The Atrocity Exhibition

Whenever you put a list of books together, you'll always get disagreements. But this could well be the most controversial choice of all, because J.G. Ballard's The Atrocity Exhibition has always been controversial, ever since the stories that make it up were first published in New Worlds.The stories that make up The Atrocity Exhibition were what Ballard called "condensed novels", stories that were reduced to intense, often hallucinogenic images, with much of the normal connecting material we expect in fiction removed. The effect was maddening and intriguing, flashes of lucidity and passages of weird insanity. Put together, they constitute an account of a descent into madness brought on by the incessant imagery of the modern world.The protagonist, if we assume it is the same character across the different stories, is variously called Traven or Travis, Talbot or Talbert; he is a doctor in a mental hospital who is himself going mad. The mass media and the cult of celebrity, events such as the death of Marilyn Monroe, the assassination of President Kennedy, the space race and the threat of war, all contribute to his psychosis, and he is constantly trying to recast them in ways that make sense to him. Some of the condensed novels, for instance, have titles such as "The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race," "Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan" and "Plan for the Assassination of Jacqueline Kennedy" demonstrate how violent these delusions are, as if only the start of World War III will make sense to him. No work better represents the character of the New Wave in science fiction, a literature of radical experiments (not always successful, but generally very interesting), and a literature in which the landscape of the mind ("inner space") is at least as important as anything in the outer world. This is challenging, disturbing, often irrational, and one of the most extraordinary achievements in the whole of science fiction.