When I came to The Kindness of Women I was dealing with, for the most part, an adult sensibility, and an adult sensibility that I could remember clearly in the inside of my own head, so I think it was the natural tense to write in. It would have very much limited the horizons if I’d had to show all the events within a twelve year old’s comprehension. I couldn’t have written Empire of the Sun in the first person, because I couldn’t have really gotten into the mind of a twelve-year old. Do you find using the first person is more intense than writing in the third person narrative? With The Kindness of Women I particularly liked the way you kept the strengths of your earlier work with the style and the sense of irony, while at the same time it’s a marvellously human story as well. We met Ballard in the Shelbourne Hotel and, for an all too brief while, talked about his ideas on writing, SF and film making. Ballard paid a flying visit to Dublin a short while ago, to promote his novel The Kindness of Women. Originally appeared in Albedo One #2 (1993) Ballard’s deeply humanistic and transcendent works can only grow in years to come.The Kindness of Women: John Kenny & Pat Quigley talk to J.G. So eerily prophetic is his vision, so commanding are his literary gifts, the import and insight of J. Given Ballard’s heightened powers of perception, it is astonishing that the dehumanized world that he apprehended so acutely neither diminished his own febrile imagination nor his engagement with mankind, evident in every story, including two new ones for this American edition. Depicting the human soul as “being enervated and corrupted by the modern world” ( New York Times), Ballard began to examine themes like overpopulation, as in “Billenium,” a claustrophobic imagining of a world of 20 billion people crammed into four-square-meter rooms, or the false realities of modern media, as in the classic “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan,” a faux-psychological study of the sexual and violent reactions elicited by viewing Reagan’s face on television, in which Ballard predicted the unholy fusion of pop culture and sound-bite politics thirteen years before Reagan became president. Over the next fifty years, his fierce imaginative energy propelled him to explore new topics, including the dehumanization of technology, the brutality of the corporation, and nuclear Armageddon. These stories are surreal, richly atmospheric and splendidly elliptical, featuring an assortment of psychotropic houses, time-traveling assassins, and cities without clocks. Ballard’s inimitable style was already present in his early stories, most of them published in science fiction magazines. With 98 pulse-quickening stories, this volume helps restore the very art form that Ballard feared was comatose. Ballard, who wrote that “short stories are the loose change in the treasury of fiction, easily ignored beside the wealth of novels available,” regretted the fact that the public had increasingly lost its ability to appreciate them. Perhaps less known, though equally brilliant, were his devastatingly original short stories, which span nearly fifty years and reveal an unparalleled prescience so unique that a new word― Ballardian―had to be invented. Ballard was a “writer of enormous inventive powers,” who, in the words of Malcolm Bradbury, possessed, “like Calvino, a remarkable gift for filling the empty deprived spaces of modern life with the invisible cities and the wonder worlds of imagination.”īest known for his novels, such as Empire of the Sun and Crash, Ballard rose to fame as the “ideal chronicler of disturbed modernity” (The Observer). Increasingly recognized as one of the greatest and most prophetic novelists, J. “More than one thousand compelling pages from one of the most haunting, cogent, and individual imaginations in contemporary literature.”―William Boyd The American publication of The Complete Stories of J.
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