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Ballard the atrocity exhibition6/4/2023 If everything is perpetually available, what remains to aim towards and to inspire any passion? He speaks of his own consequent intention to move away from the themes of earlier science fiction writing - ‘outer space, and the far future’ - towards a ‘new terrain’ yet to be colonized. The result is stagnation, inertia and a pervasive ’death of affect’ (5). 1 Ballard describes an all-voracious present, which has produced an ‘almost infantile world’ in which ‘any demand, any possibility … can be satisfied instantly’ and even the future, he argues, is ‘merely one of those manifold alternatives open to us’ (8). The future envisaged by the science fiction of the 1940s and 1950s is already our past’. Ballard locates science fiction as a ‘casualty of the changing world it anticipated and helped to create. In the 1974 introduction to the French edition of Crash (1973), J.
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