Bibliography of JG Ballard interviews

Interviews with JG Ballard:
An Incomplete Bibliography

1967: The Third Programme BBC Radio 3 (1967)
George MacBeth

1968: Bavarian TV
Ballardian (March 15, 2008)
Munich Round Up, No. 100 (1968), 104-6.

1969: Speculation No. 21 (February 1969)
Jannick Storm

1969: International Times No. 60 (July 18, 1969)
Robert Lightfoot & David Pendleton
tfstk that the writer is going to be able to rely so much on the materials of his own imagination. I think that he has got to adapt and take the materials of his fiction from the world around him in the same way as the pop painters have done. The writer’s role is more analytic. He is going to be more of a commentator than an inventor. The writer cannot compete with the world of the media landscapes inventing enormous fictions at a rate of authority and conviction that no writer can match.

The Atrocity Exhibition is published.

1970: Penthouse Vol. 5 No. 5 (May 1970)
Lynn Barber

1970: The Guardian (September 11, 1970)
Michael McNay
J. G. Ballard was born in Shanghai in 1930; for the last ten years he has lived with his daughters (he is a widower) in a rundown semi in Shepperton, with books and papers scattered around as though he is on the point of moving out. This rootlessness gives his writing an edge, a quality of observation, a feel for environment that is missing from a lot of even the best of contemporary fiction. He himself does not think of it so much as being rootless as being slightly out of step.

1970: Friends Magazine No. 17 (October 30, 1970)
Robert Lightfoot and David Pendleton
I think that the great strength of science fiction is that there is no past -- it's all future and it tallies with the way people look on their lives today. I mean look at most people and you will find that they have declared a moratorium on the past; they are just not interested. One is constantly meeting people who have only a hazy idea of their parents -- who have changed their life-styles since their childhood in every possible way. Found & transcribed by Mike Holliday

Cypher [fanzine] No. 3 (December 1970)

1971: Times Educational Supplement (January 29, 1971)
Brendan Hennessey
I can annex an enormous amount of material into it that I wouldn't be able to in a conventional narrative. Some people seem to be complaining that it isn't a nineteenth-century novel. Why the hell don't they go and live in the nineteenth century? I'm living in 1971.

1971: Transatlantic Review No. 39 (Spring 1971)
Brendan Hennessey
I think SF has quite a kinship with surrealism. The surrealists deal in an external world that has been remade by the mind. They also start from the premise that there's no firm basis of reality anywhere, and I feel this is very close to SF. We're living in a world in which the fictional elements have begun to multiply to an enormous degree, thanks to mass merchandising, advertising, politics conducted as advertising, and so forth. Found & transcribed by Mike Holliday

1971: Books and Bookmen Magazine (April 1971)
Douglas Reed
I've always been fascinated by the moody images that J G Ballard weaves, using the future as a loom, so I went to worship at the shrine, hoping the idol would not be sporting a clay foot. Someone meeting heroes at first hand is rather like the courtier with the glass slipper. Preconceptions hardly ever fit and Ballard was no exception. His house, instead of Kubla Kahn with visionary vistas rolling to the edge of the mind, was a box among boxes in greater London with the careless peeled appearance of a lizard shedding its skin. Found & transcribed by Mike Holliday

1971: Studio International No. 183 (October 1971)
Eduardo Paolozzi, J.G. Ballard, and Frank Whitford

Crash is published.

1973: CBC Radio Ideas (1973)
Carol Orr

1973: Evergreen Review No. 96 (Spring 1973)
Jerome Tarshis
Thus speaks Dr. Nathan. And what does Ballard hope for, if man lives to read the end of the Apocalypse currently in progress? "I think the future of this planet can be summed up in one word: sex. I think sex times the computer equals tomorrow. I think the future of sex is limitless.

1973: The Writer (June 1973)
Peter Linnett

1973: Cypher (October, 1973)
James Goddard
Crash is not so much about the motor car as about technology as a whole, and it is precisely the sinister marriage between sex and technology which is the book's subject. Sex x Technology = the future. A disquieting equation, but one we have to face. Incidentally, I do not see machines as necessarily forbidding or inhuman.

Vermilion Sands is published.

1973: Radio Times Magazine (December 13, 1973)
Mike Bygrave
"I like it here." He says. "It's a bit like an American suburb -- lots of ladies in their early 30s with two kids and a Cortina. The husbands work in the plastics factory, or London Airport or the film studios. It's fluid, classless London."

1973: Corridor Magazine No. 5 1973)
Peter Linnett

Concrete Island is published.

Galaxie [French] No. 117 (February 1974)

1974: Magazine Litteraire [French] No. 87 (April 1974)
Robert Louit
This interview has been deleted because might be published in 2012 in a book called Extreme Metaphors: Selected Interviews with J. G. Ballard, 1967–2008, with commentary, by Simon Sellars and Dan O'Hara.

1974: The Imagination On Trial Allison and Busby, London 1981
Alan Burns
JGB: Take the novel out of the context of the university Modern Literature Department, push back those plywood partitions and actually see the writer in his professional role, having all the problems (quite apart from the problems of writing) of persuading the publisher to publish what he's done -- writing in the context of whatever one's doing. And that's the beginning of a long, fascinating interview about how and why JGB writes.

Actuel [French] No. 46 (September 1974)

High-Rise is published.

1975: Magazine Littéraire (January 1975)
Philippe R. Hupp

Science Fiction Monthly Vol. 2 No. 10 (October 1975)

1975: Foundation, The Review of Science Fiction No. 9 (November 1975)
Robert Louit

1976: Streetlife Magazine Vol. 1, No. 8 (February 7, 1976)
Martin Hayman
James Ballard is the uncrowned king of science fiction in Britain, an intrepid explorer of inner space and an influence on practically all experimental fiction written in Britain since the early Sixties. Alone among his contemporaries he flashes on landscapes where the reader's imagination has never trodden: gingerly we moved into terrains whose terrible beauty was not governed by the laws of natural science, nor whose events bore any resemblance to the ray-gun toting swashbuckle of cosmic adventure. Found & transcribed by Mike Holliday

L'Express [French] (February 2-8, 1976)

Vector [fanzine] No. 73/74 (March 1976)

Univers [French] No. 8 (March 1977)

1976: Ballardian (May 23, 2008)
Jörg Krichbaum and Rein A. Zondergeld

1977: Opus International No. 64 (Autumn 1977)
Anne Tronche
This interview is in the collection but is untranslated.

The Unlimited Dream Company is published.

1979: Penthouse Vol 14 No. 1 (1979 U.K. Edition)
Dr Chris Evans

Time Out (November 2, 1979)

1979: Vector Magazine No. 96 (December 1979/January 1980)
Alan Dorey & Joseph Nicholas
The protagonists of most of my fiction feel tremendously isolated, and that seems to exclude the possibility of a warm, fruitful relationship with anybody, let alone anyone as potentially close as a woman... I've got three children, with whom I'm extremely close, and yet I've never introduced a child into any of my stories... It's just that children are not relevant to my work. Found & transcribed by Mike Holliday

1980: Thrust: SF in Review No. 14 (Winter 1979/1980)
David Pringle
This interview is in the collection but no permission to display it has been granted.

1980: The Listener Vol. 103 (February 14, 1980)
Rodney Smith
“It had been too concerned with the future, right from its origins. I wanted a science-fiction of the present day. I am interested in the technology of the present of this world. I am not interested in imaginary alien planets. I am certain you know that the only alien planet is Earth. It is this world that is the strange one. All the extra-terrestrials we need are walking around in these streets.

Aether SF [fanzine] No. 2 (1980)

Hello America is published.

Etoile Mecanique [French fanzine] Numero triple 1, 2 et 3 (July
1981-March 1982)

Sunday Express Magazine No. 38 (December 27, 1981)

1982: Foundation: The Review of Science Fiction No. 24 (February 1982)
David Pringle
The Profession of Science Fiction 26: From Shanghai to Shepperton. This interview is in the collection, but no permission has been given to reproduce it.

1982: Heavy Metal Magazine (April 1982)
Toby Goldstein
Everybody's going to be starring in their own porno films as an extension of the Polaroid camera. Electronic aids, particularly domestic computers, will help the inner migration, the opting out of reality. Reality is no longer going to be the stuff out there, but the stuff inside your head. Found & transcribed by Mike Holliday

Night Out No. 5 (November 1982)

Metaphores [French, but English text] No. 7 (April? 1983)

1983: New Musical Express (October 22, 1983)
Charles Shaar Murray
External reality in this particular case is a broad comfortable street in Shepperton, not far from the Dream Factory and designed to look like either a set for a suburban sitcom or a deluxe practice track for learner drivers. It seems highly appropriate to find science fiction's darkest, most authentically disturbing dreams welling up here, where Normality is writ so large as to be utterly surreal. Found & transcribed by Mike Holliday

Hard Copy [fanzine] No. 1 (January 1984)

1984: Literary Review No. 74 (August 1984)
Peter Ronnov-Jessen
This interview has been deleted because might be published in 2012 in a book called Extreme Metaphors: Selected Interviews with J. G. Ballard, 1967–2008, with commentary, by Simon Sellars and Dan O'Hara.

Empire of the Sun is published.

1984: Books and Bookmen No. 348 (September 1984)
Christopher Tookey
Jim begins the book as a very protected, pampered English schoolboy, and he works his way through the following years, simply struggling to keep alive, towards a larger understanding of life and death, and the way human beings behave in extreme situations.

1984: Observer Magazine (September 2, 1984)
Martin Amis
"Those were hard times. Don't be deceived by my friend here," he said, patting his belly. "By the end of the war the food had pretty well dried up. The Japs could hardly feed themselves. Why should they bother about an enclave of Allied detainees? Why? These are the realities. We ate cracked wheat, warehouse scrapings, weevils. You'd shift the weevils to the side and eat them last. I often had three rings of them on the edge of my plate."

1984: City Limits (September 7, 1984)
Colin Greenland
“People aren't enobled by suffering. That's another cliché. At the same time, it does strip away a lot of illusions. One pays a terrible price for that, but at least one glimpses some kind of truth.”

1984: The Sunday Times (September 9, 1984)
Claire Tomalin
An investigation into one boy's childhood; a witnessing of a strange slice of history; an astonishing piece of adventure fiction: "Empire of the Sun" is all these things, and certainly the best book that Mr Ballard has yet written.

Time Out (September 27, 1984)

Weekend Australian Magazine (November 3-4, 1984)

1984: The Guardian (November 29, 1984)
W.L. Webb
And here -- just as rooted in reality, just as concretely grounded in history -– is the terrible, fertile source of the visions the seer of Shepperton has [seen] through the past quarter of a century from the sitting-room window of a distinctly low-tech mod. semi, circa 1934, surrounded by the fading bricky charm of Thames Valley metroland.

1984: Paris Review No. 94 (Winter 1984/1985)
Thomas Frick

1985: Newsweek (January 28, 1985)
David Lehman
Stint not on the superlatives: "Empire of the Sun" belongs on anyone's short list of outstanding novels inspired by the second world war. J.G. Ballard's "eyewitness account" of life in a Japanese prison camp somehow combines the exactness of an autobiographical testament with the hallucinatory atmosphere of twilight-zone fiction.

1985: Vogue Vol. 142, No. 2 (February 1985)
Charles Shaar Murray
Ballard published his first short fiction in 1956 and made his debut as a novelist in 1962. His work has at times been so at odds with the science fiction mainstream that it might seem almost a kindness to say that he doesn't really write science fiction. He insists that he does: it is everybody else in the field who doesn't -- not any more, anyway. As space-fantasy and sword-and-sorcery increase their domination of the mainstream, Ballard still hews to his brief, an examination of what lies straight ahead on earth.

Liberation [French] (April 26, 1985)

1985: Magazine Litteraire No. 219 (May 1985)
Tony Cartano and Maxim Jakubowski

Le Monde (May 3, 1985)

Le Nouvel Observateur No. 1085 (August 23-29, 1985)

1985: Words: The New Literary Forum Vol. 1, No. 4 (September 1985)
David Pringle
Psychoanalyst of the Electronic Age. This interview is in the collection, but no permission has been given to reproduce it.

1985: XS Magazine (September/October 1985)
John Earwalker
I'm more worried about people becoming totally sane - sanity in the wrong hands is a dangerous weapon.

1985: New Musical Express (October 26, 1985)
Don Watson
Punk was so interesting -- I still haven't recovered from it. Not knowing anything about the music I saw it as a purely political movement, the powerful political and social resentment of an under-caste who reacted to the values of bourgeois society with pure destructiveness and hate. Bourgeois society offered them the mortgage, they offered back psychosis. Transcribed by Mike Holliday

Les Nouvelles Litteraires No. 7 (June 1986)

Books No. 6 (September 1987)

The Day of Creation is published.

1987: Publishing News (July 24, 1987)
Rodney Burbeck
"I have people coming here expecting the air to be heavy with the fumes of illicit substances, a miasma of child molesting, degradations... and in fact they find, I hope, a perfectly straightforward man who's brought up three children who are happy, successful adults. I think there is a complete separation between what one writes and imagines, and what one is."

1987: Sunday Express Magazine (September 6, 1987)
Lynn Barber
For a while, after “Empire of the Sun”, he doubted he could ever write again. He was exhausted by the media attention (“I am quite shy really”) and the process of remembering his own past. “It opened a lot of windows in my mind and exposed all these buried memories that I'd really hidden from myself. Of course, they had surfaced in my fiction for 20 years or more -- the drained swimming pools, the abandoned hotels, they were all memories of Shanghai -- but for the first time I was seeing them undisguised.

Time Out (September 9, 1987)

1987: City Limits (September 10, 1987)
Nick Kimberley
Ballard's fictions have never been "sentimentalizing", but have always found ways to confront the uncomfortable. Empire of the Sun may have brought him the mass audience he deserves; The Day of Creation shows that readers new and old still don't know what to expect from this "disreputable" (his own words) maverick of British fiction.

Panorama [Italian] (September 13, 1987)

1987: Rolling Stone (November 19, 1987)
Jonathan Cott
This interview is in the collection but Rolling Stone magazine will not give permission to show it.

1987: i-D Magazine No. 53 (November 1987)
Jim McClellan and Steve Beard
Surburban life is a big strain, you know. Everybody thinks it's very easy on the blood pressure but that isn't the case. To maintain this fabric of absolute normality requires powerful repressive forces -- all these double glazing and patio doors are sustained by a huge effort of will. Found & transcribed by Mike Holliday

1987: Globe & Mail Newspaper (October 17, 1987)
H.J. Kirchhoff
In October of 1987 JG Ballard made his third, and final, trip to Canada -- this time for his first-ever public reading from a novel, The Day of Creation, as part of Toronto's Harbourfront International Festival of Authors. While he was here he did a mini-interview with H.J. Kirchhoff, a writer with Toronto's Globe & Mail newspaper. He talks about public speaking, UK literary events, and his writings. "The Day of Creation," he says, "has obviously been affected by the great success of Empire of the Sun, as one would expect."

1987: The Times (November 28, 1987)
Chris Peachment
"Look at Reagan," he says, warming to his hatred of the media grip on our lives. "It is extraordinary enough that an actor can become President, but what is even more worrying is that Americans seem to like it. Supposing that brain surgeons were suddenly replaced by actors pretending to be brain surgeons. No doubt you'd get a terrific bedside manner. But when you are finally in the operating theatre ..." This sounds like an excellent idea for a new J.G. Ballard book. "Yes," he says, "the problem is, it's already been written. It's called Reality."

1987: The Toronto Star (December 14, 1987)
Ken Adachi
"The vast body of young Jim's experience in Shanghai and the camp has been invented, though it's psychologically true. You fictionalize to reach the truth. I was describing an extreme situation which isn't typical of the experience of North Americans. Most people on this planet, however, live lives subject to privation. It's the norm, not the exception, to suffer starvation and violence and the horrible use of technology to destroy lives.

1987: Chicago Tribune (December 21, 1987)
John H. Richardson
Los Angeles - For many years, J.G. Ballard avoided writing about his horrifying experiences in a Japanese prison camp during World War II. Instead he wrote much-admired science-fiction novels such as "The Drowned World." "I waited 40 years (to write 'Empire of the Sun')," he said. "Maybe I needed to wait that long; it took me 20 years to forget, and 20 years to remember it all again."

1987/88: Interzone No. 22 (Winter 1987/1988)
David Pringle
This interview is in the collection, but no permission has been given to reproduce it.

1988: Science Fiction Eye Vol. 2 No. 1 (January 1988)
Richard Kadrey
"You've got to treat the landscape of television, of advertising, of politics conducted as a branch of advertising, of your friends and the way they furnish their homes, and yourself, as if you're a figment in a dream. That's the classic surrealist approach." Found & transcribed by Mike Holliday

1988: Starlog No. 126 (January 1988)
Adam Pirani
"I was invited by Spielberg to have a very small part, a non-speaking part, as a guest at the party on the day before Pearl Harbor, which opens the book and the film -- I couldn't turn that down, it was a wonderful opportunity. It was very kind of him to offer it to me. So, I met him on the set during the two days I spent filming the three scenes in which I hope I still appear -- my brief contribution to the art of acting is probably lying on the cutting room floor in Burbank!

Sunday Oregonian (January 10, 1988)

Running Wild is published.

1988: Publishers Weekly (March 11, 1988)
Michelle Field
This interview was published in the March, 1988 issue of Publisher's Weekly and was written by London freelance writer Michelle Field. Best part? The boy in The Empire of the Sun, Ballard says with a smile, grows up to be Dr. Mallory, the main character in his new novel, The Day of Creation -- not a science fiction writer in Shepperton. In a way, Ballard says, it is the story of Empire of the Sun turned inside-out: "The circumstances in Empire of the Sun completely enclose the boy and shape him; in The Day of Creation it is Mallory himself who creates the landscapes in the book, and he imposes himself on the landscapes, not the other way around." Fascinating.

1988: Locus Magazine Issue 332, Vol. 21 No. 9 (September, 1988)
Unattributed
"But I've wished science fiction could enlarge its scope, its pool of ideas and vocabulary and ambitions. What I regret is the way that in recent years -- maybe I'm showing my age here -- the science fiction of the '50s (much of which would have difficulty getting published these days), that sort of realistic concern for what is going on, is rather out of tune with all the sword and sorcery and futuresque sagas masquerading as science fiction." Found & transcribed by Mike Holliday

1988: The Scotsman (March 14, 1988)
Lindsay Mackie
"I never wanted to create an atrocity parade," he says now about the book. And though some have claimed that the film is overly sentimental, Ballard says that he did not make the book as violent as the reality was.

1988: The Guardian (March 17, 1988)
Julian Petley
"Even in a two and a half hour film you couldn't include every single element of the novel, but those strands which the film does concentrate on are extremely faithful to the book." He's particularly impressed by Christian Bale's central performance, which he describes as the best by a child in the history of the cinema.

1988: The Sunday Times Magazine (March 20, 1988)
Anthony Denselow
"I was present at the birth of my two daughters, who were both born at home. My son was born in hospital in the days, sadly, when fathers were not allowed to be there. Not only was I present when the girls were born but I practically elbowed the midwife aside and delivered them myself. I remember Fay's head emerging into daylight; it was an extraordinary moment."

1988: Daily Mail (March 30, 1988)
Steve Absalom
He stormed: "I am fed up with this. I can't go on and on explaining that the book, and therefore the film, is semi-autobiographical. Most, and I stress most, of the events I depicted came directly from my own experiences but the film is based on a novel - a novel therefore uses fiction. Why won't they understand this? Let them write their own novels and films."

1988: Impulse: The Magazine of Time and Space [Toronto] (Spring 1988)
Unattributed

1988: ZG Magazine (April/May 1988)
Unattributed
I can see a time, probably about midway into the next century, when time will virtually cease to exist. The present will annex both the future and the past into itself. All desires will be fulfilled and people will live in a perpetual present. Found & transcribed by Mike Holliday

1988: The Face No. 96 (April 1988)
Paul Rambali
There's no music in my work," states J. G. Ballard. He smiles, quoting the Futurist manifesto, "The most beautiful music in the world is the sound of machine guns."

Women's Wear Daily (April 1, 1988)

1988: You Magazine [supplement to Sunday Mail] (April 10, 1988)
Jeannette Kupfermann
"Women have always been a very powerful force and I much prefer their company to that of men," he said. "They've shaped my life and imagination almost totally, going all the way through to my daughters Fay and Bea. I think all women, whatever their age, are beautiful in some way." He lost his wife in 1964 and has lived in the same house ever since. I asked why he had never remarried.

1988: Time Magazine (April 25, 1988)
Paul Gray
"Sadly," Ballard says, "the only surrealists around these days are psychopaths. But we all need to fight off the growing suburbanization of the soul. I want the sane to become surrealists."

Sunday Sport (May 1, 1988)

1988: Miami Herald Newspaper (May 15, 1988)
William Robertson
I've always had two important strains in my writing. One was the purely imaginative sort of romantic strain in my earlier novels. The other strain has always been an interest in the mass media, particularly the TV landscape and how this is affecting people's values. Those strains have tended to be separate in my novels up until now, and I think in this book for the first time I've brought them together. It's a romantic tale, a parable about this man who creates a river and then becomes obsessed by it, and at the same time there's the other strain, which is the way in which the mass media, in the person of this TV documentary-maker, seizes on this event and begins to affect it.

1988: National Public Radio (May 22, 1988)
Terry Gross
Well, we were out of control of our parents. This is the -- the big -- the big thing. I mean in an ordinary family the parents have a certain amount of leverage on the -- on their kids. They, you know, their pocket money, their treats, little bits of candy or presents. You know, the parents can say, well, what do you want for Christmas? And all, you know, this helps to maintain their authority over their children. Now, in our camp there were no treats. There was no candy. There were no Christmas presents. The food ration, such as it was, was, you know, delivered once a day.

1988: Twilight Zone Magazine Vol. 8, No. 2 (June 1988)
James Verniere
I have my lonely struggle trying to get a broader definition of science fiction: a definition that incorporates Gulliver's Travels, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Robert Louis Stevenson, on through H.G. Wells, on to that great genius, William Burroughs, who uses huge elements of science fiction in his novels because it's part of the air that we breathe. Found & transcribed by Mike Holliday

North Beach NOW (Summer 1988)

1989: Spin Magazine (January 1989)
Julian Dibbell
The way Ballard calls it, the world is now so fictionalized by advertising and television that the writer's traditional role is pointless. Rather than invent fiction, the writer now has to invent reality. Which is why Ballard has always turned his back on the “realism” of mainstream fiction.

1989: The Observer Magazine (April 16, 1989)
Maxim Jakubowski
Science fiction enjoys a large cult following in this country. Here Maxim Jakubowski asks leading writers of the genre which of their fellow authors they give shelf space to in their libraries.

1989: Science Fiction Eye Vol. 1 No. 5 (July 1989)
Richard Kadrey
Angela Carter, the English writer, paid me a nice compliment in a review a few years ago when she said, “Ballard is the last surrealist still in business.” I’m glad she said that.

1990: Fear Magazine No. 14 (February 1990)
David Pringle
This interview is in the collection, but no permission has been given to reproduce it.

1990: New York Times Magazine (September 9, 1990)
Luc Sante
Published in 1969, The Atrocity Exhibition was instantly notorious, not even so much for its ''difficulty'' as for political reasons. Its subject was the intersection of sexuality, violence and the mass media, and within this frame occurred several satirical episodes that raised hackles, notably a section entitled ''The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race'' (itself modeled after Alfred Jarry's pre-Dada outrage, ''The Crucifixion Considered as an Uphill Bicycle Race'').

1990: The Sunday Times ["Books" section] (November 11, 1990)
John Clute
"The stories of 'War Fever' are imaginative fiction, yes, but they confront these topics without any kind of genre baggage, as far as I can see. I don't like to use these terms, but in fact they are realist fiction, in a Zola-esque sense of addressing the realities of the day in a completely frank manner. There is no allegorical machinery in 'War Fever'."

1991: Mississippi Review Vol. 20, No. 1-2 (1991)
Jeremy Lewis

The Kindness of Women is published.

1991: Writers In Conversation With Christopher Bigsby, Vol 1, EAS Publishing, University of East Anglia, Norwich, 2000. pp 72-86.
Christopher Bigsby
Bigsby: But is that what writing has been for you, a means of dealing with experience?
Ballard: I think so. I think, if you are an imaginative writer, your writing becomes much more than the exercise of a social skill. For the imaginative writer, particularly one with a very strong imagination, writing is -- or the exercise of the imagination is -- the way that one’s central nervous system deals with the universe and absorbs and digests experience on every level.

1991: Science Fiction Eye No. 8 (Winter 1991)
Paul Di Filippo
The written word is under threat, and has been for a long time, but is unique in a vital respect: a relationship of unparalleled closeness between reader and writer. Almost everything else -- film, drama, ballet, even painting and sculpture -- are produced by committees.

1991: Paris TV (February 1991)
Antoine de Caunes
French television, Paris (February 16, 1991); produced by Peter Stuart and Pascal Dupont; also shown in an English version entitled "Heroes," Channel 4 TV, London (March 8, 1991). It consisted of short interviews with Ballard and others on the subject of heroism in the modern world, edited for a programme fronted by Antoine de Caunes. Other interviewees included Benazir Bhutto, the Dalai Lama, Anthony Burgess, George Lucas, Bob Geldof, Alan Moore, Sting and Alvin Toffler. Text of Ballard's remarks transcribed by Bernard Sigaud and published in JGB News no. 20 (August 1993)

1991: Blitz Magazine (May 1991)
Unattributed
Generally, I think there will be a retreat by people from the external world, which will be very hazardous for all sorts of reasons, to the interior world of their own homes. The ordinary domestic home of the future will be transformed into something like a television studio. Everybody will have the most advanced video equipment. Found & transcribed by Mike Holliday

1991: Weekend Telegraph (July 13, 1991)
James Delingpole
I was appalled by the exterior of the Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery. It's the sort of kitsch exhibition architecture that belongs in Disneyland. I suppose we have the Prince of Wales to thank for it.

1991: The Bookseller (August 16, 1991)
Unattributed
"I chose my title to stress the very important role that women have played in my life in giving me, I hope, a positive view of the world and of the future. The world I've written about has on the whole been a violent one - which is what the world is. But most of that violence has been perpetrated by men. There are probably more women in this book than in all my previous books put together - certainly more sympathetic women."

1991: Interzone No. 51 and Million No. 5 (September 1991)
David Pringle
This interview is in the collection, but no permission has been given to reproduce it.

Waterstone's New Books Winter 1991 (n.d.: Autumn 1991?)

1991: The Guardian (September 5, 1991)
Clare Boylan
Ballard wrote his first creative work when he was 10 and a student at the Cathedral School in Shanghai. "The headmaster was an extremely tyrannical clergyman. He was always giving us lines from improving texts to write. One day I was given 30 pages of "Westward Ho" by Charles Kingsley to copy.

1991: Independent on Sunday (Sunday Review) (September 15, 1991)
Lynn Barber
When I first knew him in the Sixties, he was a familiar, but jolly peculiar, figure on the New Worlds (sci-fi magazine) or Arts Lab scene. He was older than most -- thirtysomething rather than twentysomething -- and rather obviously public-schooly and ex-RAF, whereas the other sci-fi writers were all beard-and-sandals brigade. He drank whisky while everyone else smoked pot, and often turned up with startlingly famous friends, such as Lucien Freud and Francis Bacon and Eduardo Paolozzi. (Freud did a very good portrait of him.) Found & transcribed by Mike Holliday

1991: The Observer (September 15, 1991)
Andrew Billen
"It is often said by readers that I use the same recurrent images," says Ballard, "drained swimming pools, abandoned hotels, crashed cars. Yet I've never thought twice about it. They've just been images that crowded into my mind without any invitation."

1991: The Independent (September 21, 1991)
Ian Thompson
Has The Kindness of Women, with its notable emotional softening, finally exorcised those lifelong obsessions? Submerged forests? Fantasies of desiccated urban technologies? "It's probably exorcised my whole life!", Ballard interposes with a gleeful cackle. "I hope this book will kick-start me into the 1990s with some completely new venture. You never know, I may even start writing light comedy in the manner of Noel Coward". I hope not; James Graham Ballard is a magician of the contemporary scene -- and almost certainly the only surrealist in Shepperton.

1991: The Sunday Times ["Books" section] (September 22, 1991)
Paul Pickering
When JG Ballard had his runaway literary success with "Empire of the Sun", he remarked that he couldn't be bothered to gentrify himself. He didn't. Seven years later the suburban house in Shepperton is exactly the same, although the brand new, silver spaceship of a car in the driveway looks as if it has been left by an interstellar joyrider. His latest book, "The Kindness of Women", an equally mesmeric and original sequel to the prize-winning account of a Japanese concentration-camp childhood, is just as disturbing.

Time Out (September 25, 1991)

1991: i-D Magazine No. 97 (October 1991)
Steve Beard
Ballard gazes beyond the open French windows at the scruffy luxuriance of long grass and flat light visible from his sitting room. Does he take a secret pleasure in offending the well-tended sensibilities of his bourgeois neighbours? Found & transcribed by Mike Holliday

1991: Scotland on Sunday (October 6, 1991)
Stuart Bathgate
"The 1960s - Swinging England and all that - didn't really get under way until about 1963, the same time as the Beatles," says Ballard. "In fact I date the start of the 1960s from the Kennedy assassination. We were all so outraged that Lee Harvey Oswald could kill this electronic prince."

1991: Blast! Magazine (November 1991)
Stan Nicholls
Even the narrator to some extent is fictitious. He's sort of an alternate me. It's very hard to separate the strands of fiction from reality in novels like ‘The Kindness Of Women’ or ‘Empire Of The Sun’; they are interwoven so closely you can't really disentangle them. There's no separation between the narrator and myself as far as that's concerned. Found & transcribed by Mike Holliday

1991: Sydney Morning Herald (November 2, 1991)
Peter Huck
It is a novel of compassionately observed human relationships, examining Ballard's marriage, his wife's tragic death, his experiences as a solo father, his subsequent sexual relationships and the lives of other camp survivors. Although he continues to explore his habitual obsessions with death, time and survival, The Kindness of Women also celebrates eroticism and the tender intimacies of domestic life. Throughout, it is women who emerge as the stronger sex. "Women were ruthless from an early age, and needed to be," writes Ballard. or it is this ruthlessness that guarantees their kindness.

1991: Telegraph Magazine (November 9, 1991)
Elizabeth Dunn
And here we come to the central paradox of Ballard's life: the privilege of his cushioned world was exchanged for a small room in a prison camp at Lunghua, and imprisonment released his soul. "It was absolutely the reverse of everything that I had ever known. I was part of a huge family of 2,000 people, to whom I had instant and easy access, and I spent all my time making the most of it."

1991: The Independent (December 16, 1991)
Danny Danziger
One doesn't want to sentimentalise these things, but they are part of the fabric of English life and they are admirable. It is sad that these admirable qualities are strait-jacketed into a class system that doesn't really give them full expression. The English cling to that strait-jacket, they are happy wearing it, now and then they pull down one or two zips and breathe a bit more deeply, but they are quite capable of pulling the zips up again.

Fantazia No. 18 (December 1991)

The Washington Post (January 7, 1992)

1992: International Herald Tribune (January 9, 1992)
David Streitfield
"What I don't want to do," says Ballard a bit petulantly, "is go through the whole book saying true, true, false, false, invented, true, true. Why should I?" The volume in question is titled The Kindness of Women. The newly published sequel to Empire of the Sun, Ballard's novelized account of his imprisonment in a Japanese camp during World War II, "Kindness" is about an English writer named Jim who is born in China, gets interned by the Japanese after Pearl Harbor, lives in Shepperton, becomes a writer, has a wife who dies after stumbling and hitting her head, has these obsessions, etc.

ABC Radio 24 Hours (January 1992)

1992: 21.C Magazine [Australian] No. 5 (Autumn [i.e. Spring] 1992)
Rick Slaughter
I don't think it matters at this stage of the game. I mean, I'm 60 years old, so the bulk of my work lies behind me on any reckoning. I have to have some kind of closing of accounts in my life as a writer, and it would have been dangerous, I think as you implied, to savor it in Empire of the Sun and The Kindness of Women 20 years ago. But at my present age, I don't think it makes any difference. In fact, it might be a liberating move. Found & transcribed by Mike Holliday

1992: The Lady Magazine (May 26-June 1, 1992)
Lindsay Fulcher
Where do you most like to live -- town or country?
I prefer where I live now, in suburbia, which is neither. It is where the most exciting things go on today, the biggest changes in lifestyle and consumer taste. Here in Shepperton, public imagination flourishes and the waves of the future break.

Urania [Italian] No. 1191 (November 1992)

1992: The Hardcore [fanzine] No. 8 (no date; December 1992?)
Phil Halper & Lard Iyer

1993: Albedo One [fanzine, Dublin] No. 2 (Autumn 1993)
Pat Quigley
Autobiographies tend to be written from the perspective of maturity with the benefit of hindsight, by people who are able to weigh their lives on some sort of moral scales, and chart the overall direction of their lives in retrospect. I didn't want to do that, because I wasn't sure what my life would weigh in any sense of scales and also, by writing a work of fiction you can dramatise the immediate present with the maximum emotional force and engage the sympathies of the reader.

1994: The Independent Magazine (January 29, 1994)
Unattributed
This interviews is from a series titled "Where did you get that?" This time JGB discusses his Delvaux paintings.

Rushing To Paradise is published.

1994: The Sunday Telegraph ["Review" section] (March 20, 1994)
Frances Welch
The idea of an approaching death poses no threat to his atheism. "The self I now occupy will be obliterated. It's a daunting prospect, but not daunting enough for me to create a trapdoor through which I can swing to safety."

1994: The Guardian (August 7, 1994)
Andrew Billen
Perhaps the best thing about visiting JG Ballard is getting a chance to marvel at his house, a peeling semi-detached in Shepperton with a yellow front door blistered from the 30 summers he has lived there. It makes no concessions to celebrity, fashion, cleanliness, the money he made out of the film of Empire Of The Sun or, indeed, anything else. It is utterly true to its owner, who, at 63, is not only the same age as it but judging by his gappy, stained grin is wearing about as well.

1994: The Evening Standard (September 8, 1994)
Will Self

1995: KGB Magazine (1995)
Lukas Barr

1995: World Art Magazine [Newark, New Jersey] (January 1995)
Nicholas Zurbrugg

1995: Sci-Fi Universe (April 1995)
Andrew Asch
Ballard still holds views that are far beyond the pale of many people. “I think that there should be more pornography around,” says Ballard. “It might even be necessary to make it compulsory, but not the criminal end of it.” Found & transcribed by Mike Holliday

1995: Kulture Deluxe Magazine
James Call
I noticed that famous people who died in car crashes, their deaths had a resonance that wasn't present in the case of famous people who died in, say, plane crashes or hotel fires, or whatever. The car did lend a certain sort of drama and mystery. Found & transcribed by Mike Holliday

1995: Spike Magazine (November 1995)
Marcus Moure
Ballard is one of the best writers of speculative fiction alive today. Whether exploring the innate sexuality of automobile accidents, the power of dreams as reality, or navigating through the rubble of modern civilization, his often savage, apocalyptic work has influenced artists and filmmakers alike. Ballard himself counts among his influences the surrealist painters Dali, Magritte, and Ernst, as well as William Burroughs, whom he considers to be one of the most important authors of the twentieth century.

Newsday ["Fanfare" section] (May 21, 1995)

Probable Cause: A Literary Revue [Miami] (Summer 1995)

1995: The Sunday Express (August 20, 1995)
Unattributed
[Q] What do you remember most about VJ Day?
[JGB] The sudden disappearance of the Japanese guards from the civilian prison camp at Lunghua, near Shanghai, and the silent skies empty of American bombers.

Les Inrockuptibles [sic: French magazine] (November 15, 1995)

1995: Magazine Litteraire [French] No. 338 (December 1995)
Robert Louit
This interview is in the collection but is untranslated.

Cocaine Nights is published.

1996: Scotland on Sunday ["Spectrum" section] (January 7, 1996)
Gillian Ferguson
"The English middle-classes are trapped too as they find themselves sitting at one end of the lifeboat around the captain who holds the tiller in one hand and a large revolver in the other, but at the other end of the lifeboat are the shivering third class passengers who are not sure whether the captain knows where he's sailing the lifeboat but daren't move forwards."

1996: The Scotsman Magazine (January 9, 1996)
Pat Kane
The imaginative world of Ballard -- where nude old men videotape their own deaths; where forensic doctors organise their own atrocity exhibitions; where black is white, and evil is transparent -- sits so strangely with this clubbable Cambridge grandad, ensconced in his cosy semi, passing out whisky and sodas.

1996: SFX No. 9 (February 1996)
David Pringle
This interview is in the collection, but no permission has been given to reproduce it.

1996: Interzone No. 106 (April 1996)
David Pringle
This interview is in the collection, but no permission has been given to reproduce it.

1996: Sunday Times (May 12, 1996)
John Harlow
Ballard's views will intensify the debate over screen violence. The move to “suppress” Crash follows controversies including the release on video of Natural Born Killers, which has been suspended, and Kids, which depicts under-age sex and has been refused distribution by the Warner chain of cinemas in Britain.

1996: The Guardian (May 20, 1996)
Jonathan Romney
"The film's all about dealing with mortality. I always do this in my films, it's a rehearsal for my own death to see what my characters do with theirs. They've eroticised death, and that's their triumph. It's a good trick to pull off if you can do it."

1996: Telegraph Magazine (September 14, 1996)
Mick Brown
In 1969 [sic] the author J. G. Ballard staged an exhibition at the Arts Lab in London on the theme of “crashed cars”. The exhibition consisted simply of three cars, towed from the wrecker's yard and placed under spotlights; no text, no accompanying photographs, no explanations. “I wanted to confirm my suspicions,” Ballard says, “that there was something about the car crash that had never been looked at before.” The effect, he says, was electrifying.

1996: Guardian Lecture, British Film Institute, London (November 10, 1996)
Chris Rodley

1996: Seconds Magazine No. 40
George Petros
Within the fact packed pages of his speculative fiction, James Graham Ballard killed more people and caused more damage than anyone. His dystopian dramas employ catastrophe as a catalyst for the evolution of characters. Ultimately, his victims adapt, learning to groove with it, whatever it may be -- however deadly, however devious. Other writers have obliterated most of the human race, but silver linings exist around their dark clouds of destruction - otherwise, from what vantage point would they write? Ballard doesn't have that problem -- he's out of the picture. Found & transcribed by Mike Holliday

1996: Ballardian [website] (October 12, 2007)
Damien Love

1996: Index Magazine No. 5 (November 1996)
Peter Halley & Bob Nickas
I have always made a strong defense of the imagination, partly because I'm an imaginative novelist. And what I loathe and detest is the bourgeois novel that totally subsumes itself within reality and accepts the everydayness of life. The poets and writers that I most admire are those who try to remake our world in a more meaningful way. The Surrealists, of course, are first and foremost.

1996: Unpublished
John Hughes
What someone like Barbara Rafferty, and this is true in real life, they keep needing to up the anti, to raise the stakes. The extreme hypothesis is never satisfying itself. They’ve always got to go one step further; otherwise they’re terrified of sinking into banality and the mundane. Barbara Rafferty is constantly upping the stakes, constantly testing herself and everyone around her to the limit. Now, this is the whole point. There is no agenda strictly speaking.

1997: Frieze Magazine
Ralph Rugoff
Well, I think the unconscious collisions between the primary psychic drives are now transferred into the world of consumer design. The car, of course, has to embody contradictions between safety and fashion. Its interior has to be a cosy extension of the home, whereas all those blinking red lights and gauges signal danger. You don’t have to look very far to understand its appeal.

1997: Artforum Magazine Vol. XXXV, No. 7 (March 1997)
Andrew Hultrans
What “Crash” does -- it's particularly noticeable in the film -- is remove the moral framework that reassures the spectator that these horrific scenes are, in fact, constrained within some system of moral value. And I think that unsettles people, because they ask questions -- I mean, “Do the filmmaker and the writer really believe that auto wrecks are erotically stimulating?” Found & transcribed by Mike Holliday

1997: Fine Line Features (March, 1997)
Unattributed
Yes, I still think people are shocked by Crash, but it doesn't take them as long to realize what the book is trying to say. I think its message is as valid as ever -- probably more valid because there are more cars! There's a whole motorway culture around the world.

1997: The New Yorker (March 17, 1997)
Tom Shone
Lunch with Ballard is a distinctly nerve-racking affair. He is a model of good-humored geniality, but his volume level when he is broaching such topics as the possible eroticism of car-crash wounds takes no heed whatsoever of surrounding diners. Next to us, a family of four make increasingly unenthusiastic progress through their Sunday roast; instead, they're huddling over it in whispered conference: Who on earth is this man? The answer is simple: like it or not, they’ve been seated beside Britain's only living prose surrealist.

1997: Dazed & Confused Magazine (June, 1997)
Chris Rodley

1997: Salon Magazine (September 7, 1997)
Richard Kadrey and Suzanne Stefanac

1997: Ballardian (October 7, 2005)
Simon Sellars

1997: Spike Magazine (November, 1997)
Chris Hall
One week before David Cronenberg's Crash opened in the UK at the beginning of June, the normally reclusive author J.G. Ballard appeared at a regional press conference and pre-screening of the film in Wardour Street, London. Cronenberg's film is based on Ballard's 1973 novel of the same title, and the controversy surrounding Crash has brought Ballard back into the public eye to defend a film which he sees as a hauntingly accurate depiction of the book he wrote nearly a quarter century ago.

1998: Sunday Times (February 1, 1998)
Unattributed
[Q] With which character do you most identify?
[JGB] Meursault in Camus's Outsider. A boring afternoon, a beach and a gun.

1998: Prospect No. 33 (August/September 1998)
Jason Cowley
I found this very interesting 1998 article/interview on the website of one Jason Cowley, a journalist, cultural critic and editor in the UK. He is an editor and writer on the Observer, contributing editor of the New Statesman, and is soon to become the new editor of Granta. JG is his usual erudite self: "Yet surely the radical imagination is what we seek in a writer; when we read we want to encounter a very different world that will make sense of our own."

1998: Disturb Ezine (1998)
Jean-Paul Coillard
You said once that your first short story, "Escapement", was, except for the fantasy aspect, a good description of your first year of wedding; can we find the same thing that you lived, adapted for two brothers in Cocaine Nights? In other terms, was Cocaine Nights a way to describe or transcend your feelings about yourself and your brother?

1998: BBC Radio 3 (November 11, 1998)
David Gale
J.G. Ballard writes about the collisions between people and a world transformed by technology. In the 1970s he wrote the novel Crash, recently filmed by David Cronenberg, in which his protagonists derived erotic satisfaction from car crashes. Other works, such as The Atrocity Exhibition, High Rise and most recently Cocaine Nights, explore a territory in which the self is splintered and invaded by a myth-ridden mediascape that has eclipsed the real world.

1998: Unknown source. Reprinted in The London Magazine: A Review of Literature and the Arts (February/March 2003), pp. 36-44
Zinovy Zinik

1999: Sunday Times Magazine (March 7, 1999)
Unattributed
"The reason I didn't continue as a doctor was that I wanted to be a writer; I had so much to write about. My time in the dissecting room has given me an enormous fund of images and ideas and metaphors that I've fed into my fiction. Some people have criticised me for being a bit too clinical about the human body. But I think one consequence of spending two years dissecting it is that you have no illusions about it."

1999: The Art Newspaper (July 1, 1999)
William Feaver
To a packed auditorium, the internationally renowned novelist J.G. Ballard talked with William Feaver about the artists and works of art that had had a significant impact on him.

Super-Cannes is published.

2000: The Good Book Guide (September, 2000)
John Sutherland
I first visited the South of France in 1947, and I've spent a lot of time there over the years, and seen it change from an old-fashioned playground of casinos and luxury hotels into something close to Europe's silicon valley -- science parks and conference hotels, airports and autoroutes. The people sharing the hotel lift with you are probably thoracic surgeons or Chrysler dealers. It's the way I see the future -- endless gated communities, high technology taking the place of human relationships, and a deep unconscious boredom.

2000: The Daily Express (September 23, 2000)
Edward Docx
Ballard's "latest dish", it should be said, is truly superb. Indeed, Super-Cannes (published earlier this month) is being hailed by many as the best book he has written. Detailing events in Eden-Olympia, a giant business park in France, the story achieves the optimum balance of perfectly wrought lucid thriller writing with the formidable and pervasive intelligence of implied commentary.

2000: King's Parade newsletter (Autumn, 2000)
Alison Carter
"You're welcome to ring me about my memories of King's -- though to be honest those memories are probably more hostile than the usual bland tosh published in the King's College magazine," Ballard wrote in reply to my letter. "I didn't enjoy my time there and thought the whole place deeply provincial and second rate. I hope the place has changed, though I doubt it -- it sounds like the same very twee middle-class finishing school, deeply flattering to all those state-school entrants deluded into thinking that they've cracked the system. And from what I've seen, Cambridge itself is a vast science park with a pseudo-gothic heritage centre crammed with mystified Japanese tourists."

2000: Spike Magazine (November 1, 2000)
Chris Hall
"The main theme of Super-Cannes," he says, "is that in order to keep us happy and spending more as consumers then capitalism is going to have to tap rather more darker strains in our characters, which is of course what's been happening for a while. If you look at the way in which the more violent contact sports are marketed - American Football, wrestling, boxing - and of course the most violent entertainment culture of all, the Hollywood film, all these have tapped into the darker side of human nature in order to keep the juices of appetites flowing. That is the risk."

2001: Night Waves BBC Radio 3 (October 30, 2001)
Richard Coles
JGB: I think there's something about the intensity of the short story, it's very obsessive in the way it tackles whatever the situation may be — a single theme usually, and comparatively few characters who don't need to be developed. You can take a single mood and focus on it, almost in the way the scientist focuses on something down through the lens of a microscope. I think that fits into my particular temperament, which is a mix of, sort of, the obsessive and roving imagination.

2001: The Literary Review (2001)
Sebastian Shakespeare
Shakespeare: How did you dream up the ideas of sonic statues, psychotropic houses and singing flowers? Did you derive any of your conceits from hallucinogens?
Ballard: Pure imagination, the most potent hallucinogen of all.
Found & transcribed by Mike Holliday

2001: The Times (November 8, 2001)
Giles Whittell
"You get into a lift in Nice or Cannes and the people next to you are Volvo dealers or heart surgeons, literally. All the big hotels are year-round conference hotels and there's a huge infrastructure of science parks and motorways and airports. It's goodbye F. Scott Fitzgerald, sadly." And hello to what he calls "the directorial class; the share-options brigade".

2002: BBC Radio 4 (February 3, 2002)
James Naughtie
I think the character of Jim is fairly true to, you know, the boy that I was. The whole point of the book, really, is that — he's learning to love the war. Because the war represents security, and that's a, sort of, nightmare truth about war. And however unpleasant things are, people get used to it, and they begin to rely on it — even people in prison camps, people under enormous physical and mental pressure. You know, it's the Stockholm syndrome in a kind of way, you begin to love your captors because they represent security. I think there's a strong element of that in Jim's character. Text transcribed by Mike Bonsall

2002: Meridian Masterpiece BBC World Service, (February 14, 2002)
Harriett Gilbert
I'm never happier than when writing about drained swimming pools. There's something about them that touches a deep nerve. It may derive from my wartime experiences, as the Europeans abandoned their houses in Shanghai the swimming pools began to drain, and many were emptied during the war. I used to go round these empty houses after the war, and really there is a certain sort of melancholy beauty about these huge, empty pools. There's something about a drained swimming pool that suggests the end of an epoch, the end of a season. I think I thought of water really as a medium of, you know, of transformation. Text transcribed by Mike Bonsall.

Millennium People is published.

2003: The Observer (January 19, 2003)
Chloe Diski
One should love outside one's own head. I believe that the tongue is just as important as other organs. If you have an appetite for food, you'll have an appetite for sex. I'm always suspicious of people who lack an appetite and I admire people with strong appetites. However, now I'm 72 I don't eat a great deal and,l et's say, my tastes have simplified. It is a matter of metabolism, and I'm bored. I've eaten everything.

2003: Beck's Futures 2003 Art Exhibition Catalogue London (2003)
Hans-Ulrich Obrist

2003: The Guardian (Saturday September 6, 2003)
Susie Mackenzie
The benign catastrophist. When JG Ballard moved to his house in Shepperton in 1960, it was a rural idyll, "The spirit of Stanley Spencer's nearby Cookham seemed to preside over the splash meadows." Now, Shepperton has caught up with him, he says; its present has come to resemble his own imagination. A forest of TV aerials block out the poplars and church spires. Multistorey car parks have risen "like the megaliths of a future Stonehenge". The M3 has arrived. The whole place is, he has said, like a suburb of London airport. And much better for it, in his view.

2003: The Independent on Sunday (September 14, 2003)
John Walsh
Millennium People is set right where I live. It's not about expatriates living on the Mediterranean. It's about my own people, the English middle class, having to cope with the world of 2003 and not liking it. For the first time, they're refusing to accept the unwritten contract into which their class entered about 150 years ago, when their ancestor formed the first great British bureaucracies. And they're rebelling simply because they feel ruthlessly exploited.

2003: The South China Morning Post (September 21, 2003)
David Wilson
Ballard says he felt safe sharing a tiny room in the camp with his parents, who had run a cotton business. He "ran wild and had a wonderful time". Only as an adult did he appreciate the threat. "I look back now and think: God, the things that went on there."

2003: The Sunday Telegraph (September 21, 2003)
Emily Bearn
"Fifty years ago, a degree guaranteed you a job for life and a certain standard of living. But that's not true any more. People in middle management are forced into early retirement and the polls reveal huge levels of dissatisfaction. The traditional privileges of the middle classes are no longer there. My characters are extreme cases, but the book anticipates what happens when middle-class dissatisfaction reaches crisis point."

2003: Night Waves BBC Radio 3 (October 3, 2003)
Philip Dodd
JGB: Ten or 15 years ago I went to Chelsea Harbour, which is a much more upmarket, purpose-built enclave of luxury flats and townhouses, and looking around it I remember thinking this is a stage set. The whole thing was engineered on the drawing board, including, I suspect, a sort of psychology of the place — and if it's a stage set the fact remains that the scenery could be moved at a moment's notice. Looking around one can imagine something going wrong here. Text transcribed by Mike Bonsall

2003: Book Club BBC Radio 4 (October, 2003)
Mariella Frostrup
I've been at it now for a long time — whatever it is, 40 years — and people have always accused me of being very humourless as a writer, and I've genuinely been surprised by that. I mean, I think there's a great deal of humour in Millennium People — some of it's pretty deadpan. I'd like to just say that I never poke fun at the middle-classes, I take them seriously, and I take their complaints seriously — but of course there is something inherently comic about the idea of a middle-class revolution. Text transcribed by Mike Bonsall.

2003: The Age (November 1, 2003)
Zulfikar Abbany
'It's pretty difficult to get peoples' backs up these days. We're so... anesthetised." He may laugh, but it's a serious consideration for the 73-year-old British author, J.G. (James Graham) Ballard. Since his entry into the world of fiction, particularly science-fiction, in the late 1950s, Ballard has got plenty of backs up.

2003: The Guardian (Monday, December 22, 2003)
Tania Branigan
“It goes with the whole system of hereditary privilege and rank, which should be swept away. It uses snobbery and social self-consciousness to guarantee the loyalty of large numbers of citizens who should feel their loyalty is to fellow citizens and the nation as a whole. We are a deeply class-divided society."

2004: Spike Magazine (January 1, 2004)
Chris Hall
Millennium People is the last in a trilogy of detective thrillers – along with Cocaine Nights and Super-Cannes – to examine what might happen when all we have left as an ideology is consumerism. "People resent the fact that the most moral decision in their lives is choosing what colour the next car will be," he says witheringly. "All we've got left is our own psychopathology. It's the only freedom we have – that's a dangerous state of affairs."

2004: The Guardian (June 22, 2004)
Jeanette Baxter

2004: Ballardian (August 15, 2004)
Dan Mitchell and Simon Ford

2005: Arthur Magazine (February 15, 2005)
V. Vale
From his home in Shepperton, J.G. Ballard wonders over the phone with V.Vale of RE/Search if there is something fundamentally flawed about the American take on reality. This interview was excerpted from J.G. Ballard Interviews. It and sister volume J.G. Ballard Quotations are now available from Re/Search Publications at www.researchpubs.com Chuckle along as JGB toasts George Dubya.

2005: Ballardian (June 24, 2008)
Evelyn Finger

Kingdom Come is published.

2006: Ballardian (August 12, 2008)
Mark Goodall

2006: tobylitt.com (July 10, 2006)
Toby Litt
Because consumerism makes inherent demands, it has inherent needs, which can only be satisfied by pressing the accelerator down a little harder, moving a little faster, upping all the antes, and this could, you know… In order to keep spending and keep believing, we need to move into the area of the psychopathic. That's the fear.

2006: The Australian (September 9, 2006)
Murray Waldren
Which brings us to consumerism, ''the glue holding the whole damn society together''. It's the message underlying Kingdom Come, which is set in a town bordering the M25, part of the new England that has been built in the past 20 to 30 years, he says, of housing estates, business parks, industrial complexes. But they're a kind of wilderness because they have no churches, no libraries, no civic life to hold anything together. As one character says in the book, the cultural high spot is the local Indian takeaway.

2006: The Independent Arts & Book Review (September 15, 2006)
Marianne Brace
According to Ballard, however, "Life is filled with surrealist moments, if we only saw them... Human beings," he adds, "are the only members of the animal kingdom whose normal state of mind is pretty close to madness." As a boy, he witnessed much violence. He became distrustful of conventional reality. "I realised that what we think of as conventional reality -- this quiet suburban street, for instance -- is just a stage set that can be swept away."

2006: Ballardian (September 20, 2006)
Robert McCrum

2006: Ballardian (September 29, 2006)
Simon Sellars

2007: Das Science Fiction Jahr 2007
(Translated for Ballardian May 17, 2008)
Werner Fuchs and Sascha Mamczak
Originally published in German as, ‘George W. Bush möchte ich nun wirklich nicht ficken!’ in Das Science Fiction Jahr 2007, eds. Sascha Mamczak and Wolfgang Jeschke (Heyne, 2007). "I’ve only really written one ‘realistic’ novel: Empire of the Sun. No, I think they belong to another literary tradition, one which goes back to Sade and which was carried on by writers like Genet or Celine. The bad boys of literature, if you like. An extraordinarily powerful tradition that deals with truths people don’t want to hear." Translated by Dan O'Hara.

2007: Crash Magazine (No 43, Autumn, 2007)
Yann Perreau
The shooting in Kingdom Come wasn't irrational. The gunman wanted to kill the TV presenter, and then tried to shoot the teddy bears. But we live so passively in the West that all violent acts seem crazily disproportionate. Set fire to a car in a suburb and it seems like the Kennedy assassination.

2007: Ballardian (December 7, 2007)
Alexander Gutzmer

Miracles of Life is published.

2008: Ballardian (February 7, 2008)
Philip Dodd

2008: The Guardian (June 14, 2008)
James Campbell
Visitors to JG Ballard's semi-detached domain in Shepperton, beyond the far reaches of suburban west London, experience a sense of stepping through the looking glass. As a writer, Ballard is the ultimate urbanist, the master blender of technology and desire. In his front room, seated at a large oak table that supports a typewriter, he rhapsodises "the motorway, this road with no light that says STOP, the view through the windshield, the cross-patterns of chromium and glass that beckon you towards a better world..."