Soon after I graduated from my BA I sent a short story – my first – to Ambit magazine and received a hand-written rejection note from the fiction editor, JG Ballard: “well writ but not good enough.” I was thrilled. I’d recently read The Atrocity Exhibition and decided that he was my new favourite author. Written in the more realist mode of his earlier and later novels, the story ‘The Intensive Care Unit’ is typically prescient, and typically Ballardian in its tropes of surveillance, violence, perverse science, and desire mediated by technology. In this story all human interaction, including family life, is conducted remotely by “television hook-up”, until the narrator – a doctor, of course – makes the mistake of arranging finally to meet his wife and children in the flesh. There is a lot of flesh.
In Myths of the Near Future, Jonathan Cape, 1982. Also in The Complete Stories, Vol 2, Fourth Estate, 2014
A Personal Anthology 