JG Ballard would have approved of this new “new”

Maybe not approved, as such. Appreciate, maybe.

Understand, certainly.

It was just his flavour of apocalypse — a whimpering collapse, rather than a catastrophic bang.

Abandoned monuments to empty consumption, echoing halls of shopping malls, suburban hollowness, and civility’s new clothes suddenly no longer opaque. It is one of the most oft repeated observations of Ballard’s life that — as dramatised in Empire of the Sun — he had witnessed the collapse of civilisation, had travelled the road to barbarism and back, had been left damaged by the journey. It’s not difficult to see abstracts of High Rise and The Drought in the last six months: how easily gutted are our churches, how quickly we flee, how swiftly we abandon the vulnerable.

In 1991, Eric Hobsbawm referred to the ‘short’ 20th Century as The Age of Extremes and competing visions of the apocalypse in British speculative fiction reflect this neatly — on the one hand there is the “cosy” apocalypse of John Wyndham, that great English eschatologist. And on the other, the “cold” cynicism of Ballard, the herald of post-modernism. The soullessness of our covid-blighted streets is more the latter. For Wyndham, the apocalypse is something that happens to people, we all are victims; but in Ballard, we are all both agents of and participants in the collapse, whether through inaction, ignorance, or our very desires. In Wyndham, there remains a glimmer of hope because, of course, mankind will prevail.

But in Ballard’s apocalypse we reach the end only to find that we are its cause. Mankind’s rise is its fall.

Our new antiseptic alienation would not have been out of place in Ballard, though perhaps it might have felt a little obvious — empty streets, mannequins lining frozen escalators, stadia filled with cut-out crowds, funerals conducted by video.

The final entropy of human contact, families reduced to pixels, handshakes consigned to history.