James Ballard — All that mattered was sensation

The end of science fiction, surrealist influences, landscapes of the collective unconscious, media society, and the death of the future; but also Schwarzenegger, car crashes, virtual reality, the Vietnam war, Steven Spielberg, William Burroughs. In this interview, conducted by Sandro Moiso in 1992, James G. Ballard outlines the major issues of our time with an extraordinarily prophetic gaze – a gaze which is both ruthless and imaginative. This interview, published for the first time, preserves a distinctive Ballardian clarity and offers a precise reading of our, as well as of his, contemporaneity. In the publication’s critical essay, acclaimed journalist and author Simon Reynolds comments on selected excerpts from the interview. Reynolds’s piece collocates the thought of the British novelist within both the Ballardian corpus and the cultural context of his and our time. Through a kaleidoscope of cultural references, Reynolds constructs a dense network of hidden relationships in which underground music, philosophical writings, Hollywood movies, classic novels, Mark Fisher and Sherlock Holmes, all find their place.