The only truly alien planet is Earth. - UniCA Eprints - Università degli ...

spalle, soprattutto in terra britannica 170 : The Time Machine (1895) e The War of the Worlds (1898)
di H. G. Wells, The Purple Cloud (1901) di M.P. Shiel, The Scarlet Plague (1912) di Jack London,
The Day of The Triffids (1951) di John Wyndham, The Death of Grass (1956) di John Christopher,
per ricordare alcuni dei titoli principali. Con i suoi primi quattro romanzi Ballard, come altri autori
della New Wave della fantascienza britannica, si inserisce in questa tradizione 171 . Ma lo fa in
maniera assolutamente ballardiana, ovvero prendendo in prestito il modello per farne il veicolo di
quei contenuti che ritroveremo anche nei lavori successivi. Allo stesso modo si allontanerà dal
modello consueto della tradizione distopica di scuola americana per riprenderne alcuni aspetti in
chiave personale 172 .
Il picco della produzione del genere in Gran Bretagna, che giunge fino a Ballard 173 , coincide
con il crollo dell’impero coloniale britannico. Coerentemente con questa visione, a margine di un
saggio su Ursula Le Guin, Fredric Jameson individua nel processo di desertificazione di The
Drought un rimando simbolico al processo di decadenza dell’impero coloniale britannico,
riproduzione su scala terrestre, nella visione etnocentrica occidentale, di quel processo entropico in
atto su scala universale 174 .
170
«It is a common (and largely accurate) gesture to isolate the catastrophe novel as a peculiarly British phenomenon.»
R. Luckhurst, op. cit., p. 289.
171
La tetralogia «[…] belongs to the so-called New Wave in the science fiction of the 1960s that attempted to push the
stylistic and thematic boundaries of the genre. Much of the New Wave writing was cast in the apocalyptic mode,
especially in Britain, where the millenarian mood of the decade was reinforced by the local tradition of catastrophic
science fiction. […] In the works of such popular purveyors of cozy Armageddon as the appropriately named John
Wyndham, John Christopher, and John Lymington, the world in general and Britain in particular are destroyed by
perambulating plants, undersea monsters, the death of grass, giant beasts, assorted plagues, and all manners of alien
invasions. J. G. Ballard’s early science fiction belongs in this tradition, which continued to be a profound influence on
his mature writing as well.» Elana Gomel, “Everyday Apocalypse: J. G. Ballard and the Ethics and Aesthetics of the
End of Time”, Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas, Volume 8, Number 1, January 2010, pp.
185-208.
172
«[…] Ballard’s fictions of the 1960s move away from postwar models of sf writing , characterized by the US
dystopian tradition and the peculiarly British tradition of the ‘disaster novel’, towards a new and idiosyncratic form of sf
writing which is marked out by processes of physical and psychological transformation which are both ambiguous and
ambivalent.» Brian Baker, “The Geometry of the Space Age: J. G. Ballard’s Short Fiction and Science Fiction of the
1960s”, in Jeannette Baxter (a cura di), J. G. Ballard, op. cit., p. 12.
173
«Let the Wagnerian and Spenglerian world-dissolutions of J G Ballard stand as exemplary illustrations of the ways
in which a dying class - in this case the cancelled future of a vanished colonial and imperial destiny - seeks to intoxicate
itself with images of death that range from the destruction of the world by fire, water and ice to lengthening sleep or the
berserk orgies of high-rise buildings or superhighways reverting to barbarism.» Fredric Jameson, “Progress Vs. Utopia;
or, Can we imagine the future?”, Science Fiction Studies 27, 9:2, July 1982, p.152, cit. in R. Luckhurst, op. cit., p. 296.
174
«[…] [T]he motif may have some other, deeper, disguised symbolic meaning that can perhaps best be illustrated by
the related symbolism of the tropics in recent SF, particularly the novels of J. G. Ballard. Heat is here conveyed as a
kind of dissolution of the body into the outside world, a loss of that clean separation from clothes and external objects
that gives you your autonomy and allows you to move about freely... This loss of physical autonomy - dramatized by
the total environment of the jungle into which the European dissolves - is then understood as a figure for the loss of
psychic autonomy, of which the utter demoralization, the colonial whisky-drinking and general dissolution of the
tropical hero is the canonical symbol in literature... Ballard's work is suggestive in the way in which he translates both
physical and moral dissolution into the great ideological myth of entropy, in which the historic collapse of the British
Empire is projected outwards into some immense cosmic deceleration of the universe itself... This kind of ideological
message makes it hard to escape the feeling that the heat symbolism in question here is a peculiarly Western and
ethnocentric one...» Fredric Jameson, “World-Reduction in Le Guin: The Emergence of Utopian Narrative” in Science-
- 56 -