JG Ballard’s High Rise, published in 1975, was the culmination of a triptych of near-future shockers. Earlier novels such as The Drowned World, The Drought and The Crystal World dramatised ecological doomsday scenarios – 40 years before the decay of Detroit, Ballard had perfected ruin porn – but following the sudden death of his wife Mary in 1964, his work became tougher and more experimental. 1969s’s Atrocity Exhibition, a series of “condensed” novels, (including the infamous Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan and The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race), read like quasi-psychotic police reports or autopsies, owing far more to William S than Edgar Rice Burroughs.
Ballard’s work reached a new level of transgression with Crash (1973), a carnival of auto-erotic celebrity car-wrecks and snuff voyeurism rendered in almost baroque prose. Concrete Island (1974), a sequel of sorts, was Robinson Crusoe relocated to London’s Westway. Then, only a year later, Ballard completed the trilogy with High Rise. Here the gated estate of the future was reimagined as a 40-floor monolith fitted with swimming pools, supermarkets, banks, schools, high speed lifts and rooftop gardens. Lower income tenants occupied the ground floors, the middle class lived above them, the rich inhabited plush skylight condos. This being a Ballard production, Social Darwinianism soon asserts itself: power cuts generate civil unrest, and it all goes Lord of the Flies within the span of three months.
High Rise served as epitaph for the postwar utopian dream of social housing, the gleaming 1960s tower blocks that within a decade decayed into decrepit, syringe-littered tenements. Ballard’s fiction proved all the more unsettling for its familiar settings: the flyovers and underpasses and car-parks that made up his repository of signature images. Ballard seemed to regard our species with a pathologist’s eye. He’d had an uncommon upbringing: the two-and-a-half years he spent interned in a Japanese detention camp as a boy in Shanghai had forever warped his vision of human society.
“I would guess that a large part of the furniture of my fiction was provided ready-made from that landscape,” Ballard told Charles Shaar Murray in an NME interview in 1983. “All those barren hotels and deserted beaches, empty apartment blocks... the whole reality of a kind of stage set from which the cast has exited, leaving one with very little idea of what the actual play is about. All of that comes straight from the landscape of wartime Shanghai.”
Author and journalist Will Self, a lifelong fan who came to know Ballard in his last years, echoed these sentiments when I interviewed him in 2010. “He was quite an isolated man in all sorts of ways. He’d had this quite patrician childhood in the 1930s in Shanghai, and he never lost the kind of noblesse oblige that people from that class have. But of course he’d had this very traumatic time as well, and in many ways the kind of life he led in Shepperton, where he slept on an old army cot and mended everything with fuse wire, was a kind of traumatised recreation of the concentration camp they were in during the war.”
Ballard could never endorse Hugo Gernsback’s golden age of jetpacks and rocket operas and American exceptionalism. His vision was far closer to the No Future sloganeering of the blank generation, the feeling of being trapped in a traumatised urban space. “Many accounts of punk accentuate its social realism,” Jon Savage wrote in a 2013 essay about David Bowie and William Burroughs, “but it also had a very strong science-fiction element – projecting into a conceivable nightmare future.” And in his book England’s Dreaming, Savage noted High Rise’s particular influence on punk culture circa 1976:
“Set in the near future which is also the shadow of the present, it describes a closed world of techno-barbarism simultaneously recorded and replayed on video. The sheer physical presence of the tower blocks ‘had a second life of their own’; the blocks themselves are vandalised in the pleasurable exercise of forbidden impulses. High rises were both graphically interesting – for their stark, grid-like shapes which feature in (Malcolm) McLaren’s Croydon Art School Portfolio – and convenient as emblems of a harsh urbanism… After Ballard’s High Rise and Crash, it was possible to see high rises as both appalling and vertiginously exciting: for now, their clean, brutal lines were a perfect sight for The Clash’s hypermodernism.”
Ballard proved an even greater influence on New Wave, electro and industrial acts: The Normal’s Warm Leatherette, Joy Division’s Atrocity Exhibition, Tubeway Army’s Down in the Park and Cars, John Foxx’s Underpass. And the energy current transmitted both ways: post-punk in turn influenced the ultraviolent sensibilities of comics like 2000AD and Starlord, and the future noir of William Gibson, John Shirley and Bruce Sterling.
“1977 seemed kind of like a roots moment,” Gibson told me in 2003. “My take on it wasn’t that it was brand new nihilism, it was like a return to something that had been the real beginning of the ’60s but had been collectively forgotten. I had forgotten it to some extent myself. And it actually wasn’t so much the punk from England that did that for me; it was the stuff from New York that slightly predated what happened in London: Television and the first Patti Smith album. They were very consciously subversively retro in a really irony-free way, they seemed very, very sincere about it, and what I was seeing and hearing out of London was much more self-conscious material. Now, decades later, I know that Malcolm McClaren had been reading the Situationists, and the stuff from New York was somehow way less considered and in fact didn’t really go anywhere. They hadn’t been to art school.”
But in the UK, where the legacy of the 1960s arts labs still held currency, Ballard’s influence persisted into the pre-millennial era. The Manic Street Preachers sampled him on 1994’s The Holy Bible. Radiohead’s OK Computer (1997) was a vividly Ballardian vision of 21st century schizoid man. A decade later, Thom Yorke was blogging excerpts from Kingdome Come as a prelude to the release of In Rainbows.
JG Ballard died in April 2009, as his visions of social revolt, one-per-cent feudalism and ecological disaster began to look more like reportage than fiction. Forty years after High Rise’s publication, the future never looked so dark.
Peter Murphy is the author of the novels John the Revelator and Shall We Gather at the River. High Rise is released on March 18th
