SOURCE: Luckhurst, Roger. “Mediation, Simulation, Recalcitrance: Crash to Hello America, with Detours.” In ‘The Angle Between Two Walls’: The Fiction of J. G. Ballard, pp. 119-40. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1997.

In the following excerpt, Luckhurst compares Ballard's short fiction with the novels Crash and Hello America.

The Atrocity Exhibition intensifies the thematic of the ‘mediated subject’ in Ballard's work. At a pivotal moment, it hinges on whether the mediascape is a screen for the projection of perversities or is a device for the implantation of machinic desires. Surrealist derealization, directed by the subversive unconscious, or interpellation of the subject, the text actively fuses these apparently incompatible narratives in the compacted space of its condensed paragraphs.

The hinge question of the media, of mediation, is a major thematic in Ballard's fiction. It is not, however, initiated by Atrocity, nor is the ‘take’ on mediation finalized in its pages. It...