Ballardian adj 1 of James Graham Ballard (1930–2009), the British novelist, or his works 2 resembling or suggestive of the conditions described in Ballard's novels and stories, especially dystopian modernity, bleak man-made landscapes, and the psychological effects of technological, social or environmental developments.


In 1974 four of the five J G Ballard titles on Penguin's backlist were reprinted with cover designs by David Pelham and sold as a boxed set in a slip-case that Pelham also designed. The fifth Ballard title was eventually reissued with a matching Pelham cover in 1977.

Pelham had first met Ballard some years earlier through a mutual friend, the artist Eduardo Paolozzi, and the three men enjoyed long conversations at Ballard's home in Shepperton, a suburban town south-west of London near to Heathrow Airport and the M25 orbital motorway. Pelham was a great admirer of Ballard's books, and was drawn to what he later described as their "apocalyptic imagery" and "depiction of technological and human breakdown and decay". So when these reprints came along Pelham was keen to design the covers himself and discussed his ideas with Ballard.

Starting with the same layout as his sf covers of 1972-73, Pelham replaced the computer typeface used for the author's name with a new, stencilled effect and gave the artwork a softer, airbrushed appearance in which the black background and coloured lower band of the earlier covers became a crepuscular sky above a barren expanse of water, sand or sunbaked earth. Set against this backdrop is an artefact of twentieth-century industrial or military technology such as a skyscraper, atom bomb or Centurion tank. According to the September 1974 issue of Science Fiction Monthly, these machines depict "the debris of our society". Pelham, the article explained, "finds romance in seeing the future as if it were already the past – in visualizing ruins created from the artifacts we are manufacturing now". But the paradox of Pelham's artifacts is that they are not in ruins. His are pristine machines, at odds with their apocalyptic settings. Half submerged or buried, they stand as tombstones to ostentation and brutality. These, then, are the icons of man's arrogance.

An American B-29 bomber lies abandoned and half-buried by the shifting sands on the slip-case while its payload – a sister to the atom bomb that destroyed Nagasaki and the mother of all UXBs – rests nose down in the sand flats of The Terminal Beach. The bomb's tail-box tilts skywards like the flower of a strange fruit whose hard shell hides an exotic interior. In the belly of the bomb are the seeds of mass destruction, two stones of a ripening plutonium core waiting for the conditions that will trigger them to germinate. But unapproachable and unknowable the bomb is quantum uncertainty writ large; it is Schrödinger's cat inside Pandora's box. This atom bomb sitting in the sand is as surreal as the relativity of time and space or Salvador Dalí's melting clocks, for all are part of the same chain reaction. As mankind cowers with his fingers in his ears and his eyes squeezed shut, so the bomb and slip-cased Superfortress have their heads buried in the sand, as if in denial of this nightmarish world and the roles they have played in its creation.

The Drowned World presents a peaceful enough scene. The surface of the water is flat as a millpond, a sea of tran- quillity broken only by the art deco spire of the Chrysler Building which, like the crown of a colossal King Canute, bears silent witness to the deluge that has turned Manhattan into a man-made reef and New York into a new Atlantis.

The Wind From Nowhere lifts a tank into the air, while The Drought has turned a Cadillac Coupe de Ville into a memorial of chrome and streamlined angularity, its rocketship rear styling and flared tail fins an epitaph to the flamboyance of the American automobile.

By the time The Four-Dimensional Nightmare was reissued the icons were on tv: "Howdy all you folks out there in tee vee land and welcome to tonight's simulcast, brought to you by DuoScreen, where we'll be serving y'all up a rib-ticklin' double bill of comic capers. On one channel we've got your old pal Mickey Mouse, while on the other we'll be beaming you Live! footage of cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin's quest to become the first man in space. That's right folks, it looks like the Ruskies are finally uppin' sticks and headin' back home to the 'red' planet." [canned laughter] "Will he do it? Who cares! It'll be a laugh a minute..." The machine slowly spools the tape to the end and then rewinds and starts again, endlessly filling the airwaves with the antics of Mickey and Yuri. But no one is watching, for tee vee land is deserted.

The use of such icons to signify apocalyptic ruination is nothing new of course. The Statue of Liberty, in particular, has borne the brunt of numerous cataclysms that have left it in various stages of burial, collapse or decapitation. Ballard himself could not resist the temptation in The Wind From Nowhere, while the Statue's cameo in the final scene of the 1968 movie, Planet of the Apes, is one of the most memorable denouements in cinematic history, a classic twist in the tail that still cools the blood today. Such images may thrill and perhaps even shock, but the explanation is invariably straightforward because the machine, the artifact, the icon is in ruins. Where Pelham's images differ is that they defy such explanation. The scene is apocalyptic but the machine is immaculate, and the two are not easily reconciled.

That a book's cover art should be eye-catching is only half the battle, for having caught the buyer's attention the art- work must then hold it until a hand reaches out and picks the book up, to turn it over or perhaps thumb the pages. Pelham's artworks succeed on both counts. Aesthetically they mesmerise, and on closer inspection they tantalise, but still no answer is forthcoming. To find out more it may in fact be necessary to buy the book and read it. Or alternatively, see Landscapes From a Dream: How the Art of David Pelham Captured the Essence of J G Ballard's Early Fiction >>