SF Luminaries: Christopher Priest

Christopher Nolan, dir. The Prestige (2006)

Why isn't Christopher Priest better known? Surely he deserves to be. It's true that the stellar reputation he built in the 1970s and 80s as one of the most innovative and forward-thinking SF writers of his time seemed to dissipate somewhat in the 1990s.

The Quiet Woman (1991), his follow-up to the two extraordinary crossover hits The Affirmation (1981) and The Glamour (1984), was not nearly so well received. It was almost as if he'd lost his way, or exhausted his inspiration. The novel felt drifting, formless. I stopped collecting each new book of his after that.

Which, in retrospect, was a shame. The Prestige (1995) was a swaggering, staggering return to form. But then, I didn't even read it until well after the film was released in 2006. It came as quite a surprise.

The movie, with its screenplay co-written by Christopher Nolan and his brother Jonathan, is a characteristically Nolanian mise-en-abyme, with a startling dénouement designed to freeze the blood.

The book, on the other hand, is an overt recreation of the Frankenstein legend, with numerous echoes of Mary Shelley's masterpiece behind its setting on the vaudeville stage. It's a powerful, well-written novel, but - for better or worse - it doesn't tell quite the same story as Nolan's film.

Christopher Priest: The Prestige (1995)

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Christopher Priest: The Glamour (1984)

It was the late 1980s, in Edinburgh; my then girlfriend (later wife) was working on a Masters thesis on Fantasy literature. Her idea for a topic was a comparison between Hermann Hesse's Steppenwolf and Christopher Priest's dazzling new novel The Glamour.

I should explain that Jackie-Anne had a rather complicated origin story. Born in Paris, she was brought up in France, the UK, and Belgium by her Flemish father and Scottish mother. To say that she lived between cultures would be to put it mildly.

People often asked her if she was bilingual. She once explained to me that it's really a meaningless concept. No-one is truly bilingual. When you use different languages in different contexts you tend to know the specific vocabulary for, say, cooking and housework - or critical and philosophical discourse - in those particular languages. She did her undergraduate degree at a French-speaking university, Louvain-la-Neuve, but since she was studying German literature, the discussions in class - and the oral exams - were conducted almost exclusively in German.

The decision to go to Scotland for her Masters degree was an attempt to establish more solid roots in her mother's homeland. I'm betting that none of them guessed that she might run into an almost equally deracinated New Zealander there, conducting his own eccentric research into South American literature (Why? Who knows? All I can say is that it seemed like a good idea at the time). Spanish was one of the few European languages she didn't speak to a high standard, but of course her idea of a "speaking knowledge" was a quantum leap above mine.

So: Hermann Hesse. Jackie-Anne's undergraduate degree had compared C. S. Lewis's "Narnia" books with Michael Ende's Neverending Story. Of course she read them, and quoted from them both, in the original, but the thesis itself was written in German. Now, in Scotland, she was setting out to write in English about a German and an English writer, but of course in that monoglot world none of her supervisors could read a word of German. To them Hesse (in translation) was simply the subject of a 1960s campus cult; the complexities of his position in German literature were far above their heads.

Still, he was safely dead and buried, which is always satisfactory for Academics. Christopher Priest wasn't, though, so Jackie-Anne wrote to him with a number of questions - I guess she must have routed the letter through his publishers. I don't really recall.

His reply was very courteous, if a little bemused. He disclaimed any particular knowledge of - or influence from - Hesse, but he was happy to discuss some of the other aspects of his bewilderingly strange novel. It centres on amnesia and invisiblity. Nothing in the story is certain, and the true identity of the main character is very much up for grabs. I'm not sure if it's quite the same thing as Hesse's own rather more predictable narrative house of mirrors. but it was really the differences between them, one published in 1927, the other in 1984, which added up to the point Jackie-Anne wanted to make.

It did get me onto a Christopher Priest jag, though. My own favourite among his more recent works was definitely The Affirmation. The vision it presented of an imaginary dream archipelago, created by the narrator to assist in his own self-analysis, but then seemingly developing a life of its own, was one of the most compelling models for fictional creation I've ever encountered.

It must have had quite an effect on Priest himself, too, as he returned to it in a later collection of short stories, The Dream Archipelago (1999), as well as a further novel, The Islanders (2011).

Christopher Priest: The Affirmation (1981)

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Christopher Priest: Inverted World (1974)

Priest's work seems to fall easily into separate epochs. His transition from an intensely innovative star of the UK SF scene to a postmodern novelist parallels much the same development in writers such as J. G. Ballard and W. S. Burroughs. Priest started out more hard Sci-fi than either, though. Inverted World is probably his most influential title from this era.

Its first sentence: "I had reached the age of six hundred and fifty miles", has, according to one critic: "justly become one of the most famous in science fiction". The bizarreries of the situation in which the inhabitants of the city called "Earth" find themselves are strange in the extreme. I won't spoil the story by attempting to explain them here, but the vital difference between this SF novel and Priest's later, more postmodern works is the fact that it does get explained, and even (to some extent) resolved in the course of the narrative.

Other works from this period, such as A Dream of Wessex, have much in common with the "Dangerous Visions" SF of authors such as Philip K. Dick. There's definitely something of Dick's A Maze of Death (1970) in the idea behind the book, which:

can be read as a straightforward story about a group of twentieth-century dreamers who create a consensus virtual-reality future. Once they enter their imaginary world they are unable to remember who they are, or where they are from. On another level, the novel is itself an extended metaphor for the way in which extrapolated futures are created.

That's where Priest might have stayed if it hadn't been for the great leap forward represented by The Affirmation. It's not for nothing that he was named among the 1983 Granta 20 Best Young British Novelists.

Christopher Priest: A Dream of Wessex (1977)

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Christopher Priest & Nina Allan: The Illuminated Man (2026)

All of which brings us to this, his last (albeit posthumous and unfinished) book.

It's an odd story, exhaustively (and sensitively) analysed by Martin Petto in his review on the Strange Horizons website:

... how many books is this? Not one, despite the physical artefact that sits on my desk beside me. Its front and back covers, its table of continents [contents? - JR], its index — they are all an illusory scaffolding for what is three books in an overcoat. This makes The Illuminated Man a unique — uniquely moving and uniquely frustrating — read.

The first book — and also the worst book — belongs to Christopher Priest, the British science fiction writer who died in 2024 whilst working on The Illuminated Man ... His biography of J. G. Ballard was to be his first significant work of non-fiction.

Priest himself explained at the beginning of the book:

I contend that Ballard was one of the most important writers in English in the twentieth century ... However, I believe he has so far not been afforded the final step: the acknowledgement of true and permanent greatness.

The second book contained within The Illuminated Man "is preceded by both a prologue and a preface by Nina Allan":

Allan is another British science fiction writer and critic, active since the start of this century ... She was also Priest’s partner (and became, over the course of writing The Illuminated Man, his wife). It had not been anticipated she would have any role in the book Priest started in January 2023. But then:

Six months later, he was diagnosed with terminal cancer. We believed even then that he would have time to complete the book, or at least a passable draft of it. Sadly, we were wrong. When it became obvious Chris would run out of time, we agreed between the two of us that I should finish what had - so tragically and unexpectedly - turned out to be his final work.

But that's not where the complications end. "Allan had been commissioned to write an essay on Ballard for Writing the Future: Essays on Crafting Science Fiction (2023)":

Talking with Priest about this essay, he shared the Pringle chronology with her. Priest: “I’d forgotten I had this.” Allan: “I became obsessed with it” ... Ultimately Priest took forward the wider book-length project with Allan’s blessing, but it remains a bit of a mystery as to why he did. It also seems unarguable that Allan was better suited to the task. “‘It sounds like you should be writing it,’” she reports a friend as saying. “She was responding, I suppose, to my enthusiasm for the project, for the excitement I still felt for it, in spite of everything”.

The prologue, Petto continues: "showcases what this book could have been, what it partially still is, in its deft blend of criticism, biography, and autobiography ... It is with ... Priest’s own memoir in Chapter 15, that the better book re-emerges. These chapters focus on the accident that precipitated Priest’s diagnosis with terminal cancer and the couple’s individual response to this."

“I suggested that I should take over those parts of the story, he agreed immediately. ‘I can’t write about that stuff, but you can,’ he said. He seemed incredibly relieved”. The final hundred pages of the book ... are simply remarkable. This book is entirely Allan’s book and interleaves an intensely affecting memoir of the period around Priest’s death with a critical evaluation of Ballard’s late work and finally a culminating synthesis of all the elements of The Illuminated Man. That these pages were written under such devastating circumstances makes the accomplishment even greater.

Petto concludes as follows:

The Illuminated Man is profound and deeply moving. It is also inconsistent and confounding. It is sometimes outright bad. It would ideally have been Allan rather than Priest who started the project. In artistic terms, leaving Priest’s initial book intact rather than fully incorporating it was a mistake. But “artistic terms” aren’t really important here ... “We came to think of this book as ours, a shared endeavour that sustained us and maintained our togetherness even as Chris’s work and life came to an end” ... That is an impregnable statement to which the lens of literary criticism cannot be applied. This book — this interlocking trilogy of books — couldn’t exist independently of the context that led to its creation and, ultimately, it is a privilege to read this shared endeavour.

Mikhail Bulgakov: The Master and Margarita (1971)

As I read Martin Petto's marvellous essay-review, clearly written straight from the heart, I found myself reverting to comparative mode: not between Hermann Hesse and Christopher Priest this time, but back to my memories of Bulgakov's luminous last book, The Master and Margarita (1928-40).

The Master's unfinished historical novel about Pontius Pilate constantly doubles with the story of the devil's visit to Moscow in this bewildering book, in all its overlapping versions (and more-or-less "complete" translations). But the message of the book is clear: that Art - in some strange way - can even overcome Death.

It's certainly proved true in Bulgakov's case.

The other thing it reminded me of was more unexpected. I remembered my sense of frustration at reading The Quiet Woman, all those years ago. I remembered that strange interpolated chapter where a UFO descends to earth. Above all, I remember the protagonist's decision to sell the book she's been working on to the European Union's unpublished fiction vault, rather than fighting any longer to share it with the world.

It seemed so depressing, so futile an ending at the time, but see what's become of it now! Priest, too, turned out to have his own Margarita, and his increasingly unavailing attempts to finish this last book have borne strange fruit: something far greater than any biography of the most slippery customer in contemporary British writing could ever have been.

It must have just seemed like wishful thinking at the time, but maybe Bulgakov had a point after all. Perhaps the arc of the moral universe really does "bend toward justice", as Martin Luther King's favourite quote would have it. Perhaps all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well. It doesn't look like that most of the time, but occasionally, ever so seldom, the clouds part and something marvellous comes through.

Christopher Priest's final work is starting to look very much like that.

Christopher Priest: The Quiet Woman (1991)

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Christopher Priest (2019)

Christopher Mackenzie Priest
(1943-2024)

Novels:


1. Indoctrinaire (1970)
   • Indoctrinaire. 1970. Times Mirror. London: New English Library, 1973.
2. Fugue for a Darkening Island (1972)
   • Fugue for a Darkening Island. 1972. Pan Science Fiction. London: Pan Books Ltd., 1978.
3. The Inverted World (1974)
   • Inverted World. 1974. Times Mirror. London: New English Library, 1975.
4. The Space Machine (1976)
   • The Space Machine: A Scientific Romance. 1976. An Orbit Book. London: Futura Publications Limited, 1977.
5. A Dream of Wessex [aka "The Perfect Lover"] (1977)
   • A Dream of Wessex. London: Faber, 1977.
6. The Affirmation (1981)
   • The Affirmation. 1981. Arena. London: Arrow Books Limited, 1983.
7. The Glamour (1984)
   • The Glamour. 1984. Abacus. London: Sphere Books, Ltd., 1985.
8. [as Colin Wedgelock] Short Circuit [Film novelisation] (1986)
9. [as John Luther Novak] Mona Lisa [Film novelisation] (1986)
10. The Quiet Woman (1990)
11. The Prestige (1995)
    • The Prestige. 1995. Gollancz. London: The Orion Publishing Group, 2004.
12. The Extremes (1998)
13. eXistenZ [Film novelisation] (1999)
14. The Separation (2002)
15. The Islanders (2011)
    • The Islanders. Gollancz. London: The Orion Publishing Group, 2011.
16. The Adjacent (2013)
17. The Gradual (2016)
18. An American Story (2018)
19. The Evidence (2020)
20. Expect Me Tomorrow (2022)
21. Airside (2023)

Story Collections:


22. Real-time World (1974)
    • Real-Time World. Times Mirror. London: New English Library, 1974.
23. An Infinite Summer (1979)
    • An Infinite Summer. 1979. The Science Fiction Book Club. Newton Abbot, Devon: Readers Union Group of Book Clubs, 1979.
24. The Dream Archipelago (1999)
25. Ersatz Wines – Instructive Short Stories [early work] (2008)
26. Episodes (2019)

Edited:


27. Anticipations (1978)
    • Anticipations. 1978. Pan Science Fiction. London: Pan Books Ltd., 1980.

Prose:


28. Your Book of Film-Making (1974)
29. The Book on the Edge of Forever (1993)
30. The Magic – The Story of a Film (2008)
31. [with Nina Allan] The Illuminated Man: Life, Death and the Worlds of J. G. Ballard (2026)
    • [with Nina Allan] The Illuminated Man: Life, Death and the Worlds of J. G. Ballard. London: Bloomsbury Continuum, 2026.

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Mary Turner: Christopher Priest & Nina Allan

John Cranna's Arena (1992)

John Cranna: Arena (1992)

The worst effects of malnutrition, he continued, were on the mind. 'I've known starving men who listened to their thoughts and believed they had invented a strange new language.' He tapped the point of the toothpick on his front teeth. 'They died convinced they were geniuses.'

- John Cranna, Arena (Auckland: Minerva New Zealand, 1992): 104.

Somewhere in the space between J. G. Ballard's The Drowned World (1962) and J. M. Coetzee's Booker-Prize-winning Life & Times of Michael K (1983) lies the zone of John Cranna's first (and, to date, only) novel, Arena.

Like them, it's dystopian; like them, disturbingly violent. Arena also shares with both books a kind of deadpan flatness of affect - though all three authors show a taste for occasional flights of poetic fancy.

J. G. Ballard: The Drowned World (1962)

J. G. Ballard's first novel is set in a drowned London of the future. The characters have the usual Ballardian preoccupations with inner space: with the working out of their personal obsessions rather than any more practical, world-altering activities.

Even the bizarre ceremony which serves as the culmination of whatever narrative arc the novel has proves strangely anticlimactic: Dr. Kerans survives his ordeal, and wanders off at the end of the novel in search of "the forgotten paradises of the reborn Sun."

It's hard, however, to forget the lush evocativeness of the picture Ballard paints - of a world ending not with a bang but a whimper. Who would have thought at the time that his fantasies would seem so timely and relevant so soon?

J. M. Coetzee: Life & Times of Michael K (1985)

Coetzee's Life & Times of Michael K is more poignant. It is, in fact, a very difficult book to characterise even to those familiar with Coetzee's other novels. The solitary, arduous odyssey of the deformed, hare-lipped Michael K through the war-ravaged landscapes of a frighteningly real - albeit on an alternate historical time-track - South Africa, is simultaneously grotesque and inspiring.

Michael K's status as an unperson ("CM [coloured male] - 40 [his age] - NFA [no fixed address] - Unemployed") is established very clearly in context, and yet it's the actual nature of his quest that matters. The civil war ravaging the landscape is above (or below) his attention. His only approach to success in the book lies in the garden he makes in the provinces before returning to Cape Town.

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Brain-damaged by the nineties, openly neglected by authorities, their school buildings falling unhindered around their ears, the kids had all the helpless savagery of young animals left out in the cold too soon.

- Rosie Scott, Feral City (Port Melbourne, Victoria: William Heinemann Australia, 1992): 19.

In terms of a strictly New Zealand speculative fiction, the juxtaposition works somewhat differently. Somewhere between Rosie Scott's Feral City and Albert Wendt's Black Rainbow lies Arena (all three were published in the same year: 1992).

Rosie Scott: Raubstadt [Feral City] (1992)

Rosie Scott's vision of a near-future inner-city Auckland devastated by neo-liberal monetarism may seem a long way from John Cranna's magic-realist city, where "a yellow haze obscured the horizon from the slums of the south to the Guest suburbs in the north" [27], but they do have certain tropes and assumptions in common.

The gleaming teethed "guests" who appear to be in control of the body politic in Cranna's fable are not a long way from the equally sinister authorities in Scott's - or, for that matter, the elaborate Orwellian apparatus of Albert Wendt's.

Albert Wendt: Black Rainbow (1992)

"One day the history of our nation would become clearer to her. When the time was right I would try to explain a few things." [141]

Mary Paul's recent essay "Always Something There to Remind Me: On Growing Up Amid Neoliberal Reforms" Pantograph Punch: 19/8/19) might act as a timely reminder of the spirit of that particular age, for those fortunate enough not to have lived through it.

Hers is, by its nature, a very partial view: Auckland-centric (like the three novels mentioned above), and surprisingly male-dominated. 'Didn't you want to interview any women?' was one of the comments listed under the piece when it first appeared.

That isn't entirely fair, mind you. The last interview (of five) in the article is with the couple Richard Misilei and Mate Colvin, who both work as librarians in Ōtara. All the others, though: writer and performer Dominic Hoey (aka 'Tourettes'); 'Stephen' (not his real name); performance artist Mark Harvey; and AUT Communications Senor Lecturer Thomas Owen, are indeed men, and - it would have to be admitted - offer distinctively male perspectives on the period.

Mary Paul: Always Something There to Remind Me (2019)

Mary begins with a quote from Economist Tim Hazeldine, who describes the fallout from the 'reforms' of this era as “terrible”:

I cannot find any developed economy in modern times that has inflicted so much harm on itself. 104 major reforms pummel[ed] the body-economic. One manufacturing job in three was lost, and with those jobs basically went the blue-collar core that is crucial to the chances of less skilled workers being able to support their families in decency.

She does, however, preface this in more personal terms:

In the early 1990s I often woke at night worrying about how our children would manage in a newly competitive world. If they couldn’t strive to be the best, or at least buy into the idea of life as raw competition, how would they manage? It was not so much a feeling of pressure as one of loss. Would there be a place for them to flourish – one organised around human values and community, and not only around competition and consumerism?

The country had changed in 1984, when a newly elected Labour Government implemented free-market reforms with extreme rapidity, reforms that were extended in the early 1990s by the subsequent National Government. What was done was oddly extreme for a well-developed Western democracy and an elected Labour government, or any government. However giving precedence to business did fit with the crude empirical generalisations that were current at the time about society being founded on self-interest.

Is that what John Cranna's Arena is about, also? That sense of fear over eroding values? Certainly his (unnamed) protagonist lacks any conventional moral compass. He cuts off a man's ear-lobe and chains him to a tree in the garden as a simple act of discipline, and his somewhat tepid feelings of solidarity with the Aboriginal escapee from the livestock collected for the upcoming Arena Festival do not extend to any attempt to liberate him when recaptured for sacrifice.

His strongest identification turns out to be with the children of the next generation, but even this seems as much sensual as ideological:

The girl child's green, wide-set eyes met mine. Poised there was the question that had been put to me twice, the invitaion that had pursued me to the swamps and had haunted my dreams. And as the wind blew sand in flurries across the arena, and brought to that place the scent of end-of-summer orchards, I reached out to the small white hand of this dancer, my daughter, and told her, Yes. [174]

Bear in mind that this is the end of the same summer in which this particular child was born. A brief riffle back in the pages reveals the question - or, rather, statement - twice put to him: "We want you to be the narrator" [160].

But what exactly is it that he's meant to be narrating?

Migrant Workers' Children (2011)

... in a sense, everything that happened that summer was predictable, and with time it seemed to me that when the sequence of events happened as it did, it did so with an inevitability that left me certain that somehow I had known what was going to happen all along. [50]

There's a certain clunkiness to that sentence, and - it has to be admitted - to John Cranna's book as a whole. It's as if he's so determined to make each action deeply significant, that he neglects to explain it - even to himself. It reads like a sleepwalker's book.

Ballard's novels sounds now like an example of cli-fi written long before that term was born or thought of. Coetzee's, too, has a clear political dimension alongside the fabular narration. Scott and Wendt, too, have their targets (and genres) clearly in their sights.

What, then, of John Cranna? More than 25 years on, any deficiencies in clarity of intention seem - to me, at any rate - outweighed by the obscure feeling of hurt underlying his story. His protagonist (like the author?) has returned to home ground round to tell us his story once more in the faint hope that this time it may end up making some tenuous kind of sense.

His hopes - as always - are disappointed, but at least he's managed, this time, to gather around him a small knot of children who may offer some kind of hope, however fragile:

O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?

- W. B. Yeats, "Among School Children"

Or, to put it more directly, how can there be narrative closure where we ourselves deserve none?

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John Cranna

John Cranna
(b.1954)

Select Bibliography:

1. Visitors. Pacific Writers Series. Auckland: Heinemann Reed, 1989.


2. Arena. Auckland: Minerva, 1992.

Homepages & Online Information:


3. The Creative Hub


4. Wikipedia entry

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The Voices of Time

Ballard in front of Paul Delvaux's The Violation
[original lost, believed burned in 1940. Copy by Brigid Marlin]

i.m.
James Graham Ballard
(born 15th November, 1930 in Shanghai
- died 19th April, 2009 in London)

Later Powers often thought of Whitby, and the strange grooves the biologist had cut, apparently at random, all over the floor of the empty swimming pool. An inch deep and twenty feet long, interlocking to form an elaborate ideogram like a Chinese character, they had taken him all summer to complete, and he had obviously thought about little else, working away tirelessly through the long desert afternoons.

I guess my first acquaintance with the work of J. G. Ballard must have come when I ran across the story "The Voices of Time" in some old Sci-Fi anthology in the school library. I was already a rabid fan of Clarke, Heinlein, Le Guin and all the others, but this seemed off-key somehow, from a rather different (though possibly contiguous) universe. The notes in the back of the book were less than helpful. Ballard, they said, was interested in the exploration of "Inner Space."

Now that I knew about. I'd been reading Hermann Hesse (Steppenwolf, The Journey to the East) for years. The back of one of my paperbacks even called him "the prophet of the interior journey." I'd read Kafka (The Castle, The Great Wall of China), too. I'd even heard of Absurdism, Existentialism, lots of other isms. Clever writing for clever people (my brother Ken had a thick, daunting-looking copy of Sartre's Being and Nothingness by his bedside, which impressed me inordinately). But that didn't seem to fit sentences like this exactly, either:

After Whitby’s suicide no one had bothered about the grooves, but Powers often borrowed the supervisor’s key and let himself into the disused pool, and would look down at the labyrinth of mouldering gulleys, half filled with water leaking in from the chlorinator, an enigma now past any solution.

“The Voices of Time.”The Complete Short Stories, 2001 (London: Flamingo, 2002): 169.

I wasn't sure if it was Sci-fi, but I liked it. It was languid, that was the word for it: languid. Ballard's heroes (and heroines) were cool, sexy, disillusioned. They didn't have adventures so much as play strange mindgames or develop inexplicable psychological tics ("Powers had watched him from his office window at the far end of the Neurology wing, carefully marking out his pegs and string, carrying away the cement chips in a small canvas bucket"). There was an air of consequence about it all, though. It was as if the moment one fathomed what was going on something wonderful would appear. It was, I realise now, the voice of the Postmodern.

After that I started to collect his books whenever I came across them, garish seventies paperbacks, with lurid covers, and titles such as The Unlimited Dream Company or Myths of the Near Future. There seemed to be dozens of them, novels and collections of stories, but that I was used to from my other Sci-fi heroes: Ray Bradbury, Frank Herbert, Philip K. Dick ...

The first ones that I read were (accidentally?) the first ones that he'd written: a series of Apocalyptic disaster stories in the tradition of John Wyndham's The Day of the Triffids or John Christopher's the Death of Grass. I say in the tradition of, but certainly not in the same manner.

Wyndham and Christopher had gripped me with their bleak picture of a future of starvation and struggle. Ballard, by contrast, in novels such as The Drowned World, The Drought, The Crystal World and The Wind from Nowhere didn't really seem particularly interested in his human protagonists at all. His attention appeared to be more on the aesthetic frisson of great ruined vistas of desert cities, drowned swamps in the heart of the Home Counties.

He charted, in prose as lush as Joseph Conrad's, a series of journeys to the Heart of Darkness - but then his heroes decided to stay there. To stay and immediately start making excavations in the floor of an abandoned swimming-pool. It was, to impose a phrase which would not become current till long long afterwards, post-human writing.

It could become tedious, mind you. His books were nothing if not repetitive, and while reading a couple of them could blow your mind, surfeiting and over-indulging could lead you to long again for the simple boosterism of an Asimov or an A. E. Van Vogt. I dabbled in the shallows of J. G. Ballard, let us say.

"The imminence of a revelation that does not occur," said Borges, "is this not, perhaps, the aesthetic phenomenon?" That seemed to sum him up. I loved the idea of him more, at times, than the actual detail of his minutely-crafted, ingeniously-told stories.

[Steven Spielberg, dir.: Empire of the Sun (1987)]

Then came Empire of the Sun.

Say what you like about the movie - simple-minded, over-the-top in parts (the Spielberg factor) - it was powerful. And suddenly everything fell into place. J. G. Ballard was (as he'd been saying all along to anyone willing to listen) a Science-Fiction writer only by title. What he'd been writing all along was an exploration of his own inner space - the psyche of a child separated from his parents, imprisoned in a Japanese prison camp in the immense, turbulent incomprehensible world of wartime Shanghai, a literal witness of the first Atomic blast.

No wonder so many of his stories were set on Pacific atolls covered with bunkers and equipment manuals, no wonder he was obsessed with urban wastelands (one of his most effective, in Concrete Island, is set in the grassy zone between two motorway ramps - no-one can escape because the cars will never stop). He wasn't imaginative so much as brave - what he was writing was a series of description of the furniture of the inside of his head ...

[J. G. Ballard: The Writer's Room]

"Why I want to fuck Ronald Reagan" - that was the title of one of his short stories. Another was "The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race." Empire of the Sun was all very well - beautifully, sparely written, correcting all the excesses of the Spielberg version when I finally got round to reading it. He succeeded in making his "real" childhood landscape a legitimate province of the Ballardian cosmos. But there was something just a little too easily-assimilable about it, I suspect, for him.

World War II had been slobbered over and preempted quite enough already, I suspect he thought. His interests were in the now, or (rather) in the now-plus-one. The coming Apocalypse preoccupied him far more than those past disasters (not that they could ever be truly "past" for him). Hence Crash.

[David Cronenberg, dir.: Crash (1996)]

For once a book of his found adequate incarnation in the movies. David Cronenberg's inspiration did not so much run parallel as in closely analogous territory to Ballard's. Crash shocked, disgusted, fascinated, repelled - most of all turned on audiences all over the world. It was shocking, garish, tasteless, hard to take - banned in some countries, cut in lots of others. Talk about drawing a connection between sex and violence!

It might have looked a bit worrying on the page, but by now Ballard was rapidly becoming a G.O.M., a Grand Old Man of letters. Translated onto the big screen, though, no polite masks or evasions were possible. This man was sick. What's more, he was telling the rest of us that we were too - that is was time to wake up and smell the coffee with a vengeance. Put on the Jackie Kennedy wig, roll over, and spread 'em ...

His later work may have been more subtle - certainly his books were now packaged as serious "literary novels" rather than pulpy sci-fi - but he never lost that subversive edge, that bleakness of vision, that sense of a world spread out before us not so much like "a land of dreams, / So various, so beautiful, so new," as like a radioactive motorway offramp leading down to an airstrip littered with abandoned bombers and fragmentary, water-soaked instruction manuals for the maintenance of same ...

There, there'll always be a beautiful stranger flitting round at the corner of your eye. Be warned, though: the only way to attract her is to start right away on your project of assembling old bicycle parts into a mandala. Then she'll come, when you're lying there dying of thirst, and sit just out of arm's reach, idly making a daisy-chain out of spent fuel rods as you try in vain to remember the opening verses of the Bardo Thodol ...

On that note, then, a heartfelt farewell and thanks to J. G. Ballard. There's never been a greater visionary (I firmly believe) than this humble man. He enriched us all - those who were willing to listen, at any rate - with his multiple, various body of work, which will survive him. As for his own body, that now departs into the void:

Oh you compassionate ones possessing the wisdom of understanding,
the love of compassion,
the power of acting,
& of protecting in incomprehensible measure,
one is passing through this world & leaving it behind.

No friends does(s)he have,
(s)he is without defenders, without protectors and kinsmen.
The light of this world has set.
(s)he goes from place to place,
(s)he enters darkness,
(s)he falls down a steep precipice,
(s)he enters a jungle of solitude,
(s)he is pursued by karmic forces,
(s)he goes into a vast silence,
(s)he is borne away on the great ocean,
(s)he is wafted on the wind of karma,
(s)he goes where there is no certainty,
(s)he is caught in the great conflict,
(s)he is obsessed by the great affecting spirit,
(s)he is awed and terrified by the messengers of death.

Existing karma has put hir into repeated existence
& no strength does (s)he have
although the time has come to go alone.

[Bardo Thodol]