J. Ballard - Hello America

Fourth Estate

An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers

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London W6 8JB

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This edition published by Fourth Estate in 2014

First published in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape in 1981

Copyright © J. G. Ballard 1981

The right of J. G. Ballard to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988.

Introduction © Ben Marcus 2014

‘The Sage of Shepperton’ © Travis Elborough 2008

Author’s Note © J. G. Ballard 1994

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Cover by Stanley Donwood.

Photography by Hecate Moon.

Ebook Edition © JUNE 2010 ISBN: 9780007346967

Version: 2014-07-11

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Author’s Note

Introduction by Ben Marcus

1 The Golden Coast

2 Collision Course

3 A Drowned Mermaid

4 Secret Cargoes

5 To the Inland Sea

6 The Great American Desert

7 The Crisis Years

8 Thirstland

9 The Indians

10 The Starship

11 The Oval Office

12 Camels and A-Bombs

13 West

14 Wayne’s Diary: Part One

15 Giants in the Sky

16 Rescue

17 Across the Rockies

18 The Electrographic Dream

19 The Hughes Suite

20 Wayne’s Diary: Part Two

21 Crash-landing

22 The House of Presidents

23 The Sunlight Flier

24 A Graduate of Spandau

25 Siege

26 Titans and Cruises

27 Love and Hate

28 The War Room

29 Countdown

30 Execution Squad

31 Flight

32 California Time

The Sage of Shepperton

About the author

By the same author

About the Publisher

The United States has given birth to most of our century’s dreams, and to a good many of its nightmares. No other country has created such a potent vision of itself, and exported that vision so successfully to the rest of the world. Skyscrapers and freeways, Buicks and blue jeans, film stars and gangsters, Disneyland and Las Vegas have together stamped the image of America onto the maps of our imagination.

Recently the American dream may have faded a little, exposed to the harsh reality of violent crime and decaying inner cities, but throughout the rest of the world the core appeal of the American way of life is as strong as ever. Above all, Hollywood still rules our entertainment culture, projecting a fictional image of America far more powerful than the reality.

Whenever I visit the United States I often feel that the real ‘America’ lies not in the streets of Manhattan and Chicago, or the farm towns of the Midwest, but in the imaginary America created by Hollywood and the media landscape. Far from being real, the sidewalks and filling stations and office blocks seems to imitate the images of themselves in countless movies and TV commercials. Even the American people one meets in hotel lobbies and department stores seem like actors in a huge televised sitcom. ‘USA’ might well be the title of a 24-hour-a-day virtual-reality channel, broadcast into the streets and shopping malls and, perhaps, the White House itself – certainly during the Presidency of Ronald Reagan, whose first year in office coincided with the original publication of Hello America .

Cadillacs, Coca-Cola and cocaine, presidents and psychopaths, Norman Rockwell and the mafia … the dream of America endlessly unravels its codes, like the helix of some ideological DNA. But what would happen if we took the United States at its face value and constructed an alternative America from all these images? The simulacrum might well reveal something of the secret agenda that lies beneath the enticing surface of the American dream.

A curious feature of the United States is that this nation with the most advanced science and technology the world has ever seen, which has landed men on the moon and created the supercomputers that may one day replace us, amuses itself with a comic-book culture aimed for the most part at bored and violent teenagers. In Hello America I suggest that the hidden logic of the American dream might one day lead to a President Manson playing nuclear roulette in Las Vegas, a less far-fetched notion than it seems, bearing in mind the Hollywood actor who occupied the White House through most of the 1980s, his head filled with the debris of old movies as he dreamed his Star Wars fantasies of laser-armed missiles.

Nonetheless, as the reader will find, Hello America is strongly on the side of the USA, and a celebration of its optimism and self-confidence, qualities that we Europeans so conspicuously lack. For all my fears of a President Manson, the story ends in the triumph of the nineteenth-century Yankee virtues embodied in my old glass airplane-building inventor. However hard we resist, our dreams still carry the legend ‘Made in USA’.

1994

By Ben Marcus

Hello America might as well be called Goodbye America . Goodbye and so long, you monstrous, resource-sucking nation, who raped the land and air, imposed your hypocritical policies and cartoonish values every which where, and lowered the world’s collective intelligence through debased entertainment. Good riddance, and now let’s tour the corpse. This novel, more than any in his opus, is J. G. Ballard’s cruel eulogy to the country everyone loves to hate. America, we all know, has had it coming for a good while now. Since it first started to thrive, perhaps? In Hello America , that comeuppance has struck, and hard. The promised land has given way to wasteland, a blank slate. Welcome to the end times. Or is Ballard suggesting we need to wipe the great nation clean and start again, with a new group of well-meaning European explorers? Perhaps ‘hello’ is the correct word after all.

The novel opens to a dead America, the Statue of Liberty drowned in her own harbour. A group of explorers has come across the ocean to assess some worrying radiation levels. At first glance, our explorers find a New York that is covered in what looks like mounds of gold. Gold dust is spilling from buildings, running into the water. They’re rich! This is the American promise, writ not just large but gigantic, and their excitement is nearly childish. Of course this is Ballard, who would not reward his characters so soon, if ever. Their fates will not be resolved so easily. Up close, the explorers discover that this is not gold at all, but sand. America’s profligate way with all of the world’s resources has left it uninhabitable. Published in 1981, when America was still recovering from the oil crises of 1973 and 1979, Hello America is even more relevant, or terrifyingly accurate, today. Our sense of its premise’s inevitability quickly transforms the novel from sci-fi horrorscape to just another piece of domestic realism, plus some very appealing clone technology and ultra-sexy transparent flying machines late in the novel. The climate in this not-so-fictional world has been pitched on its head after the damming of the Bering Strait, and the explorers discover that not only did every American have to flee, they did so in a hurry. The metropolis is a desert. We can only guess at the wrenching weather that must have burned people out of their homes. The country is a graveyard of itself. This is perhaps just the cautionary tale we need as we lurch further into real, irreversible destruction, and since the hard-headed among us are not listening to science, why not let fiction commence its subtler, more sinister campaign?