J. G. Ballard and RAL

Three special treats of this ‘Little Golden Age’ were Cordwainer Smith, J.G. Ballard, and Arthur C. Clarke. Well, Smith died and Ballard lost a bit of his fine hand after a bit, but these were still the great treats. There was a sort of magic winking and blinking in half-a-dozen places. It would be hard to extinguish all those new and elegant sources, though it would be attempted. — “The Case of the Moth-Eaten Magician”

J.G. BALLARD A beach without an ocean yet, A cartless horse, a plotless prating. A dogless tail, guitarless fret, Oh why, oh why's he fascinating?

This may be my favorite of Lafferty’s testy verse squibs about other science fiction writers. Against expectation, Lafferty respected Ballard. The more I think about it, the more that respect makes sense. Lafferty’s quarrel with most science fiction was that it was thin stuff: mechanically optimistic, materialist, prose-deaf, dead to spiritual pain, prone to cheap heroics, and often eager for political self-congratulation or political pandering. If these are the tests, Ballard fails almost none of them. Lafferty’s usual contempt for science-fiction people therefore has little purchase on Ballard.

More positively, Ballard and Lafferty share an apocalyptic temperament. Both write as though the modern world is already a ruin, or about to dissolve. Ballard has his drowned and crystallized landscapes; Lafferty’s worlds come apart at the seams because they were provisional experiments pointing toward Prime. Both reject the arrow of reductive progress. Both are scorpion-like moralists. Both think real catastrophe ought to be real revelation. To a Catholic eschatological imagination, Ballard’s instinct that disaster is what the psyche secretly wants is recognizable, even where the theology divagates.

They are also both writers of transformation rather than adventure. They care less about problem-solving heroes than about what the world means and what it is becoming. Both have powerful prose styles, and both are willing to be outré, to follow an inner logic beyond standard-issue plausibility. Lafferty could respect craft seriousness even where he did not share belief. Someone ought to work this vein, because Ballard is one of Lafferty’s most interesting interlocutors. Lafferty’s oh why is not cuteness but a profound question that says something about his own inner space.