It's a male dream.

There are photos of my four grandchildren (one, along with a picture of my girlfriend Claire, is just out of shot). The postcard is Dali's Persistence of Memory, the greatest painting of the 20th century, and next to it is a painting by my daughter, which is the greatest painting of the 21st century. On the desk is my old manual typewriter, which I recently found in my stair cupboard. I was inspired by a letter from Will Self, who wrote to me on his manual typewriter. So far I have just stared at the old machine, without daring to touch it, but who knows? The first drafts of my novels have all been written in longhand and then I type them up on my old electric. I have resisted getting a computer because I distrust the whole PC thing. I don't think a great book has yet been written on computer.

JGB at his desk, circa 1970s.

I have worked at this desk for the past 47 years. All my novels have been written on it, and old papers of every kind have accumulated like a great reef. The chair is an old dining-room chair that my mother brought back from China and probably one I sat on as a child, so it has known me for a very long time. A Paolozzi screen-print is resting against the door, which now serves as a cat barrier during the summer months. My neighbour's cats are enormously affectionate, and in the summer leap up on to my desk and then churn up all my papers into a huge whirlwind. They are my fiercest critics.

I work for three or four hours a day, in the late morning and early afternoon. Then I go out for a walk and come back in time for a large gin and tonic.

The Obsessive Life

Ahhh, yes... JGB... I've been collecting Jimmy's stuff since 1974, and I’m finally starting to zero in on the great bulk of his work – in its various guises and editions. The early pulps are the coolest to find... I'll never forget the day I wandered into Jamie Fraser's Toronto bookstore to find him gloating over a cardboard box full of Brit pulps. He wanted the PK Dicks... I bought the Ballards... there were 16 or 17 of them... Escapement was in that haul...

My favourite Ballard period is around The Terminal Beach. I don't care what you say, I like The Wind From Nowhere, and I believe JGB is a far superior short story writer than novelist. Only the self-referential "Ballardisms" connect it to the heavy psycho explorations of his early creative as he carpet bombed the high ground of our minds.

The early stuff I love because these stories reveal JGB's surrealistically perverse imagination. His characters wander through an often-dangerous landscape of images and symbols, and perversely control these painterly creations as an extension of their own psychotic state... reminds me of my youth.

My favourite JGB quote? "Sex times technology equals the future". That’s an advertising line... but considering he said it in the 1970s, that would make him eerily prescient about, oh, say... the internet? Right on, Jimmy.

JGB at home, circa 1990. Photo: Martyn Goddard