J.G. Ballard and American Science Fiction

Abstract

Offering something of a group portrait, this study focuses on Ballard's first decade as a published writer (1956-1966), seen in the context of US science fiction—its stories, writers, communal obsessions (including NASA's Mercury Program), and above all its shared writing practices. During the early Cold War years, science fiction regularly recast the genre's own earlier moments, a practice that tied even the pointed social critique of noir sf in the early 1950s—stories that first drew Ballard to the genre—to earlier pulp science fiction, including the space adventures of the 1930s and 1940s. An especially striking quality of this postwar generation is what seems an unusual degree of prescience; for Ballard's early sf—like that of the US writers who inspired him (sometimes to emulate, sometimes to critique)—regularly offer uncanny intimations of our own contentious historical moment today.