J.G. Ballard’s 'Crash' by Paul March-Russell

(Palgrave Macmillan, 2024)

Reviewed by Paul Kincaid

By the 1960s, the new generation of British science fiction writers who had grown up since the Second World War had come to view their world as a technologized hellscape. This landscape of mechanised death and destruction was usually apostrophized in overlapping triplets of resonant names: ‘Belsen … Buchenwald … Passchendaele’ (Keith Roberts, Pavane, 1968); ‘Gomorrah, Hiroshima and Buchenwald’ (M. John Harrison, ‘Lamia Mutable’, 1972); ‘Cape Canaveral, Hiroshima and Belsen’ (J.G. Ballard, ‘Myth Maker of the Twentieth Century’, 1964). And in their present of the 1960s they saw the end result of that violent past in an alienating landscape of brutalist architecture and motorway intersections. This was the landscape that J.G. Ballard found himself inescapably drawn to explore in a series of controversial works as the decade and the British New Wave drew to their inevitable close.

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Review from BSFA Review 25 - Download your copy here.