J.G. Ballard and Angela Carter were friends and co-conspirators in their witness to the postwar world and the liberation movements of the 1960s. Both were scathing in their antipathy towards the polite novels of manners and empire that still dominated English readers’ appreciation and expectations. Pioneers in the liminal spaces between literary and ‘genre’ fiction, and science fiction in particular, both of them are haunted by the visions of Swift, Shelley, Kafka and Borges.

Ballard’s ‘The Atrocity Exhibition’ and ’The Passion of New Eve‘, considered together here along with Ballard’s short story ’The Drowned Giant‘, are vivid, fearless, still shocking novels of ideas – if ‘The Atrocity Exhibition’ can be described as a novel at all. Marina and Chloe discuss that question as they consider Ballard’s catalogue of contemporary violence and pop culture transgression. Then they turn to Carter’s own gleeful transgressions, born out of the ferment of 1970s cultural theory, which she explores and interrogates with inimitable style. But do the excesses of these works still speak to the present, and does their lack of restraint risk collapsing the whole category of the fantastic?

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Further reading in the LRB:

Susannah Clapp on Angela Carter:

⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v14/n05/susannah-clapp/diary⁠

Edmund Gordon on J.G. Ballard:

⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n10/edmund-gordon/his-galactic-centrifuge⁠

Watch ‘If God is a snail...’, a film about Carter’s food writing for the LRB:

⁠https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yxqr5O2JFvE⁠

Listen to Edmund Gordon discuss Ballard on the LRB Podcast:

⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/podcasts-and-videos/podcasts/the-lrb-podcast/on-j.g.-ballard⁠

Next episode: Ursula K. Le Guin.