A User's Guide to the Millennium
JG Ballard
HarperCollins pbk, 304 pgs
Review by Gerald Houghton (1996)

Writing in The Observer at the end of 1995, JG Ballard - surely the most unflinching and inventive of all post-War British novelists - commented on the future thus:
Nothing will mean anything... As always when visualising the future, we find that we have merely described the present, and the 1990s hold almost all the patents on the day after tomorrow.
He is nothing if not consistent.

This new book is ostensibly a gathering of reviews and essays from the early sixties to the present, and when it talks of the future (which it does often) it almost always rings true.

Ballard has never been that predictive, and yet you feel, as time ('an obsolete mental structure') drags us ever closer to the millenium, that more and more acolytes will flock to his tweedy coat tails for of gobbets of plum-voiced wisdom. Ballard's fiction had always been millenial, even when he was looking from only mid-way through the century. He has always put a lie to the commonly held fallacy that a writer should write what they know. This suburbanisation of the imagination is really about experience; Ballard knows about drowned worlds, America gone to desert, the eroticising of the car-crash wound. It's only when he actually deigns to play prophet that it rings hollow: the attempt to redefine his beloved car for the next century is as clonky as a fifties magazine-spread pushing silvery-suits and vacations on Mars by 1996. The future, as the writer says more than once, has a fin on it.
Did the future arrive too soon, some time around the mid-century, the greatest era of modern science fiction? It has always struck me as remarkable that one of the twentieth century's greatest achievements, Neil Armstrong's landing on the Moon...should have had virtually no influence on the world at large.

In 1977 Ballard wrote one of his most experimental and most brilliant short stories, 'The Index'. Did the attached book ever actually exist? Was it all a figment of some deranged imagination? All that remains of this autobiography is a collection of names and page numbers; tantalising nudges and winks, like a road-map with the motorways rubbed out. It's a game we can play with A User's Guide To The Millenium: Hitler nuzzles up to Mae West, Dali to Nancy Reagan, Derek Jarman with Walt Disney, Lee Harvey Oswald and the young Jim interred in the Japanese camp. What, if anything, do all these and the rest have to do with this rather unpresupposing British author?

Ballard is never less than urbane, but his best dinner party manners mask real teeth. Thus he adores the Surrealists, Henry Miller, Joyce and Genet, but is dismissive towards others (Warhol), occasionally outright scathing (Nancy Reagan). The Ballard in these pages is clearly in awe of Burroughs' reupholstering of narrative form, while describing himself as an old-fashioned storyteller. (It's fulsome praise that should be tempered with a reading of his superb interview with Will Self in Self's recent Junk Mail.) He is mystifyingly rhapsodic over Dali, surely the most overrated artist of the century. (What, one wonders, would Ballard make of the comment that Dali is the 'kind of artist you think is brilliant when you're 15'? Are you listening Damien Hirst?)

Much of the book's bite is reserved for the very genre of which he finds himself a fully paid-up, card carrying member. (Ballard, one feels, is not a joiner.) He rubbishes Kingsley Amis' The Golden Age of Science Fiction, a work which to his amusement asserts that he was never really a science fiction writer at all; Ballard is evangelical in his proselytising of sf as not only relevant but of everything else as irrelevant:

Given its subject matter, it's eager acceptance of naivety, optimism and possibility, the importance of science fiction can only increase. I believe the reading of science fiction should be compulsory.

Non-sf is fiction privy to that suburbanisation of the imagination. (Suburb is a shibboleth to Ballard. At one point he unforgettably posits 6-mile long space colonies early in the next century, artificial-gravity suburbia staffed by half-insane housewives and perpetual TV. What, one wonders, does he make of Babylon 5?) So what of the autobiographical novels, you ask? If we follow through Ballard's own exposition of inner rather than outer space, then these books are surely as sf as anything in his cannon. After all, many a sci-fi-head weaned on the twin-Stars - Trek and Wars (singled out for particular derision) - would fail to recognise his masterpiece, the great urban trilogy of the early seventies - High-Rise, Crash, Concrete Island - for science fiction. Here we are surely describing the present as much as the future.

Ballard singles out his clutch of sf movies in the 1987 title piece: Alphaville, Forbidden Planet, Mad Max 2, Silent Running, The Man Who Fell to Earth, Dark Star and its big-brother, Alien. Films about the collapse of the now as much as the mundanity of the future. There are no empty swimming pools, but those tiled-depths hang heavy over each and all. In this brave new world the silver-suits have broken zips (a 'small but astute machine') and the deregulated Mars buses come three-deep. (Ballard, one senses, rather regrets rejecting the offer to novelize Alien: 'one of the most original horror-movies ever made'.)

The birth of those ubiquitous swimming-pools was his return to the commandeered Shanghai family home during the war. That city is the fountainhead of Ballard's exoticism and dystopia, the very things that mark him out from pack. Its very temporariness, one feels, informs the way history is both epochal and irrelevant in his fiction. He pooh-poohs Tom Wolfe's assertion that you can never go home by taking a BBC film-crew with him. Imagining Ballard without Shanghai would be to imagine that Burroughs never shot his wife.

It can be no accident that Ballard's blueprint for the rebirth of London is
a crash programme [of]...pirate TV stations, nightclubs, brothels and porn parlours.
The architect of this particular Weimar-on-the-Thames, however, would be watching from a safe distance away in Shepperton.

The Warren Commission Report, Ballard asserts in one of his brilliantly allusive soundbites, is 'the novelization of the Zapruder film.' He likes to play with the idea of fact as fiction, of reading the supposedly authentic as though it were simply a novel. When he reviews the recent, exceptional volume of Burroughs' letters, he is in his element: with William Seward Burroughs fact and fantasy are often one and the same. Should we (can we?) read Ballard the same way? It seems somehow wrong. Burroughs is his own greatest creation, the perfect Burroughsian character; exactly what Cronenberg realised so well in Naked Lunch. Ballard (himself about to receive the Cronenberg treatment with the eagerly awaited Crash) is almost invisible behind his own imagination.

This collection, like the Self, tells us as much about its author as it does any of the subjects it discusses, but unlike that book, by the end we never really sense that we know Ballard any more than we ever did. In what is possibly this excellent book's most telling aside, he says that in the 400 interviews he gave for Empire of the Sun, never once did he feel moved to explain why it took him 40 years to write.

That Ballard himself appears amongst the great and (not always) good in Stuart Haygarth's superb dust-cover collage seems somehow appropriate. That you almost don't notice him at all comes as no surprise.