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reality experiments in a TV series called Human Zoo.
“Most television is low-grade pap, it’s so homogenised
it’s like mental toothpaste. But Big Brother as a
slice of reality – or what passes for reality. It was like
Tracey Emin’s Bed,” he says approvingly.
Ballard is worried that with all the interest in the
internet we are forgetting what’s really around the corner:
“The rapid development of the internet over recent
years has rather shut out all discussion on the news
about progress made on virtual reality. I assume that
the world’s big electronic corporations are developing
VR systems, which after all are going to take television
and movies into completely new dimensions that I
think potentially do represent a threat. When you enter
into a simulated environment that is more convincing
visually than the real world, the so-called real world,
which of course is itself generated by the central nervous
system,” he says, as if this is given a priori, “the
temptation may be to stay there. It may lead to my
phrase about playing with our own psychopathology as
a game coming true with a bang. I see huge dangers
there, but also huge possibilities. We might all learn
how to play God! There might be a program along the
lines of ‘Be a messiah. See what it’s like to be Jesus
Christ or Buddha!’”
So God isn’t dead, he’s a latent component in a VR
program? “Yes! Nietzsche was wrong!” he says triumphantly.
“This might engender strong social changes,
BUY J.G. Ballard books online from and
because most people have far more imagination than
they realise, as their dreams make clear. Most people’s
imaginations are damped down by the needs of getting
on and making a living, generally coping with life and
the imagination tends to be rather repressed in order to
allow this flow.”
Surprisingly, for all his interest in film and an acknowledgement
that it’s far more powerful than when
it’s on TV, Ballard doesn’t go out to his local cineplex
but watches rented movies at home. He gives a surprisingly
prosaic reason for this: “There’s less rustling of
chocolate papers.” Given that he’s a fan of David Cronenberg,
and has generously praised his adaptation of
Crash, it is also surprising that he hasn’t seen eXistenZ
yet. “I hate all those VR pictures, especially the ones
where people’s faces start to drip on to their chest and
you realise,” he says with mock surprise, “My God,
we’re in a dream sequence and the VR system has
broken down! I hate that.”
For those of us desperate for more Ballard short
stories, the news isn’t good: “I can’t see myself writing
any for a while, partly because there’s nowhere to
publish them. When I began writing short stories for
sci-fi mags in the 1950s most of them were between
5,000 and 10,000 words. Now, magazines want 2,000
words or a 1,000 words – you can’t develop an idea.
It’s not just a matter of knocking off a short story, it’s
getting your mind into a writing phase where your
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