In the 1970s novels, it is not some post-apocalyptic future but instead the here-and-now that is transformed into dystopia: Crash focuses on the link between sexual fetish and car accidents, High-Rise on the psychopathology of life in an urban tower block, and Concrete Island on what happens when a man, an architect named Robert Maitland, becomes ‘marooned’ on an island – a traffic island, that is, in London, on a busy motorway junction, after he crashes his car through a temporary barrier one afternoon. In Ballard’s first four novels, published in the 1960s, the world is destroyed by catastrophe: by a freak wind ( The Wind from Nowhere), by water ( The Drowned World), by heat ( The Drought), and by crystal ( The Crystal World). Certainly, his novels and stories frequently have the clarity and simplicity of concept that we see in Wells’s fiction, just as the narratives driven by these concepts proceed to undo that simplicity by showing the complications that inevitably ensue. Wells and William Burroughs, in so far as he can be likened to anybody. Ballard has always struck me as a curious mixture of H.
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