J. G. Ballard’s Crash: is it Science Fiction?

Crash is not normally thought to be science fiction, and Ballard in the end denied it was. Let’s see . . .

Critic and scholar Darko Suvin identified two characteristics of SF: the novum and cognitive estrangement. The novum is the radical idea, e.g., imagine we could travel back in time, and cognitive estrangement is the experience of a reader confronted with a different reality — one that’s usually built around one or more novums — that shines a light on their actual reality.

In Crash, the novum is imagine people got turned on by car accidents, and the cognitive estrangement is the experience created by Ballard by combining this novum with ordinary things (pornification, alienation, clinical and technical language, celebrity culture, etc.) to create an extra-ordinary world that directs our gaze back to the real world, where we now see those ordinary things as problematic, or as problematic in a different and more coherent way.

So far, so good. But there’s another important defining characteristic of science fiction: its imagined worlds are, or pretend to be, explicable in terms of science, whether social or physical science. There is no magic as there is in the fantasy genre, which doesn’t pretend to refer back to anything we can recognize as knowledge—mythology and mysticism having lost their epistemic currency. Magic doesn’t have to be explained, but time travel does. Or more accurately, we are expected to believe that time travel has become possible thanks to scientific breakthroughs, even if they are not explicated, and even if — as is usually the case — the explication is pseudoscience (perhaps this is the only good pseudoscience).

One mark of a science fiction story then is that we think, or join the author in pretending, that the novum is a credible extrapolation: as far as we know it might be possible, whether in the future, in a far-away planetary system, or in an alternative timeline (all of which are presumed to share the same universal physical laws). So science fiction is a kind of realism, unlike fantasy. The most mundane realism asks us to believe that there could conceivably be such-and-such fictional events experienced by such-and-such fictional people. Science fiction does this too, but takes it much further.

Incidentally, it seems to me that this underlying realism is what ensures that cognitive estrangement always refers back to the reader’s reality, even when this is not intended by the author or sought for by the reader. For pure escapism, you have to go to fantasy. It’s quite possible that this is what the “cognitive” is doing in Suvin’s scheme: the reader of science fiction thinks the relation between current knowledge and the world of the story, whereas the reader of fantasy has to dumbly accept what is presented: Oh ok, this little guy has a sword that glows blue when there are orcs around. Cool.

The point I’m trying to get to is that the novum of Crash is not a credible extrapolation, and is not even meant to be, so the book cannot be science fiction. Although the tone of the novel is rational, clinical and technical, there is no attempt to make the reader believe that such a community of car crash fetishists could ever exist, no psychological explanation offered for the development of this sexual behaviour qua paraphilia. It is fantastical. Of course, it would be perverse to describe it as a fantasy novel, so a better word is surreal. And this fits with Ballard’s influences and interests. The novum of Crash does relate to our reality; it’s just that it is not a relation of realism, but rather of surreal exaggeration.

That was easy. We have answered the question, and we have efficiently defined science fiction along the way. The trouble is, I don’t really believe it is possible to objectively decide on these questions once and for all. Science fiction, like all genres, is synchronically and diachronically mutable. In other words, what counts as science fiction varies both within an epoch across a wide range of related works, and historically. And crucially, applying a label based on a definition is an intervention in that varied and evolving landscape, rather than a view from above—it is about what we want science fiction to be, or how we think a book should be read, and which other books we think it should be compared to (or, how we think it should be marketed).

As for the project of definition, my breezy intervention belies the fact that literary theorists have been debating the definition of SF, and the very legitimacy of the definitional project itself, since the 1960s. What I have done, probably, is emphasize some dominant features among an unlimited web of family resemblances, to use Wittgenstein’s concept: in looking at SF we see “a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing: sometimes overall similarities, sometimes similarities of detail,” and we apply the label “as in spinning a thread we twist fibre on fibre. And the strength of the thread does not reside in the fact that some one fibre runs through its whole length, but in the overlapping of many fibres.” (Philosophical Investigations, §66)

This means that there are other ways of defining SF, or rather, there are other fibres we can pick out. We could simply say that SF is the literature of “What if . . . ?” A what if question implicitly relates to the real world, which means that most fantasy literature doesn’t fit — in fantasy, the rules are internal to the world of the story and everything can be made to fit, so there is no what if question to ask, no real-world implications (except thematically via allegory). But Crash arguably sits quite happily under this description, since its world is our world, only with a surreal twist: what if people got turned on by car crashes?

I questioned my own motivation in wanting to correctly label the book, but I don’t regret it. The quest for a definition and the instinct to classify, even if they cannot be ultimately satisfied, constitute a way in—towards a clearer, deeper appreciation, of both Crash and science fiction in general.

But right now I’ll take the easy way out and just go with “speculative fiction.”

Further reading

Darko Suvin, “Estrangement and Cognition”