[E.O.M.S.]

For people that aren't already Ballard junkies – those who have only read one novel, who have tried and failed to get on with his work and those who are thinking of reading Ballard for the first time, for example – will Extreme Metaphors peak their interest on any measurable scale, or make Ballard's novels more accessible or enjoyable when they do get around to it?
SS: I believe so. There’s a sense, especially in the 70s conversations, that Ballard used the interview situation as a kind of laboratory. He presented real-world case studies (say, video recorders becoming popular in the 70s); ran tests on them – that is, extrapolated extreme near-future scenarios (say, an imagined dystopia of disembodied virtual sex inspired by reading reports of people watching porno films on VCRs); and published the results in his writing (his savage, gory 1977 short story ‘The Intensive Care Unit’ follows precisely that VCR/sex/dystopia line of thought). Probably my favourite interview in the book is one from 1974 where he runs rings around the interviewer, Carol Orr, dazzling her with all manner of near-future situations as he works through the themes of his then-unpublished novel, Concrete Island. If you didn’t understand Concrete Island, the Orr conversation will probably enlighten you. We avoided including too much discussion of Empire of the Sun, because Ballard even bored himself after talking about it for the umpteenth time. After Spielberg filmed Empire, it seemed that’s all anyone wanted to ask him about and I’ve read interviews where you can sense his frustration with it. Instead, we tried to get at least one sustained mention of each of his novels in the book, so you’ll find talk of such works as the much-maligned Hello America and the misunderstood Rushing to Paradise.