The Worlds of J.G. Ballard
J(ames) G(raham) Ballard (1930-2009) was an English author of avant-garde fiction who published nineteen novels and novellas and one hundred short stories, many of which were controversial, prescient, or both. Very broadly, his career can be divided into two stages, science fiction and literature. The first began with the publication of ‘Escapement’ in New Worlds in 1956 and the second with the publication of Empire of the Sun, his eleventh novel, in 1984. Along with Michael Moorcock and Brian Aldiss (1925-2017), Ballard was one of the founders of the New Wave of science fiction, which originated in New Worlds magazine in the mid-nineteen-sixties and reconstituted the genre as an extension of literary modernism focused on the psychological rather than physical impact of technology. Ballard’s science fiction can itself be divided into two stages. His first four novels (or novellas, depending on one’s preferred definition) pioneered Anglophone climate fiction. The Wind from Nowhere (1962), The Drowned World (1962), The Drought (1964), and The Crystal World (1966) constitute an elemental quartet in which civilisation is threatened or destroyed by air, water, fire, and earth respectively. Ballard’s next six novels were much more experimental, putting his ideas about the relationship between the content of science fiction and formal innovation into practice, and include The Atrocity Exhibition (1970) and Crash (1973). The critical and commercial success of Empire of the Sun elevated Ballard to the literary canon and it was released as a Hollywood film directed by Steven Spielberg in 1987. Like his science fiction, Ballard’s literature can also be divided into two stages, with Cocaine Nights (1996) and his last three novels usually referred to as satire.
The last book Ballard published before his death from prostate cancer was Miracles of Life: Shanghai to Shepperton (2008), an autobiography written after his terminal diagnosis. It’s not very often that anyone, let alone a great novelist, has the opportunity to write an autobiography that will include (almost) their entire life story, but I found it for the most part disappointing. Ballard always valued his privacy and the autobiography is strangely unenlightening. The Illuminated Man: Life, Death and the Worlds of J.G. Ballard (2026), a biography that was begun by Christopher Priest (1943-2024) and completed by his wife, Nina Allan, when he died of prostate cancer in 2024, is much more revealing. In his review of Priest and Allan’s book in The Guardian, Adam Sisman concurs with my criticism of Miracles of Life by calling it ‘curiously flat’. There are certainly no insights into Ballard’s creative process or literary practice, which was what I had most hoped to find. When I discovered that his archive had been acquired by the British Library in 2010 and was now available to the public, I thought I’d try there instead, but Ballard’s reticence extended to the private sphere and his habit was apparently to destroy his notes for his fiction as soon as it was published. While the archive contains multiple drafts of multiple novels, including those of three of his four early climate fictions, much of both his process and practice remains opaque.
The J.G. Ballard Papers
In the ‘Works’ section of the archive only three of the one hundred and sixty-two files are described as projects for a new novel or working notes. The first of these is a set of four text collages that were published in New Worlds in 1978, the second a set of five spiral-bound notepads (one of which has only two pages of notes) that were probably used from 2005 to 2008, and the third five typed A4 pages, also likely dated 2005 to 2008. One of the pages, Notepad A, most of Notepad B, and a few pages each in Notepads C and D are notes for a novel that was never written, provisionally titled An Immodest Proposal or How the World Declared War on America and abbreviated as ‘VUS’ ([World] versus US). Allan recounts her visit to the archive in 2024 and discusses these notes and other materials in The Illuminated Man and it was pure chance that I visited less than a month after reading it. Something that comes across very strongly in the biography and was very useful in providing a context for the notes was the extent to which Ballard was affected by the September 11 attacks and what is now known as GWOT, the Global War on Terror.
Ballard’s notes for VUS include everything one might expect to find, from the premise at its most basic to alternative ideas for plot and character, considerations of form and content, and reflections on whether and how he could meet its particular challenges. The proposed narrative is typical of Ballard in being located in an unspecified but imminent future, taking the present rather than the future as its subject, and providing commentary on current social mores and norms. The present with which he is concerned is the increase of the US’ military footprint in response to 9/11, specifically the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003. Ballard does not connect these to either Panama in 1989, Grenada in 1983, or the US’ military deployments during the Cold War and seems to have regarded GWOT as an unprecedented phenomenon. He is also well aware of the symbolic significance of 9/11 and the care with which both the targets and the date of the four coordinated attacks were planned. I’ll begin my discussion of the novel by setting out the fictional sequence of events on which the narrative would be based. Unlike more precise questions of form and content, on which Ballard is often undecided, the sequence is fairly comprehensive and consistent.
VUS
The setting of VUS is a world in which the US has established an empire reminiscent of the European colonies of an earlier age. America controls all of the Middle East, including Israel, and most of the world’s oil supply. Many countries across the globe are either occupied by the US, have puppet regimes, or are sympathetic to the US. In those countries that are occupied or have puppet regimes, ‘American values are relentless enforced.’ The same values are relentlessly promoted in the countries with sympathetic governments, such as the UK and Germany. The US exerts a global hegemony by the combination of military threat and economic pressure and insists on preferential trade agreements for all of its goods, including oil. France is one of the few countries to remain openly anti-American and tries to import oil from an alternative supplier (Venezuela is mentioned at least twice). In response, the US initiates a naval blockade, which causes skirmishes at sea and anti-American civil unrest globally. There is a naval battle between the US and France, which the US wins, and the United Nations Security Council authorises military action if the US fails to abandon both its preferential trade agreements and foreign military bases. Predictably, the US refuses and the world declares war on the US, led by either the rest of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation nations or by a combined NATO-Russia alliance.
The war that follows has three stages. In the first, which is a conventional, high-intensity conflict, the US achieves a rapid victory over NATO, using weapons of mass destruction to destroy military and civilian targets and occupying all the nations who have taken up arms against it. US global hegemony is transformed into a global empire. No Pax Americana materialises, however, as multiple insurgencies begin, starting in Iraq, Syria, and Saudi Arabia and then spreading to other countries. This second, unconventional, stage culminates in a series of coordinated attacks aimed at destroying nine icons within the US homeland. The US responds in a similar manner to its response to the declaration of war, causing mass casualties among insurgents and civilians at home and abroad. In the homeland, Black and Muslim communities are targeted, which initiates the third and final stage. Black, Muslim, and other soldiers in the US Army mutiny, violence in the homeland spirals, and America descends into a second civil war. Ballard doesn’t describe the impact of this civil war on the empire, but the implication is that it crumbles and that the world is consequently victorious against the US.
The subject of the novel at its most basic is simply ‘US imperialism’, but Ballard’s concern extended beyond military expansion to America’s dominance of global popular culture, from Hollywood to McDonald’s to Elvis and so much else. He was especially interested in the way in which this cultural hegemony was causing people to see themselves through an American lens and how this succeeded in turning other nations into ‘subservient colonies’ (without the need for puppet regimes or invasion). Ballard has various ideas about how to turn this subject into a theme, the most consistent of which is that the US would be ‘treated as Nazi Germany in 1939-45’ with no characters in the novel permitted to adopt a neutral stance. He was more certain about the characters that would drive the narrative. His initial idea was to use three ‘principle [sic]’ characters and three ‘secondary’ characters. He later refers to these six as an ‘inner core’. The characters would all be of different nationalities and the protagonist, who would be British, and three others would be men. The protagonist is an English university lecturer who teaches American Studies at a university in the Middle East and has an American wife (which is significant because it will allow him to gain entry to the homeland later on). A second principal character, also a man, would be French. The nationalities of the others would be drawn from Japan, Russia, Australia, Germany, an unspecified Muslim country, and possibly Israel. Ballard then thought that one of the women should also be British, which may have been why he expanded his central characters to seven, four men and three women. The characters would either be in professions that would bring them into direct contact with the war, such as the military, media, or medicine, or foreign workers, such as those in oil, education, or diplomacy.
Ballard started to delineate the French protagonist, couldn’t think of anything interesting, and wrote: ‘All need to be thoughtful + of heroic potential.’ He was also convinced that all ‘should have suffrered [sic] in some way from the US — —’ and these two ideas taken together suggest that a major part of the narrative would be the planning, recruitment, and execution of the coordinated attacks on American icons, some or all of which would be suicidal. He wanted to break the stereotype for people that were prepared to sacrifice themselves in this way and noted that the insurgents should be ‘educated, intellectual, even unwilling.’ Whether or not the insurgency would be led by a Muslim cadre was unclear, although his sequence of events identifies it as beginning in Middle Eastern nations. Ballard made several lists of the insurgent targets, which included a wide range from the Empire State Building to the Capitol to Las Vegas and Disneyland. Each of these would be attacked or destroyed using a different tactic, although his list of options for these only ran to eight. At one point, he refers to these as ‘psycho-targets’, drawing attention to their symbolic significance to the US and to the psychological impact of their destruction. The novel would open outside the US embassy in Grosvenor Square in London during the heightened tensions of the naval blockade. After a protest turns violent, US troops open fire on the crowd, who scatter and destroy a nearby McDonald’s in retaliation. The event would either be described in the form of a news report (assuming Ballard’s original idea for his British protagonist) or in the first person by his (alternative) British protagonist. Ballard did not state when the novel would conclude and the options appear to be either the mutiny, the civil war, or the dissolution of the US empire.
Ballard seems to have had much less of a vision as to how he would tell the story of VUS than what the story was. He planned to switch point of view among his principal characters and mix these different points of view with reportage from different media channels. He was not, however, sure whether the novel would be narrated in the first person, by the different principal (or principal and secondary) characters, and whether these narrations would be presented as individual testimonies, oral histories, or diary entries. He also toyed with the idea of opening with an academic-style introduction to the collected testimonies and reports, rather than in medias res. Beyond that, he had very little to say about specific aspects of framework, function, structure, or symbolism. Notwithstanding, his reflections on the genre of the novel are fascinating: ‘Very important Must not allow this to become s-f. That would lower its credibility & impact.’ He was similarly worried that the novel doesn’t become ‘a familiar kind of s-f story.’ Ballard’s approach to science fiction was, as already mentioned, to prioritise the present over the future for the purpose of social commentary, which he often achieved by exploring the impact of either the broader public and political world or the immediate physical environment in which each person lives on their inner, psychological world. These New Wave commitments are completely compatible with what he was trying to achieve with and in VUS so it is curious that he was so determined to avoid the novel ‘becoming’ a work of science fiction. I wonder if the clue to this apparent anomaly isn’t the dating of the notebooks, some thirty years after the decline of the New Wave. What he probably means by ‘becoming’ is ‘being labelled/sold as’ science fiction, which had become a genre very much dominated by series and franchises by the middle of the first decade of the twenty-first century. I think that what he didn’t want was VUS being sold and read as an alternative history or a dystopian or apocalyptic narrative and I’ll return to the question of genre in my conclusion.
The Illuminated Man
Ballard was both confident that his premise was strong and worried about his ability to do it justice. I find this particularly interesting coming from someone who practically invented climate fiction, had established himself as one of Britain’s greatest living authors, and already published eighteen novels and novellas. Although his belief in his ability to develop the premise into a rich and rewarding theme appeared to grow as he built up his body of notes, his modesty and diffidence are evident throughout. For example, he writes: ‘Need to add a specific spin of some kind?’; ‘Need a deeper dimension!’; ‘too depressing & reminiscent of 1984?’. More specifically, he was concerned that the novel would be too long (presumably because of its temporal and spatial scope) and with his competence in writing first person narratives from the point of view of characters from cultures distinct from his own, such as the proposed Middle Eastern, Japanese, and Russian principal or secondary characters. Both of these problems were related to the question of how to present a ‘global sense of the battle against the US?’ Ballard was also concerned about the credibly of what he called ‘The fight back’, i.e. the success of the insurgency: ‘But is it all credible if its [sic] realistically portrayed?’ I ruminated on this myself, the dichotomy between the ease with which the US wins a conventional war against the rest of the world and the speed with which the insurgency leads to the dissolution of the US empire. But I also have no doubt that Ballard would have solved this literary problem as skilfully as he had solved others in his previous novels, novellas, and short stories. He makes a quick reference to a potential solution when he writes: ‘Perhaps visualise it as a film script.’ The process of both writing the notes down and returning to read them later seem to have helped because although there is no way to be certain of the chronological order of either the notepads or notes within them, there is definitely a sense of progress, of the crystallisation of a constellation of ideas as a premise and a sequence of events become a theme and a narrative.
It’s impossible to say know whether Ballard would have proceeded with the project had he not been diagnosed with terminal cancer, but if I had to guess one way or the other I’d say yes, given the escalation of GWOT from 2005 to 2009 and beyond. VUS would definitely have been one of his most controversial novels, perhaps even more so than The Atrocity Exhibition and Crash, and I imagine he would have been accused of both glorifying 9/11 and promoting political violence. I am fairly certain that VUS would have been banned in many US states. Assuming it had been released early in the second decade of the twenty-first century, when Big Tech was achieving its own hegemony, I wonder if the publishers would have actively courted controversy to increase sales or insisted that the novel stay on the science fiction shelf. Like The Drowned World, The Drought, and many of Ballard’s other long and short stories, there is also a sense in which VUS is prescient. Mark Blacklock beat me to that point in his essay in The New Statesman, which refers to the regime change in Venezuela in January 2026 and what is currently being called the 2026 Iran war, although Ballard did not anticipate how divided the (rest of the) ‘world’ would be in the era of VUS. What I can perhaps add to Blacklock and where Ballard and I would disagree, is that this military muscle-flexing is nothing new, just part of an imperial imperative that stretches back to at least the US invasion of Grenada. That was in 1983, the year before Ballard was catapulted into the limelight with Empire of the Sun, a novel about a different empire. As the sun sets on one, it rises on another…
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