Is there a famous quote from Ballard along the lines of sci-fi being the only true or worthwhile literature of the 20th century? It's been bouncing round my head for ages so if any of you could tell me what the correct quote is and where it's from I'd be eternally grateful...
Ballard on sci-fi
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J G Ballard
"For me science fiction is a way of thinking, a way of logic that bypasses a lot of nonsense. It allows people to look directly at important subjects."
There is also this quote
‘if photography is the Cyclops eye of the late 20th century, recording everything but seeing nothing’
from a book featured here....
http://www.ballardian.com/jg-ballard-conversations-quotes/
kinda on the right track, I guess if its really killing you, you could get the book?
"For me science fiction is a way of thinking, a way of logic that bypasses a lot of nonsense. It allows people to look directly at important subjects."
There is also this quote
‘if photography is the Cyclops eye of the late 20th century, recording everything but seeing nothing’
from a book featured here....
http://www.ballardian.com/jg-ballard-conversations-quotes/
kinda on the right track, I guess if its really killing you, you could get the book?
It's in the foreword for Crash, I can't tell you the correct quote because I only have a german copy here. He basically says that SF represents the most important literary tradition of the 20th century because the most important thing about this century is the concept of unlimited possibilities through science and technology.
The Introduction to 'Crash' can be found here :
http://www.ballardian.com/introduction-to-crash/
but it deals mostly with the inversion of the real.
I know the one you mean, but can't place it. I've a feeling it might feature in 'A User’s Guide to the Millennium'
http://www.ballardian.com/introduction-to-crash/
but it deals mostly with the inversion of the real.
I know the one you mean, but can't place it. I've a feeling it might feature in 'A User’s Guide to the Millennium'
Ah! There's a fuller version of the 'Crash' intro (from the 1974 Calmann-Levy edition) in the RE/SEARCH #8/9 Ballard book:
"I firmly believe that science fiction, far from being an unimportant minor offshoot, in fact represents the main literary tradition of the 20th Century, and certainly its oldest - a tradition of imaginative response to science and technology that runs in an intact line through HG Wells, Aldous Huxley, the writers of modern American science fiction, to present day innovators as William Burroughs.
"The main "fact" of the 20th Century is the concept of the unlimited possibility. This predicate of science and technology enshrines the notion of a moratorium on the past - the irrelevancy and even death of the past - and the limitless alternatives available to the present."
"Given the immense continent of possibility, few literatures would seem better equipped to deal with their subject matter than science fiction. No other form of fiction has the vocabulary of ideas and images to deal with the present, let alone the future. The dominant characteristic of the modern mainstream novel is its sense of individual isolation, its mood of introspection and alienation, a state of mind always assumed to be the hallmark of the 20th Century consciousness.
"Far from it. On the contrary, it seems to me that this is a psychology that belongs entirely to the 19th Century, part of a reaction against the massive restraints of bourgeois society, the monolothic character of Victorianism and the tyranny of paterfamilias, secure in its financial and sexual authority. Apart from its marked retrospective bias and its obsession with the subjective nature of experience, its real subject matter is the rationalization of guilt and estrangement. Its elements are introspection, pessimism and sophistication. Yet if anything befits the 20th Century it is optimism, the iconography of mass merchandising, naivety and guilt-free enjoyment of all the mind's possibilities."
"I firmly believe that science fiction, far from being an unimportant minor offshoot, in fact represents the main literary tradition of the 20th Century, and certainly its oldest - a tradition of imaginative response to science and technology that runs in an intact line through HG Wells, Aldous Huxley, the writers of modern American science fiction, to present day innovators as William Burroughs.
"The main "fact" of the 20th Century is the concept of the unlimited possibility. This predicate of science and technology enshrines the notion of a moratorium on the past - the irrelevancy and even death of the past - and the limitless alternatives available to the present."
"Given the immense continent of possibility, few literatures would seem better equipped to deal with their subject matter than science fiction. No other form of fiction has the vocabulary of ideas and images to deal with the present, let alone the future. The dominant characteristic of the modern mainstream novel is its sense of individual isolation, its mood of introspection and alienation, a state of mind always assumed to be the hallmark of the 20th Century consciousness.
"Far from it. On the contrary, it seems to me that this is a psychology that belongs entirely to the 19th Century, part of a reaction against the massive restraints of bourgeois society, the monolothic character of Victorianism and the tyranny of paterfamilias, secure in its financial and sexual authority. Apart from its marked retrospective bias and its obsession with the subjective nature of experience, its real subject matter is the rationalization of guilt and estrangement. Its elements are introspection, pessimism and sophistication. Yet if anything befits the 20th Century it is optimism, the iconography of mass merchandising, naivety and guilt-free enjoyment of all the mind's possibilities."