JGB in front of Project For A New Novel, 1960

J.G. Ballard on
“Experimental Fiction”




Organized By Rick McGrath

It may surprise few to learn that British writer J.G. Ballard has always had a desire to write experimental fiction.

Although you may be surprised at its date of genesis.

In one of his many interviews, Ballard reveals that when he started writing science fiction in 1956, he would have preferred even then to have written stories similar in experimentality to those in The Atrocity Exhibition. “I was interested in writing experimental fiction (though I hate the phrase, in fact) when I was still in school.”

Ballard’s most famous piece of experimental work is his set of five “advertisements” he did for Ambit magazine from 1967-1971.

But that is not his earliest work.

In 1958 JG Ballard created Project For A New Novel -- an entire novel reduced to look like two-page magazine spreads, and planned to be posted on billboards. According to Ballard’s friend and Ambit editor, Dr. Martin Bax, “It’s eight frames photocopied with famous Ballard characters like Coma and Kline. Most of the text you can’t read because when you see things on billboards you don’t read the small print, so the text is deliberately blurred – you can only read the headlines and some remarks. I don’t know why I never published it… I had it framed some years ago. It hangs above my mantelpiece”.

As Ballard himself describes the Project: "(These are) a series of four facing-page spreads that were specimen pages I put together in the late 50s... sample pages of a new kind of novel, entirely consisting of magazine-style headlines and layouts, with a deliberately meaningless text, the idea being that the imaginative content could be carried by the headlines and overall design, so making obsolete the need for a traditional text except for virtually decorative purposes... The pages from the Project For A New Novel were made at a time when I was working on a chemical society journal in London, and the lettering was taken from the US magazine Chemical and Engineering News  -- I liked the stylish typography. I also like the scientific content, and used stories from Chem. Eng. News to provide the text of my novel. Curiously enough, far from being meaningless, the science news stories somehow become fictionalized by the headings around them."

But more than that, the content of the Project must have struck a deep psychological chord with Ballard, and many of the characters and concerns in Project have resurfaced over the years, most notably in the 1964 short story, The Terminal Beach, and from 1965 to 1968 when Ballard wrote the first seven “chapters” of The Atrocity Exhibition. Ballard’s “collage of things” spawned such characters as Coma, Kline and Xero, and such phrases as “the terminal beach”, “Mr F is Mr F”, “thoracic drop” “intertime” “T-12” and many more Ballardian tropes now familiar to his readers today.

Moreover, in July 2008, a new discovery was made at the “J.G. Ballard: Autopsy of the New Millennium” exhibition at Barcelona’s Museum of Contemporary Culture. The exhibition organizers had obtained Dr Bax’s framed copy of Project For A New Novel, and precisely 50 years since it was created it was discovered it was comprised of not four double-page spreads, but five such layouts. The newfound spread is reproduced below:










The set was finally printed in 1978 in New Worlds, 20 years after their creation.

Ballard has also commented on the “advertisements” he placed in Ambit: “Back in the late 60s I produced a series of advertisements which I placed in various publications (Ambit, New Worlds, Ark and various continental alternative magazines), doing the art work myself and arranging for the blockmaking, and then delivering the block to the particular journal just as would a commercial advertiser. Of course I was advertising my own conceptual ideas, but I wanted to do so within the formal circumstances of classic commercial advertising – I wanted ads that would look in place in Vogue, Paris Match, Newsweek, etc.

 “To maintain the integrity of the project I paid the commercial rate for the page, even in the case of Ambit, of which I was and still am Prose Editor. I would liked to have branched out into Vogue and Newsweek, but cost alone stopped me…

“Claire Churchill (by the way, the subject of the first ad, was my then girlfriend, and still is) is also the subject of the fifth ad, which shows her, after swimming in the sea off Brighton, sitting naked in the front seat of my car covered with thousands of specks of seaweed – so outraged was she by my sneak photography that she stole my only copy of the ad, but she has agreed in the interests of Art and Literature to have it published.

“The Angle Between Two Walls is a still from Alone, the American filmmaker Steve Dwoskin’s movie about a masturbating woman. Neural Interval was a picture from a bondage magazine. I’ve no idea of the source for the strange gun photo, though Les Krims was a very well known US photographer.”


‘Homage to Claire Churchill’: Ambit, #32, Summer 1967



‘Does the Angle between Two Walls have a Happy Ending?’: Ambit, #33, Autumn 1967



‘A Neural Interval’: Ambit, #36, Summer 1968


‘Placental Insufficiency’: Ambit, #45, Autumn 1970


‘Venus Smiles’: Ambit, #46, Winter 1970/1971