By Dr. Charles Evans
Penthouse: Science fiction is supposed to reflect the future. How well do you think it has done that over the years?
Ballard: I think it's been amazingly accurate, not necessarily in terms of the technology itself, but in predicting society's response to technology. Jules Verne, over 100 years ago, was the first writer of any kind to respond to the impending transformation of society by technology, and from his time onwards science fiction has picked out the main preoccupations and anxieties of the Industrial Age, identifying them way ahead of their appearance. Incidentally it has also anticipated the present unease about science which has recently become a public issue, but which was featured in SF as far back as the 1930s. I suspect it will also turn out to have been extremely accurate in the way in which it is now predicting or anticipating the peculiar affectless quality of life in the 1980s and 90s.
Ballard: I think it's been amazingly accurate, not necessarily in terms of the technology itself, but in predicting society's response to technology. Jules Verne, over 100 years ago, was the first writer of any kind to respond to the impending transformation of society by technology, and from his time onwards science fiction has picked out the main preoccupations and anxieties of the Industrial Age, identifying them way ahead of their appearance. Incidentally it has also anticipated the present unease about science which has recently become a public issue, but which was featured in SF as far back as the 1930s. I suspect it will also turn out to have been extremely accurate in the way in which it is now predicting or anticipating the peculiar affectless quality of life in the 1980s and 90s.
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