Fiction and the Fantastic: J.G. Ballard and Angela Carter

Oct 19, 2025

Exploring the dynamic friendship of J.G. Ballard and Angela Carter reveals their shared disdain for conventional literature. They challenge traditional narratives through bold, transgressive works, like Ballard’s unsettling 'The Atrocity Exhibition.' The podcast debates whether this fragmented piece qualifies as a novel and analyzes its themes of apocalypse and trauma. Carter’s vibrant style and cultural critiques also come to light, raising questions about the resonance of their outrageous visions in today's world.

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INSIGHT

Transgressive Witnesses To Postwar Culture

Marina Warner and Chloe Origis position Ballard and Carter as transgressive witnesses to postwar and 1960s liberation movements.
They argue both writers reject polite imperial novels and occupy liminal spaces between literary and genre fiction.

INSIGHT

Ballard's Form Breaks The Novel Mold

The Atrocity Exhibition sparked scandal and admiration on release and resists easy categorization as a novel.
Chloe notes Ballard removed sequential narrative to intensify the book's density of ideas and images.

INSIGHT

Themes Over Plot: A Catalogue Of Images

The book reads like a cascade of recurring motifs rather than linear plot, unified by themes not causality.
Ballard aligns inner mental spaces with global traumas, between Cape Canaveral and Hiroshima.

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J.G. Ballard and Angela Carter were friends and co-conspirators in their witness to the postwar world and the liberation movements of the 1960s. Both were scathing in their antipathy towards the polite novels of manners and empire that still dominated English readers’ appreciation and expectations. Pioneers in the liminal spaces between literary and ‘genre’ fiction, and science fiction in particular, both of them are haunted by the visions of Swift, Shelley, Kafka and Borges.

Ballard’s ‘The Atrocity Exhibition’ and ’The Passion of New Eve‘, considered together here along with Ballard’s short story ’The Drowned Giant‘, are vivid, fearless, still shocking novels of ideas – if ‘The Atrocity Exhibition’ can be described as a novel at all. Marina and Chloe discuss that question as they consider Ballard’s catalogue of contemporary violence and pop culture transgression. Then they turn to Carter’s own gleeful transgressions, born out of the ferment of 1970s cultural theory, which she explores and interrogates with inimitable style. But do the excesses of these works still speak to the present, and does their lack of restraint risk collapsing the whole category of the fantastic?

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