Is he a science-fiction writer?
Oh, yeah. In some sense he’s the only science-fiction writer. He’s a figure who ranks with Stanislaw Lem in that regard, I think. He’s just repurposed the tools of the genre to such a tremendous extent that he’s doing things that are unheard of. He’s like a Hendrix figure who’s, like, this guy that picks up a guitar and instead of doing the things you expect to hear from a guitar, there are notes coming out of it that are like flutes and saxophones. That’s the kind of creative idiosyncrasy that Ballard brings to the genre.
Do you perceive that he had a similar influence on some of the other seminal cyberpunks like Gibson or Neal Stephenson?
Lew Shiner talked a lot about Ballard – he was a Ballard fan. Gibson is certainly a Ballard reader. A lot of cyberpunks were major Anglophiles. We’re really kind of New Wave 2.0, and if you were into New Wave, you really had to be into British New Wave because that was where it was happening. Of course, I’m a Harlan Ellison disciple, so I’m American New Wave by right of inheritance. But, yeah, you had to read Ballard. I know for a fact that John Kessel and James Patrick Kelly and a lot of the other humanist writers were jealously anxious of Ballard. They didn’t appreciate the idea that cyberpunks were somehow appropriating this guy – someone they really thought of as a hero of their own – as somebody who was willing to write real literary fiction about scientific things, without doing these annoying cyberpunk tropes like “my deck’s got more RAM than yours”.
El resto de la entrevista es mucho más interesante por supuesto. Y ni se diga de la web en sí, full información y noticias acerca de J.G. Ballard y su obra. Por cierto, se anuncia un nuevo libro, y estas son sus propias palabras acerca del mismo: The new novel is called Kingdom Come, and it will be out in September — it asks the question — «will consumerism turn into fascism?» and argues that it might, if we aren’t careful… La info la obtuve del Yahoo group sobre JG Ballard. Por si tienen dudas, como las tuvo quien escribio acerca de esto en la lista de correos mencionada: Consumerism y fascism (fascismo), tal como lo define la Wikipedia.
La foto de J. G. Ballard ha sido tomada de la web UK Politic Misc
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