An interesting long interview by J.G. Ballard from 1974 (via Ballardian).

The whole notion, the distinction between fiction and reality, is turned on its head. The external environment now is the greatest provider of fiction. I mean, we are living inside of an enormous novel, written by the external world, [by] the worlds of advertising, mass-merchandising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, and so on and so forth. The one node of reality left to us is inside our own heads.

He’s then asked whether this correlates to the idea of ‘inner space’ mentioned elsewhere to Ballard (and so important to other New Wave science fiction writers). He now nuances idea of interiority:

I suppose we are moving into a realm where inner space is no longer just inside our skills but is the terrain we see around us in everyday life. We are moving into a world where the elements of fiction in that world – and by that fiction I mean anything invented to serve imaginative ends, whether it is invented by an advertising agency, a politician, an airline or what have you; and these elements have now crowded out the old-fashioned elements of reality.

He is interrupted by his interviewer, but continues:

What I am saying is 20 0r 30 years ago the elements of fiction, that is politics within the consumer society or within one’s private life, occupied a much smaller space. I can’t quantify this exactly but it was sort of 50/50. But now I don’t think this is the case. I think we have seen the invasion of almost every aspect of our lives by fictions of one kind or another. We see this in people’s homes – the way they furnish their houses and apartments. Even the sort of friends they have seem to be dictated by fictions, fantasies, by standards invented by other people to serve various ends, not necessarily commerical. But we’re living more and more in a hot mix of fictions of every kind.

Now I think the writer’s job is to – he no longer needs to invent the fiction, the fiction is already there. His job is to put in the reality. The writer’s task now is to become much more analytic – he’s got to approach the subject matter, and especially the science-fiction writer because I think he’s the most important of all writers – he’s writing the true literature of the 20th century, the only important one.

Ballard now speaks of the role of the science fiction writer being analogous to a scientist – proposing hypotheses, such as that entertained in Crash, that car crashes might have some ‘beneficial role’, and applying them to the subject matter of fiction.

Putting in the reality – what does this mean? Trying to discover how people – his or her characters – might live in this new domain? Then the task of science fiction (speculative fiction) is to discover forms of individuating that are already happening. To hypothesise just as we are all hypothesising with our lives with respect to how we might live in our new world.