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Back in the days of HG Wells’ War of the Worlds, aliens, with their “intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic” could be seen as a warning against one of the great threats of the looming 20th century: letting pure intellect dominate, and lead us into our own technologically-flavoured destruction. Midway through the century, an alien of a different type (Klaatu by name) turned up to issue a more direct warning against blowing ourselves up, as though to say, “You just don’t get it, do you?” Later still, in the post-Morning of the Magicians/Chariots of the Gods? 70s and 80s, when aliens came not to invade us, they were still often remote (2001), weird (Close Encounters of the Third Kind) or at least impressed by our capacity to feel emotions (Starman).

But here we are in the 21st century, and it’s a sorry state of affairs when aliens come along to remind us how to be human.

I went to see Disclosure Day the day after the current president of the United States hosted an Ultimate Fighting Championship night in the White House, so the opening scene of Steven Spielberg’s latest dip into alien lore—a wrestling match in which one contestant breaks a chair on his opponent’s head while the crowd eggs him on to further showy violence—couldn’t help but feel like a political statement. Is this, Spielberg seems to be asking, America today: a baying crowd driven to distraction by a trumped-up fight while the world teeters on the brink of environmental instability and World War III, and meanwhile a shady organisation that somehow blurs the distinction between a tech company and a government agency is responsible for incarcerating and mistreating immigrants (of the interstellar variety, but immigrants all the same)…?

If it needs to be made any more explicit, we’re told at one point (slight spoiler) that Disclosure Day’s aliens regard empathy as an important evolutionary advance—a direct riposte, I assume, to a certain trillionaire’s assertion that the same quality is “the fundamental weakness of Western civilisation”. (Elsewhere, footage of dead or injured Close Encounters-style aliens, with their emaciated bodies and overlarge heads, surrounded by various flavours of the uniformed military, can’t help recall images of the victims of Nazi concentration camps…)

It’s a pity, then, that Disclosure Day is such a mess. The story (though not the script) is by Spielberg himself, and I can’t help feeling the “story” in question was more a wish-list of scenes and ideas, which had to be knocked up into some sort of a narrative. Can we have crop circles, please? Just the one. It doesn’t have to mean anything in the narrative, but just be there for a brief attempt at a sense of wonder (though it comes off more as a tired joke)…? It is, in this way, the film of a true believer, who feels he has to include everything, rather than pick only what serves a well-honed story.

On the way, Spielberg gets to fake some archival UFO/alien footage, which I’m sure is already, in some sectors of the internet, being claimed to be actual alien footage, snuck into a Hollywood film both against the government’s wishes (the government, of course, never watching Hollywood films) while also being a government-sanctioned plot to prepare us for the real disclosure day (the government, of course, being in secret control of Hollywood films) which will happen any day now. (No, now. No… now. Alright, but soon.)

Ever since Klaatu assumed the name of Carpenter in The Day the Earth Stood Still, the line between aliens and angels/saviours/gods (or, as von Däniken would have it, Gods?) has been somewhat blurred, but here the blurring is more slapdash than subtle. On the one hand, Spielberg spends a rather contrived scene assuring his viewers that a belief in aliens isn’t incompatible with traditional faiths, then he undermines it by having people treat our touched-by-the-aliens protagonists with religious awe. (Why should technologically more advanced beings be thought of as spiritually superior? If my neighbour has a better iPhone than me, is he holier? Does being guided by AI make a war any more spiritual? Or make the Buddah, not having a digital watch, any less?) There’s too much demand on the aliens in this film to be everything Spielberg wants them to be.

But I don’t think it’s the point of Disclosure Day to make sense. Its point it to thrust a lot of stuff at us—Steven Spielberg sense-of-wonder stuff (though it’s nowhere near as sense-of-wonder-ish as Close Encounters)—while making a broad point about empathy at a time when the world could really do with a reminder that such a thing exists.

There’s a push to see Disclosure Day at the cinema, but I have to say, it doesn’t really do much in the big-screen wow-ing visuals department. Worth watching on your home TV (if for no other reason than you can pause it to take a loo break, because it’s over two hours long), but not, I’d say, if you’re up for a wholly satisfying story—more if you’re happy with a dip into the realms of conspiracy culture (or are a believer, in which case it’s probably a delight), plus an occasionally moving reminder of what it means for people to perhaps, maybe, sometimes, be nice to each other, have hope in the future, and get together to turn things around generally.

If you want to learn about the life of JG Ballard, there are plenty of sources. There’s Ballard’s own writings on the subject, which includes both memoir (Miracles of Life) and fiction (Empire of the Sun and The Kindness of Women), which might be grouped together as self-mythologising (which I don’t intend as a negative term). Then there’s David Pringle’s detailed chronology (currently spread across ten or so volumes of the Deep Ends anthology, and really in need of standalone publication), the John Baxter biography The Inner Man from 2021, and now The Illuminated Man: Life, Death and the Worlds of J G Ballard by Christopher Priest and Nina Allan.

When The Illuminated Man was first announced (at that point, it was only to be by Priest), I felt there was a certain amount of relief that Ballard would be getting a respectable biography, as Baxter’s book had attracted a certain amount of criticism (not least from Ballard’s daughters) for factual inaccuracies and a general misrepresentation of Ballard’s character (as, Edmund Gordon writes in a review of The Illuminated Man in The New Statesman, “a racist, sexist, mendacious creep, beset by alcohol problems and ‘psychotic tendencies’”—though that wasn’t the impression I came away from it with). This, then, was to be a more acceptable, hopefully more scholarly—if less gossipy (though it’s good to have both)—biography, presumably to be written with the collusion of Ballard’s estate (and, crucially, his daughters).

(I have to say that, at the time, I was quite grateful to read The Inner Man—always taking its speculations about Ballard’s psychology with the same grain of salt I’d bring to any biography. It was, for me, the first take on Ballard’s life I’d read that wasn’t by Ballard himself, and so was a welcome second perspective. Baxter had, for instance, clearly spoken to many of the other people involved, so that second perspective wasn’t only his own. And I couldn’t help feeling its dips into gossip and anecdote were a welcome contrast, a circus tent set up outside the crystalline pagoda of Ballard’s own powerful self-mythologising. Where else would I have got to read the story of Ballard buying The Who’s “Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere” and saying he preferred it played at 33rpm (as opposed to the faster 45rpm, presumably)? I even think Baxter’s might have been a biography Ballard would have enjoyed—had it, that is, been written about anyone but himself! After all, Ballard had good things to say about Baxter’s biographies of Steven Spielberg—“Baxter is a shrewd, witty and very readable writer”—and Woody Allen—“astute and entertaining”.)

Sadly, though, that idea of The Illuminated Man wasn’t to be. Priest fell ill and died before the book was finished. His partner (and, later, wife) Nina Allan has finished it but made two crucial decisions that fundamentally affected its character. First, Priest’s version of the book has been left unedited, even when some chapters clearly feel like they were written by a man of flagging energies. Second, Allan has taken this opportunity to write about Priest’s final illness and death in some detail. Which is understandable, considering what she and he must have been through, but I have to confess I skipped those chapters. The result is an unblended mix of straightforward biography and memoir about two different people. (In fact, the book makes most sense regarding the biographical chapters about Ballard as materials offered to support the memoir covering Priest’s illness and death.)

Christopher Priest’s portions of The Illuminated Man seem strongest, to me, in their critical comments on Ballard’s fiction. For instance, this:

“‘The Voices of Time’, we soon discover, is a story that does not give up its secrets. If there is a plot, an underlying purpose, it constantly evades the reader. Instead, every page, every paragraph, seems charged with meaning, never clarified, never given the benefit of cause and effect. The reader is cast alone. If obscurity is art, here we find it—but ‘The Voices of Time’ is not obscure.”

That’s the sort of thing I want from critical writing: it makes me want to return to the story, and gives me permission to feel confused as to what it’s presenting. Accept the confusion and bathe in the meaning, Priest is saying. Good advice.

Allan’s are (necessarily) the more complete sections, whether biographical (thanks to her interviewing the people involved where possible) or critical (her comments on Ballard’s final novels, for instance, make me want to give them another—or in some cases a first—go).

Towards the end of the book, Allan asks, of biographies: “Are we reading to confirm that our hero really was a hero, or to discover that they were secretly a monster?” For me, it’s neither. I never look for writers I admire to be heroes—certainly not saints—because that’s plainly only going to end in disappointment. What I want is to get a glimpse of the human being behind it all. Ballard was, both in interviews and on the page, an impressive man, but not the sort to ever admit to, say, playing The Who at the wrong rpm, which is, frankly, the sort of thing I want to read! The Illuminated Man provided a better example though, when Allan looks at a rare Ballard notebook for a novel he never completed (he destroyed all such preparatory materials once a book was finished). Seeing him, in his notes, trying out ideas and asking himself questions, feels like a wonderfully humanising moment, a side of him that never comes through in his interviews and writing.

As I say, I think of Ballard’s own writing on his life as self-mythologising, but I don’t mean to imply he’s covering up the truth; rather, he’s coming up with the version of events that best expresses how those events felt to him—how he experienced them, what they meant to him—which is a crucial difference (especially when those events are so intimately entangled with his fiction). We all alter the facts of our lives to fit an evolving inner story—unconsciously streamlining them to bring out the meaning they have for us. It’s only when it’s someone gets a proper biography written about them that this really comes to the fore. In a sense, Ballard’s version of his own life, as presented in both the novels and the memoir is the core of his whole body of fiction, which might all be understood as a complex response to traumatic events and times, an attempt to make meaning out of often disparate events, ideas, experiences. Having this myth brought up against the facts does not invalidate the myth, but emphasises its artistry.

Ballard himself provides an example. In Empire of the Sun, young Jim is separated from his parents for the duration of his internment by the Japanese; in reality, as Ballard admitted, he was with his parents the whole time. But, he said, he made the change because when he was in the camp, his parents were no longer the ones who had control over his life—they couldn’t punish or reward, and were busy being revealed as all-too-human beings, in a sudden change from their former lofty distance. They were, in a sense, no longer parents (just as Ballard was abruptly shunted into no longer being a child). Jim’s being separated from his parents in Empire, Ballard said, was how it felt, hence the myth, the fiction. (Thus also fitting it into the standard fairy tale trope of children thrown out into the wild alone.)

I don’t know if The Illuminated Man can really be a replacement for Baxter’s The Inner Man. At one point Allan castigates Baxter for presenting unattributed information, but on the same page (p. 199) she has a block quote that is itself unattributed. (Maybe that was a publisher’s error.) She mentions Ballard’s family’s unhappiness with Baxter’s book, which was in part due to his sometimes overplayed speculations on Ballard’s psychology, but Allan then goes on to speculate whether Ballard would have remained faithful to his wife, had she survived, which seems, to me, on the same level.

But that’s what biographies do. I only know Ballard through his fiction, interviews, and other writings, and I like to learn about his life as a sort of accompaniment to the writing. I’ll keep The Illuminated Man on my shelves, but it’s probably The Inner Man I’ll refer to first when I need to, if only because it’s in chronological order. (The Illuminated Man, for instance, has a chapter on Ballard’s novel Hello America after the one on The Empire of the Sun, and a chapter on the early Vermillion Sands stories after the chapter on Crash. If nothing else, this leaves out the connecting tissue: what was Ballard doing before and between these books?)

Ballard was evidently a complex man—that sort of fiction wouldn’t come from someone who wasn’t. In a way, his fiction arrived pre-analysed (though in a distinctively Ballardian fashion), and it begs for other takes, going deeper, and seeing things Ballard himself didn’t highlight. It’s an infinitely rich body of work—as, no doubt, was the man himself, and the myth he created.

I’ll end with something from Nina Allan on Ballard the man:

“…listening to him talk—the tone of his voice, the clarity of his thinking, the whole vast hinterland of memory and intellect that lies behind the words he speaks has an immediacy and power that exceeds any number of pages filled with third party speculation and literary analysis.”

But it’s good to have the third party speculation and literary analysis all the same.

Bug Jack Barron is one of those novels you keep hearing mentioned if you read about the history of science fiction, particularly the New Wave that revolutionised the genre’s literary palette in the late 60s and early 70s. It was initially published in Michael Moorcock’s New Worlds between December 1967 and October 1968 (which, if you don’t have your countercultural periodical publication frequency calculator handy, is six instalments), but the novel’s liberal use of swearing, drug use, and sex caused WHSmith, the largest magazine distributor and vendor in the country at the time, to refuse to stock its March 1968 issue, after which (because New Worlds had an Arts Council grant) “questions were asked” in the House of Commons. (Which you can read here. It’s quite short and mild and, despite the legend, Spinrad never gets called a “degenerate”. He’s not even mentioned by name.) The novel was published in book form in 1969.

It’s set a couple of decades into what was then the future (at least twenty years after Bob Dylan recorded “Tombstone Blues”, according to the novel, so after 1985). Jack Barron has a one-hour Wednesday-evening TV show, in which he invites members of the public to video-phone in and tell him what’s bugging them, after which he phones up those responsible, live on air, and gets them to explain. Things kick off when a man phones in to complain he’s been denied a place in one of the Foundation for Human Immortality’s cryogenic freezers. It turns out this is for legitimate reasons—the Foundation demands a certain amount in liquid assets to be assigned to them for the duration of a person’s freezing, but the man included his home and business in the calculation—the man, though, says he was refused because he’s black. Barron pursues the issue anyway, just to stir up trouble. The Foundation, at that very moment, are trying to get a bill passed that will grant them a monopoly on cryogenic freezing, and Barron has just enough clout (an audience of one hundred million Americans) that he can impact political decisions. This brings him to the attention of the Foundation’s president, Bennedict Howards, who tries to recruit Barron to his cause, by offering him a free place in one of their freezers.

But Barron has had an equally tempting counter-offer: politicians from opposite sides of the left-right spectrum who oppose the Foundation’s bill have realised Barron is the one man who could unite their supporters and get them into power as a coalition. So which does he want, immortality, or to be President of the United States?

So Howards ups the stakes. First of all he finds Barron’s ex-wife Sara, who left him shortly after he began his media career, feeling he’d abandoned the progressive political ideals the two shared in their student days. (Back then, Barron formed the Social Justice Coalition party, which he left so as not to compromise his TV show’s political neutrality.) Somehow knowing that Barron and Sara are still hung up on each other, Howards convinces her that if she can get Barron to sign his contract for a freezer-place, she’ll get one too. Then he ups the offer again, telling Barron that the Foundation has actually developed an immortality treatment, and that he and Sara can have it whenever they want. They just have to sign the contracts.

Barron, though, starts to suspect there’s something odd about the immortality treatment, and when Howards gets annoyed when Barron covers a seemingly unrelated issue on his show—a poor black man in the deep south who sold his daughter for supposed adoption to a rich white man for $50,000—things start getting complicated.

The novel’s style placed it firmly in the experimental, literary New Wave. Aside from the free use of the sort of street-talk (and a lot of swearing) that was probably how people spoke then anyway, there are occasional passages in a sort of Beat-style stream of consciousness (though these get a bit repetitive as the novel goes on). (I have to say I found the first chapter almost incomprehensible, but fortunately things settled down after that.) Probably the thing that would make it impossible to publish today is its racial language, though the irony is that it uses this language to say what was progressive for its day. On the other hand, its treatment of women is pretty poor. Sara, despite leaving Barron when he gave up on his progressive politics, gives up her own when offered a shot at immortality, and basically exists to worship him (“oh, this is a man”). Once she’s reinstalled into his life, she’s not involved in any of the decision-making, and doesn’t even seem to want to be.

But the novel is really about the battle of wills between two men of power, Barron and Howards, and the worlds (media and business) they represent. In this, it reminded me of Alfred Bester’s The Demolished Man, which is also about the contest between two world-sized personalities (Bester even gets name-checked here: “Jack could always stick a phrase in your head like a Bester mnemonic jingle.”). But Bester’s plots had far more incidents and ideas, and both of his characters really did feel world-sized. One complaint I have about Bug Jack Barron is that Howards, as a villain, is too easily needled into giving his secrets away. As soon as Barron even touches on a sensitive area, Howards breaks into a seething rage. He’s a cartoon villain, and how he ever made it to being CEO of a major corporation is hard to imagine. He couldn’t even play a round of poker.

Read in terms of the time it was written, Bug Jack Barron is a study in the aftermath of 60s-countercultural hopes and ideals (Bob Dylan, in the novel, is dead), in which once-idealistic people have been led into a world of “use me and I’ll use you politics” and world-weary cynicism:

“What happened to all the no-more-war n*****-loving peace-loving happy got nothing need nothing love-truth-and-beauty against the night Baby Bolshevik Galahads. Years happened, hunger happened, and one day, age-thirty happened.”

(Asterisks not in the original publication.)

Immortality, in the novel, is the ultimate corrupting Faustian pact, the one thing that would cause anyone to give up their ideals. As Spinrad says in an LA Review of Books interview from 2012:

“The initial inspiration for Bug Jack Barron was the way the question of immortality was generally treated in science fiction—that is, no one had seriously dealt with the inevitability that it would initially be very expensive, and that it would confer enormous political power on whoever controlled it, indeed on whoever might even be able to promise it one way or another…”

Against this, he says:

“…the only such power that could stand up to the power of the promise of eternal life was the power of television to transform, control, mutate, and manipulate individual and cultural consciousness…”

The perceived importance of TV back then is captured in this diagram from a Michael Moorcock article in the same issue of New Worlds as the final instalment of Bug Jack Barron, which places television right at the centre of the “Media Web”:

(Though I couldn’t help thinking of what would be the closest UK equivalent in the day, Esther Rantzen in That’s Life! — hardly Bug Jack Barron stuff. Maybe it’s a UK/US difference.)

Nowadays, with broadcast TV flailing for viewers in the same way cinema did when TV came along, Bug Jack Barron has nevertheless attained a new prescience. Barron, alone before the camera in his small studio, sharing screen space with video-callers, feels like an influencer of a certain type, even more so when you consider his emotive stirring-up of his viewing public. Back then, the idea that a media personality such as Barron could be considered for President of the USA was satire (Ronald Reagan was Governor of California at the time); nowadays, reality is so busy satirising itself that Bug Jack Barron reads more like a how-to manual—Machiavelli’s The Prince, updated for the video age.

As a novel, I perhaps found it a little too long (entire chapters were taken up with Barron coming to a decision), and only Barron himself felt like a convincing human being, but it shows how even SF from over fifty years ago can still feel relevant.

(Another thing reading this novel caused me to check out: What happened to all those real-life companies offering cryogenic freezing what seems like only a few years back? Some are still about, yes, but some went out of business. And the freezers were turned off.)