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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.)

Olaf Stapledon’s second novel, published in 1932, is not so much a sequel to Last and First Men (1930) as a sort of pendant to it (as his next novel, Odd John, started out as an appendix to this one). Like that first book, it’s dictated by a Neptunian from the far-future final race of humankind, who have developed the ability to project their consciousnesses into minds of the distant past, and not just witness events, but influence them to a certain extent, too. (Stapledon gets over the difficulty of the future being able to influence the past with a little handwaving: “Thus when I am observing your mental processes, my activity of observing is, in one sense, located in the past.” Or, for a little more detail: “though future events have indeed no temporal being until their predecessors have ceased to exist with temporal being, all events have also eternal being. This does not mean that time is unreal, but that evanescence is not the whole truth about the passing of events.”)

Instead of the vast, thousands-of-millions-of-years sweep of Last and First Men, Last Men in London concentrates on one comparatively tiny sliver of time, but one that is nevertheless “a crucial incident in the long-drawn-out spiritual drama of your species”: the First World War and its immediate aftermath. And the Neptunian chooses to approach this period through the consciousness of one individual, a relatively ordinary man called Paul. His intent is to present a deeper understanding of the causes of what was then known as the Great War, but also, by introducing Paul to glimpses of the more cosmic worldview of the Eighteenth Race of humankind, to see how this affects a man of our age. “It is my task,” he says, “to tell you of your own race as it appears through the eyes of the far future…”

After the immensely compressed tale of multiple human species in his first novel, focusing on a single individual might make it sound as though Last Men in London would read like a more straightforward narrative. In fact, it’s even less of a traditional novel (in terms of character, plot, and so on) than Last and First Men. After an initial chapter which details life on far future Neptune, we get a brief glimpse of Paul as he hesitates before an army recruitment centre in London, wavering between social pressure to join up and his more deeply held belief in pacifism. But this is one of the few conventional scenes in a book that has only about three or four named characters, and almost no scenes with dialogue, action, and so on. Following the introduction of Paul, the narrator digresses for two long chapters on the causes of the Great War (whose roots are not in the messiness of Imperial European politics as you might think, but in the very nature of our simian ancestry), before returning to Paul and his personal experiences in the war, and then onto his life in the years that followed.

This is only partly a criticism—you come to Stapledon for ideas, not realism—but I have to say I still find Stapledon at his most readable when he’s following a narrative, whether it be of the human race as a whole as in Last and First Men, or the life of an intelligent dog in Sirius. (To be fair, Stapledon declares early on: “Though this is a work of fiction, it does not pretend to be a novel. It has no hero but Man.”) Here, he has his exposition dials turned up to eleven—which isn’t a criticism as such, but I have to say I did find these sections, though interesting, a bit of a slog.

But Last Men in London could also be a kind of autobiographical novel. Like Paul, Stapledon refused the call-up into the army, but elected to serve in the Friends Ambulance Unit as an expression of his pacifism—and, like Paul, he won the Croix de Guerre, and was intensely aware of the irony of a pacifist winning a war medal. Also like Paul he spent time as a teacher. All this leads me to suspect you can probably read Paul’s education in a wider worldview as Stapledon’s own philosophical awakening, with the Neptunian narrator/educator a sort of fictional stand-in for Stapledon’s inner, guiding, slightly alienated deepest self. (It might even be better to read this novel as Stapledon’s attempt to write about the causes of the First World War being derailed by an inner need to tell the story of his own philosophical development.)

As to the causes of the Great War, from the Neptunian perspective it comes down to humankind’s “practical intelligence” getting ahead of its deeper self-understanding, plus a tendency in the First Men (as the Neptunians call us) towards “the importance of personal triumph over others in the great game of life”—the tendency to value heroic individuals over humankind itself, with a corresponding belief in nations as a sort of communal hero-self, with one nation necessarily triumphing over others being the accepted state of things. From the Neptunian point of view, the Great War was on the cards from the moment we came down from the trees (we have “a will that is still in essence simian, though equipped with dangerous powers”), but awaited the technological breakthroughs of the nineteenth century for its fruition:

“…your ‘modern’ world came too soon. In the century before the war it developed with increasing acceleration. You had neither the intelligence nor the moral integrity to cope with your brave new world.”

More interesting from a present day perspective, perhaps, is Stapledon’s insight into the mood during and after the Great War. There was, he says, a “suspicion in all the combatants that human nature had failed”, its ultimate effect being to “undermine man’s confidence in his own nature”. He goes on, in perhaps his most passionate and forthrightly critical section of the book, to detail how various sectors of society—politicians, religious leaders, teachers, artists and writers, common people—contributed to the war by turning a blind eye or justifying it to themselves. Perhaps the most useful passage to read today, as it still has such relevance, is this:

“Many people seemed to Paul to unearth a new self to cope with [the war], a simpler, less doubting, more emotional self, a self that concealed under righteous indignation a terrible glee in the breakdown of old taboos.”

Post-war, Stapledon describes the mood as one of:

“…a deep and deadly self-disgust, a numbing and unacknowledged shame, a sense of huge opportunities missed, of a unique trust betrayed, and therewith a vast resentment against earlier generations, against human nature, against fate, against the universe.”

Though Paul, in moments of particularly Stapledonian insight, still finds himself thinking:

“How can things be so wrong, so meaningless, so filthy; and yet also so right, so overwhelmingly significant, so exquisite?”

Which is perhaps one of the things that led John Kinniard to write, in Starmont Reader’s Guide 21: Olaf Stapledon, that “Stapledon’s philosophy is best approached as a challenge and a corrective to the disillusionment that became the dominant attitude of the Nineteen-twenties.”

So, what is Stapledon’s answer to all of this? It can be summed up in ideas that were already present in Last and First Men: “loyalty to man and worship of fate”. Or, as the Neptunian narrator puts it in a way that perfectly sums up Stapledon’s mix of the acceptance of cosmic doom with a defiantly joyous optimism:

“The story of your species is indeed a tragic story, for it closes with desolation. Your part in that story is both to strive and to fail in a unique opportunity, and so to set the current of history toward disaster. But think not therefore that your species has occurred in vain, or that your own individual lives are futile. Whatever any of you has achieved of good is an excellence in itself and a bright thread woven into the texture of the cosmos. In spite of your failure it shall be said of you, had they not striven as they did, the Whole would have been less fair.”

Does this help us at all, though, in the prevention of future wars? Stapledon’s notion of “loyalty to man and worship of fate” is a little too vague to be practically useful (unless one were to be faced with a catastrophe that really did threaten the species as a whole like, say, an increasingly unstable climate). Who is to say what best serves “man” or what should be regarded as “fate”? Elsewhere, Stapledon criticises the pursuit of happiness for this very reason:

“For if happiness alone is the goal, one man’s happiness is as good as another’s, and no one will feel obligation to make the supreme sacrifice. But if the true goal is of another order, those who recognise it may gladly die for it.”

Reviews at the time, though fewer than for Stapledon’s first novel, were mostly positive: “one of the most impressive things I have read” (The Birmingham Weekly Mercury), “engrossing and equally stimulating to the imagination and the reflective capacity” (The Aberdeen Press and Journal), “approached seriously, it will be found a rich, stimulating book” (The Daily News). Hugh I’Anson Fausset, in the Yorkshire Post and Leeds Intelligencer, though, offered up a criticism of the Neptunian narrator:

“He may personify ‘the mature individual who has wholly escaped the snares of private egoism,’ and whose will is for the racial good, but only by ceasing to be a person with a real unity of being and a spiritual centre.”

Around the same time, Fausset reviewed (positively) David Lindsay’s Devil’s Tor, a novel which has a few similarities with Last Men in London: both are books in which events and characters are manipulated by science-fictional beings (one from the future, one from space); both touch on the early evolution of humanity and talk of a coming, better race; both make use of sometimes quite intense examination of characters’ inner motives; and both ultimately move towards the metaphor of music made up of many individual instruments as a way of apprehending the cosmic story (and Stapledon’s declaration that “There is no music without the torture of the strings” might have interested Lindsay).

John Wyndham’s Chocky (1963) is a much more readable take on the theme of the alien/futuristic visitor inside one’s own head. I’m sure Wyndham must have read at least some of Stapledon’s works, and wouldn’t be surprised if he’d read them all. Whether he remembered it while writing Chocky is debatable, but there’s a hint of Stapledon’s cosmic vision in Chocky’s parting statement about intelligent life being “the rarest thing in creation, but the most precious. It is the only thing that gives meaning to the universe. Without it, nothing begins, nothing ends…”

Last Men in London is not one of Stapledon’s essential works, but it does make interesting reading as a historical document (its insights into the postwar mood), and as a transition point in Stapledon’s own creative direction: here, he’s working out how to take the themes of Last and First Men and apply them to his evident interest in the philosophical development of an individual. His treatment of Paul’s life is rather distant and unengaging, but he ends the novel with a short episode in which Paul, as a teacher, encounters a weird-looking child prodigy who proves to be, like the next novel’s “Odd John”, a throw-forward to the next step in human evolution. Writing Last Men in London, then, perhaps showed Stapledon the way he should be going, and which he’d do more successfully in both Odd John and Sirius.