My first non-music writing for The Memphis Flyer:

J.G. Ballard Conversations

Edited by V. Vale

RE/Search Publications, 360 pp., $19.99 (paper)

The only star graduate of the “New Wave of Science Fiction” of the 1950s and early ’60s, J.G. Ballard tended to shuck hokey plots for more human statements. Like his American (arguable) counterpart, Philip K. Dick, Ballard became unclassifiable as the ’60s wore on. Intensely tuned in to the decay left behind by urban and technological advances, it could be said that Ballard’s real protagonists by the ’70s were abandoned buildings and shipyards and decommissioned military bases. Man was thrown in just for giggles, and the reader watched as the foreboding environment psychologically broke him (it was usually a male) down.

The Terminal Beach (1964), The Crystal World (1966), Concrete Island (1974), and High-Rise (1975) are powerful and highly recommended, but it was The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), a collection of incendiary stories, and the automobile-accident, scar-fetish porn of 1972’s Crash (adapted for the screen in 1996 by David Cronenberg) that brought Ballard notoriety. Then he wrote what the general public knows him for: the semi-autobiographical best-seller Empire of the Sun (1984), a fictionalized account of Ballard’s childhood in a WWII Japanese internment camp in occupied China, which was subsequently made into the award-winning Steven Spielberg film.

RE/Search Publications has always embraced Ballard, making him the subject of two previous volumes (one a reprint of The Atrocity Exhibition) and now honoring the writer with the simultaneous publication of J.G. Ballard: Quotes and this collection of interviews. Sadly, Conversations is as much about RE/Search founder V. Vale’s agenda — he is a terminal and alienating sycophant of all things Counter Culture 101 — as it is about the subject at hand, a problem that plagues most RE/Search books.

Vale edited and published Search and Destroy, one of the first punk-rock fanzines of the ’70s, before launching RE/Search, a narrow-minded but definitely interesting player in the world of ’80s/’90s underground publishing. Though Incredibly Strange Music, Incredibly Strange Films, and Pranks! are of merit, RE/Search too often strayed into contrived, “shocking” territory with titles such as Modern Primitives and Bodily Fluids, the latter hilariously devoid of pictures.

In Conversations, Vale claims that Ballard’s only literary equal is William S. Burroughs, going so far as to say that they are the only two writers who have ever mattered. This is ridiculous and indicative of the shortsightedness that only assigns quality to art that is self-consciously fringe, weird, controversial, difficult, in-your-face, etc. In truth, the glaring commonality between Burroughs and Ballard is that the same letter begins their surnames. Burroughs, a man far more interesting to read about than to read, in no way approaches the level of Ballard.

True to its title, Conversations is not so much interviews but seemingly unedited tea times among Ballard, Vale, and Vale’s secret-handshake club of longtime RE/Search collaborators: Mark Pauline (founder of Survival Research Laboratories), Greame Revell (leader of the industrial group SPK), and writer David Pringle. The conversations span the ’80s, ’90s, and ’00s, offering Ballard’s surprisingly light-hearted and humorous takes on the political and social climates of each decade, which are amusingly in direct contrast to the interviewer’s predictable efforts to “serious-up” and sabotage things with fatalistic negativity.

Not to be lumped in the for-fanatics-only category, Conversations is still an insightful read into Ballard’s head, but his fiction and nonfiction collection A User’s Guide to the Millennium (1996) are better places to start. — Andrew Earles

The Flyer, this writer’s oldest freelance outlet, has only run my music writing. It felt nice to sneak a book review in there.