Behold the Man
Nebula winner and the New Wave's most notorious provocation: time-travel paradox as theology, handled with a seriousness that outlasted the scandal.
Book Entry · Science Fiction
What is Crash about?
After his own motorway accident, a television producer named James Ballard is drawn into the orbit of Vaughan, a scarred 'hoodlum scientist' who choreographs and photographs car crashes as erotic events, and whose final project is a head-on collision with Elizabeth Taylor. Written in prose of surgical detachment that makes the pornography of metal and wound somehow clinical, Crash is the purest distillation of Ballard's thesis that technology doesn't serve our desires — it breeds new ones. One publisher's reader famously reported: 'This author is beyond psychiatric help. Do not publish.' They published.
Why it matters
The most extreme and most influential of Ballard's urban-disaster novels; Cronenberg's 1996 film adaptation won a special jury prize at Cannes and a moral panic in the British press.
Read next
Dhalgren
The genre's most famous avant-garde novel and an enduring proof that SF readers will follow real difficulty if the sentences earn it.
Titus Alone
A flawed, haunting coda whose proto-New-Wave collision of fantasy and dystopia influenced Moorcock (who championed it) and M.