By Jeremy Smith

I.

I first read J.G. Ballard's stories as a 16-year-old living in the postindustrial molder of Daytona Beach, Fla. – the same year I saw, standing outside the gates of my high school, the space shuttle Challenger explode in a white pillar of smoke.

Ballard taught me how to see that wound in the sky. In a recent Re/Search Publications interview, Ballard calls NASA a dinosaur "trapped in a Buck Rogers dream" – a bureaucracy evolving into a state religion, each space disaster a kind of ritual scarification. For his characters, technological artifacts always conceal savage, shadowy selves: our cars and spaceships are embodiments of our most intimate and carnal desires. Ballard's project is to discover and describe the human in the machine. And it's not always pretty.

For more than four decades Ballard has exerted a deep influence over diverse writers like Angela Carter, Jean Baudrillard, Michel Houellebecq, and Don DeLillo, in a career that climaxed with his Booker Prize-nominated Empire of the Sun (filmed by Steven Spielberg – of all people – in 1987). With the releases in the U.K. of J.G. Ballard: The Complete Short Stories and the novel Millennium People, together with a new volume of interviews from RE/Search, J.G. Ballard: Provocations, we can finally see Ballard whole. He is revealed as a moralist, standing at the intersection between Jonathan Swift and Salvador Dalí.

II.

Ballard's first published stories show flashes of brilliance when he mingles a surrealist sensibility with pulp science fiction idioms, but it wasn't until "The Voices of Time" in 1960 that Ballard's private iconography came into focus: the whole world is falling asleep, victim to an apocalyptic narcolepsy. As the desert hospitals fill with "the vanguard of a vast somnambulist army massing for its last march," the neurosurgeon protagonist gives up trying to save his patients or himself, embracing this unhurried, eerie apocalypse as a pathway to a higher stage of human evolution.

Ballard had found his voice but not yet perfected his craft. In 1962 he published his first short masterpiece, "The Cage of Sand," which codified his distinctive prose style. Here we find his characteristic hypnotic rhythms, an accumulation of surgically described detail, sweeping, free-associative similes, and humor so black that most readers are never able to perceive it. That same year, in New Worlds, he coined the term inner space to describe his preoccupations and technique. "The biggest developments of the immediate future will take place, not on the Moon or Mars, but on Earth, and it is inner space, not outer, that needs to be explored," he wrote. "The only truly alien planet is Earth."

In 1964, Ballard's wife, Mary, died in a freak accident. His stories from that year, and through the rest of the 1960s and early 1970s, are among the best in 20th-century avant-garde literature. They easily match the achievement of such works as Naked Lunch, by William S. Burroughs (another existential moralist, savage and repellent). Many readers were bewildered by the static story line and seeming amorality of stories like "The Terminal Beach," in which a former bomber pilot named Traven wanders the abandoned beach of an atomic test site, haunted by the ghosts of his wife and son. Though we glean that Traven killed millions dropping the bombs of World War III – or perhaps only imagines he did – he's unrepentant. "For me the H-Bomb is a symbol of absolute freedom," he tells an island visitor. "I feel it's given me the right – the obligation, even – to do anything I choose."

For all the wintry alienation of its tone, in the end "The Terminal Beach" is a heartbreaking story. Traven is striving, however strangely, to overcome his alienation and reconcile himself to personal loss. Here lies the paradox of Ballard's morality, which finds our humanity in our most inhuman acts and creations – an artistic strategy that recalls Franz Kafka. "A lot of people misread Kafka," Ballard wrote in 1985. "They assume that in describing his particularly nightmarish world he saw it in an exclusively unfavorable light. I think it had invaded him [and] enfolded him, and the whole power of his fiction rises from this ambivalent response. I'd like to think that I've done the same for technology in [my stories].... We must immerse ourselves in the threatening possibilities in which we're suspended to have a hope of swimming through to the other end."

In other words, if we see something sick in the environments we create, then it must correspond to something that is sick in ourselves. While we may see technology as inhuman, this is self-deception; only by recognizing technology's all-too-human psychosocial possibilities can we take responsibility for it. In The Atrocity Exhibition stories, Ballard tries to reveal the desires embodied in the automobile as the ultimate extension and enhancement of the human body. I doubt very much that Ballard (or his typical reader) is literally turned on by the orgasmic car crashes that are so lovingly depicted in these stories. The semen-stained dashboards of The Atrocity Exhibition period are less about sex than they are about the limits of our mortal bodies.

III.

The most interesting thing about the interviews and quotes collected in J.G. Ballard: Provocations is that they show us a Ballard who continues to be horrified by the contemporary world. "People have uncoupled their belief in a sane world that they can influence through the political realm," he says in a long interview with film composer Graeme Revell. "That's a very dangerous state of affairs. It turns Western Europe and the States into a sort of unstable Weimar-like era where if reason sleeps, monsters are born. One prays there isn't another 9-11."

Never has Ballard sounded so concerned, fatherly, or political. (In an earlier, 1984 Re/Search interview, Ballard impishly exclaims, "I want more nuclear weapons!") The interviews in Provocations make it abundantly clear that while Ballard has always proclaimed the death of reason and the visceral origins of technology, he now sees these developments as almost wholly negative. "What bothers me," the author says of that notorious techno-pornographic novel Crash, "is that something is happening that you could almost call the 'Normalizing of the Psychopathic' – the greater and greater areas of what used to be regarded as the psychopathic by, say, my parents." It doesn't seem to occur to Ballard that anyone might have read his violently sexual stories literally.

For both Ballard and Revell, our salvation lies in science and technology. "I think machines are going to save us," Revell says at one point. "The Age of Reason is probably petering out slowly," Ballard replies. "Only our machines will be reasonable, because they make sense. We can rely on our computers to be moral beings. A machine, in a sense, is a moral structure – like a thermostat. If the room is too hot it will bring the temperature down ... I think we are subcontracting our moral universe to that of the machines."

Such comments reveal the contradictory, unstable fissures in Ballard's Enlightenment morality, in which, for example, machines are invested with animal desires that will destroy us and the scientific techniques that could save us. The machine is, in other words, an arena into which we throw our ethical conflicts. While the brilliant and indispensable Complete Short Stories glories in the moral contradictions of technological society, in his new novel, Millennium People, Ballard seems to finally tire of the ambivalence that has defined his fiction. His stock characters – the man of science, his maniacal alter ego, and the damaged woman who bridges them – all seek freedom through irrational acts of terrorist violence. But in the end moral equilibrium is restored. Like the villain in a Hollywood movie, the antagonist Gould pays his debt to society with a bullet in the head.

"He believed that the most pointless acts could challenge the universe at its own game," the novel's narrator sums up. "Gould lost that game, and had to take his place with other misfits, the random killers of school playgrounds and library towers, who carried out atrocious crimes in their attempts to resanctify the world." With Millennium People, Ballard no longer seems satisfied with expressing his morality in purely negative terms.

The results are didactic and artistically disappointing. But Ballard's oeuvre, taken as whole, retains its power. His writing stripped the 20th century of its cultural illusions. Most science fiction authors conceal their mysticism beneath what H.G. Wells called "an ingenious use of scientific patter." Ballard does the opposite, smuggling the Enlightenment in under the cover of dreams. It doesn't matter how far or fast humanity travels, his stories say: even in space, the most alien creatures we'll confront are ourselves.

Jeremy Smith is a writer who lives in San Francisco.

J.G. Ballard: The Complete Short Stories

By J.G. Ballard. Flamingo, 1,189 pages, $52.50 (import).

Millennium People

By J.G. Ballard. Flamingo, 304 pages, $36.16 (import).

J.G. Ballard: Provocations

Edited by V. Vale. Forthcoming from Re/Search Publications, 200 pages, $15 (Volume One); 400 pages, $20 (Volume Two).