ballard

Reality and fiction were crossing each other.

"Yes, they’d begun to reverse — the only point of reality was our own minds. It seemed to me that the only way to write about all this was to meet the landscape on its own terms. Useless to try to impose the conventions of the 19th-century realistic novel on this incredible five-dimensional fiction moving around us all the time at high speed. And I tried to develop — and I think successfully — a technique of mine, the so-called condensed novels, where I was able to cross all these events, at right angles if you like. Like cutting through the stem of a plant to expose the cross section of its main vessels. So this technique was devised to deal with this fragmentation and overlay of reality, through the fragmentation of narrative."