JG Ballard—master of surrealist science fiction, dystopian visionary, and brilliant cultural critic—is one of my all-time favorite writers. In 1984, the Paris Review interviewed Ballard at his home, and the magazine has just made that conversation, titled "The Art of Fiction," available free online for a limited time. It's filled with Ballard's incisive observations, deep wit, and creative inspiration. If you're new to Ballard's fiction, I recommend The Drowned World (1962), Crash (1973), High-Rise (1975), and Millennium People (2003). If only he were still alive to comment on today's insanity, but fortunately (or unfortunately), his body of work is more relevant than ever. From The Paris Review:
INTERVIEWER
Let's start with obsession. You seem to have an obsessive way of repeatedly playing out permutations of a certain set of emblems and concerns. Things like the winding down of time, car crashes, birds and flying, drained swimming pools, airports, abandoned buildings, Ronald Reagan . . .
BALLARD
I think you're completely right. I would say that I quite consciously rely on my obsessions in all my work, that I deliberately set up an obsessional frame of mind. In a paradoxical way, this leaves one free of the subject of the obsession. It's like picking up an ashtray and staring so hard at it that one becomes obsessed by its contours, angles, texture, et cetera, and forgets that it is an ashtray—a glass dish for stubbing out cigarettes.
INTERVIEWER
So you rely on the magnetism of an obsession as a way of proceeding?
BALLARD
Yes, so the unity of the enterprise is forever there. A whole universe can be bounded in a nutshell. Of course, why one chooses certain topics as the subject for one's obsessions is a different matter. Why was I obsessed by car crashes? It's such a peculiar idea.
INTERVIEWER
Yes, why were you?
BALLARD
Presumably all obsessions are extreme metaphors waiting to be born. That whole private mythology, in which I believe totally, is a collaboration between one's conscious mind and those obsessions that, one by one, present themselves as stepping-stones.
