Why J.G. Ballard still matters

 

I FIRST encountered the writing of J. G. Ballard (1930 – 2009) as a teenager and, like many readers discovering him for the first time, I found his novels unsettling yet oddly hypnotic.

Here were familiar landscapes that felt weirdly distorted, worlds in which ordinary reality had slipped sideways. At the time, I was immersed in science fiction – Star Trek, Thunderbirds, the works of Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Philip K Dick and many others.

But what originally drew me to Ballard’s fiction were the eye-catching cover designs by artist David Pelham. They shouted from the shelves of a small bookshop in the market town of Boston, Lincolnshire, that I loved browsing during Saturday afternoon family outings.

Pelham was best known for his iconic designs for editions of A Clockwork Orange and In Cold Blood before, in 1974, he created a distinctive set of covers for a Penguin box set of four Ballard books: The Wind from Nowhere, The Drowned World, The Drought and The Terminal Beach.

The images were bold and a perfect doorway to Ballard’s fiction – even before opening the books you sensed these were stories about worlds slightly out of joint. I was hooked and Ballard has been part of my literary journey ever since.

His fiction was profoundly imaginative – often surreal, even improbable – and, several decades later, I found myself returning to his work with rather different eyes.

Today, in an age of extreme weather, rising seas, recurring floods and growing anxiety about the future of technology, some of Ballard’s once startling visions feel less like fantasy and more like uncomfortable possibility.

When journalist and author Derek Turner kindly compared my debut novel Flood Waters Down to Ballard’s work – particularly The Drowned World – in his introduction, I felt honoured, if also slightly daunted.

Comparisons with writers one admires are dangerous territory. Yet his observation made me reflect on just how much of Ballard’s writing had quietly shaped my own thinking.

Landscapes that become characters

One of the things I came to appreciate about his novels is that they were never really about catastrophe in the conventional sense.

Yes, cities had flooded. Societies had fractured. And familiar structures had crumbled. But the disasters themselves often felt secondary to something more profound – how human beings psychologically adapt to transformed environments.

In The Drowned World, for example, London has become a humid, lagoon-like wilderness reclaimed by rising waters and tropical heat. The city’s half-submerged environs are dreamlike and psychologically destabilising.

I probably absorbed these dystopian worlds instinctively rather than analytically, but the idea of landscapes shaping behaviour and identity stayed with me.

Looking back, I can see how this understanding influenced the way I approached my debut novel, Flood Waters Down. The flooded Lincolnshire Fens and the raging climate are not simply a backdrop for action – they shape everything from politics and survival to social relationships.

One of the lead characters, Sara Flynn, arrives from London to encounter not simply environmental collapse but a landscape where the remnants of decimated communities cling to their former identities.

Perhaps it is not surprising that this otherworldly landscape becomes a character because, long before I ever began writing Flood Waters Down, I had always felt there was something uncanny about the Fens.

I say this as someone who has lived in South Lincolnshire for most of my life and cares deeply about this extraordinary region. Stoically beautiful and endlessly fascinating, it is also frequently misunderstood.

Beneath the immense skies and infinite horizons it is far from comforting, especially for first-time visitors. Human engineering is everywhere – drainage systems, embankments, pumps, razor straight waterways and industrial-scale agriculture – reminders that much of this land exists because people wrested it from the sea.

The water might be tamed for now but it never entirely disappears – the Fens exist in an uneasy balance, suspended between land and sea. Anyone who has stood on the coast after a storm surge, or watched floodwater creep across fields, understands how fragile that can feel.

In many ways, the Fens scarcely needed fictionalising to become Ballardian. They already contain that quality of liminality – a sense of existing between states, haunted by older landscapes beneath the present one.

That feeling intensified for me after visiting the tiny settlement of Surfleet Seas End in the aftermath of the damaging east coast storm surge of 2013.

Speaking to farmers and residents whose lives had been disrupted by flooding made the effects of climate change feel tangible and immediate rather than abstract. The seed of Flood Waters Down was planted.

From environmental anxiety to climate reality

Though Ballard was writing long before anthropogenic climate change became part of everyday public consciousness, re-reading his work today feels uncannily contemporary.

His fiction endures because he understood something we are only now beginning to confront collectively: environmental catastrophe rarely arrives all at once.

A little more flooding. A little more heat. Slight disruptions to systems once assumed reliable. Rising anxiety beneath the surface of daily life. Institutions struggling to adapt. Politics hardening. People normalising the abnormal.

In writing Flood Waters Down, I wanted to explore similar questions through the lens of contemporary fears: climate disruption, social fragmentation, wealth and the unsettling rise of artificial intelligence (AI).

Unlike much science fiction, my interest has never been technology for its own sake, which is perhaps surprising given my long career as a journalist specialising in space and technology.

As  Turner perceptively notes in his introduction, “technologists are often accused of excessive faith in systems”, so working in and around the space sector for decades might easily suggest an unquestioning belief in technological progress.

Practical and everyday experience, however, teaches a more complex lesson. Technology can create just as many problems as it can solve. Liberation isn’t always without cost.

In Flood Waters Down, AI emerges partly as humanity's attempt to manage crisis, only for that solution to become a threat in its own right – reflecting our anxieties and contradictions.

Ballard was primarily concerned with the psychological consequences of a transformed environment. In Flood Waters Down, I wanted to explore its political and social consequences: the wealthy insulating themselves from catastrophe while others are left to struggle, and technology becoming as much an instrument of control as a means of survival.

The instinct to resist

At its heart, Flood Waters Down is a story about resistance and, even amid loss and upheaval, the endurance of communities. People improvise. Moral choices remain.

Yet amid the danger, greed and oppression of this flooded world, there is also a stubborn hope. Maybe this stems from my experience as a journalist – years of reporting on human ingenuity and scientific achievement leave one reluctant to surrender entirely to pessimism.

Or perhaps it comes from the Fens themselves – a landscape shaped by generations of people refusing to give up in harsh circumstances. The rebels and survivors in my novel certainly owe something to that spirit.

What strikes me most when re-reading Ballard today is not his accuracy as a prophet (though there is an element of that in his work) – it is his emotional truth.

He understood instability. Psychological unease. And the feeling of living through transition when the familiar world is no longer dependable.

Those feelings increasingly define life in the 21st century. We live in an era shaped by climate uncertainty, technological acceleration, military hubris and a growing awareness that systems we assumed permanent may be more fragile than we imagined.

Echoes of Ballard’s visionary prose may occasionally surface in Flood Waters Down – in its flooded landscapes, environmental anxieties and moral ambiguities.

No writer, however, wishes simply to imitate another and my novel is very much its own story – a future history rooted in the Lincolnshire landscape and shaped by contemporary concerns and events.

Literary influences, however, have a way of lingering beneath the surface. Just like the rising water.

 

 

 

 

Flood Waters Down (2026) is available now in paperback and ebook from bookshops and online.

NewSpace was here first

 

                                            Archive issues of NewSpace magazine dating from 1984 and 1985.

A pioneering magazine produced from a Lincolnshire village in 1984 has left an unexpected footnote to space history. More than 40 years after its launch, its name – and what it set out to cover – raises an intriguing question about the origins of one of today’s most familiar space industry labels. Clive Simpson investigates. 

THE term NewSpace is recognised by everyone involved in the space industry today. It has become shorthand for the entrepreneurial, commercially driven sector that emerged alongside – and sometimes in opposition to – the traditional world of government space agencies and their large aerospace contractors.

SpaceX is NewSpace. Rocket Lab is NewSpace. Start-ups building small satellites, launchers and in-orbit services are routinely described as NewSpace. Countries from Britain and Germany to India and the UAE talk about developing their own NewSpace ecosystems.

But where or how did the compound originate? Accepted history generally takes us to the United States and the Space Frontier Foundation, the campaigning organisation established in 1988 by Rick Tumlinson, Bob Werb and Jim Muncy.

The Foundation emerged from a movement inspired partly by Princeton physicist Gerard O'Neill's vision of permanent human settlement beyond Earth. Its founders believed that the established, government-dominated model of spaceflight was too bureaucratic and expensive and that private enterprise could open the space frontier far more effectively.

Today the Foundation describes NewSpace as representing space infused with the spirit of entrepreneurialism and the free market. Its historical records that in 2004 it was already referring to an emerging generation of space development as NewSpace.

And this is where the story of the word becomes interesting. Who actually coined the term NewSpace?

Unsurprisingly, the Space Frontier Foundation makes a specific claim. Its biography of Bob Werb states that in 2004 he was one of three people who “coined the word NewSpace”, during the strategic review in which the Foundation adopted ‘Advancing NewSpace’ as its mission.

Rick Tumlinson provided a more colourful version of events. The entrepreneurial space movement had experimented with the expression “Alt.Space”, drawing on the language of alternative music and distinguishing its approach from conventional aerospace.

Not everyone liked it. Tumlinson recalls Charles Miller and Bill Boland proposing that “new” and “space” should instead be combined into NewSpace, complete with the internal capital S. It had the sort of typographical punch then appearing in names such as MirCorp and LunaCorp.

Tumlinson says he was initially unconvinced but eventually came around. The name subsequently became attached to the Foundation's conference and, increasingly, to the movement itself.

By 2006, it was certainly established. The Foundation's NewSpace 2006 conference was held at the Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas that July, bringing together entrepreneurs, investors and space advocates. A contemporary account of the accompanying business plan competition talked about encouraging a new breed of ‘astropreneurs’.

One observer captured the changing times by remarking that a few years earlier many attendees would have had the names of struggling non-profit organisations on their conference badges. Now everyone seemed to be a CEO.

It is a neat snapshot of the moment when commercial space advocacy was turning into a fully-fledged industry.

Except there is a problem with the accepted etymology. NewSpace was already the name of a space magazine in Britain 20 years earlier. And I should know.

The first published issue carried the masthead NewSpace, complete with the capital S and, underneath it: ‘Vol. 1 No. 1 – December 1984’. It was a small but ambitious publication produced in Lincolnshire by two young space enthusiasts with backgrounds in journalism and printing – Stephen Byford and me.

Steve worked for a local printer while I was then a contract sub-editor on Angling Times, part of the rapidly expanding EMAP publishing group, whose titles ranged from regional newspapers to national magazines such as Smash Hits.

More intriguing than the NewSpace title, however, is what we said the magazine was actually about. The opening editorial begins: “Welcome to the very first issue of NewSpace, a new publication designed to bring you all the latest news and reports concerning the ever-expanding world of space exploration and commercialisation.”

That final word is important. This wasn't simply an astronomy magazine that happened to have NewSpace as a catchy title. From its first paragraph it identified space commercialisation as part of the changing world it intended to cover.

The editorial noted that NewSpace was aimed at readers wanting to keep abreast of “rapidly changing events in the space world” and that we had established direct contacts in Britain and overseas with people immediately involved in space-related activities.

The first issue included reports on the Space Shuttle, Ariane, Soviet spaceflight and Spacelab. One article also asked a remarkably prescient question: ‘A Space Agency for Britain?’ The UK would eventually establish the UK Space Agency – 26 years later.

Contemporary evidence

Memory alone is a notoriously unreliable historical source. Fortunately, in this case, there is independent evidence as well as an archived set of original issues. The Spalding Guardian (7 December 1984) carried a substantial article headlined: HI-TECH LIFT-OFF FOR SPACE MAGAZINE

“A magazine about space industry and exploration has been launched by two local men,” reporter Paul Murphy wrote, alongside a photo of Stephen and myself in our production office.

The article identified NewSpace, named Stephen Byford and Clive Simpson as its publishers (under the guise of Pitch & Moment Publishing) and reported that the first edition had been printed and released earlier that week. It explained that we believed there was a gap in the market for a magazine covering rapidly changing events in space exploration.

It also recorded something significant about the publication's intended reach. NewSpace had approached the American, European, Russian and Japanese space agencies, together with firms involved in the space industry, for information. NASA, apparently, was particularly helpful – sending news releases “in English!”, as the newspaper article rather charmingly observed.

Copies were being sold on subscription and through a local bookshop and the intention was initially to publish six issues a year. Among the early subscribers was the late Sir Patrick Moore, who sent his subscription cheque accompanied by a typewritten note of encouragement – quite a boost for two young space enthusiasts launching a magazine from Lincolnshire.

The publicity, however, didn’t go down too well with the EMAP hierarchy and on my next shift I was hauled into the office by Angling Times Editor Alan Haines and asked, in all seriousness, if I was setting up in competition. Though outwardly denying such ambition, I did send a ‘message’ via him to the upper echelons of management offering to sell them the forward-looking title and install Steve and myself as editors.

In retrospect, I guess the launch of NewSpace did probably sail rather close to an obscure ‘non-competition’ clause in my EMAP contract but, given what subsequently happened across the space industry, I still like to think they might have regretted turning down my cheeky offer.

So, there is little ambiguity about the basic historical fact: a publication called NewSpace, using exactly that compound spelling and capitalisation, existed within the British space community in December 1984. And it explicitly covered space industry, exploration and space commercialisation.

NewSpace wasn’t just a two-man show either. We also had the support of other writers in the space field, including Dr Michael Leggett and Dr Michael Martin-Smith. My Derby-based cousin Antony Bennett, a talented artist, gave the magazine a unique visual identity with his original pen and ink drawings for the covers and to illustrate articles.

Even the styling was ahead of its time

Back in the mid-1980s, running two words together while retaining a capital letter at the start of the second – NewSpace rather than New Space or Newspace – was ahead of the curve.

Today it is commonplace. We see it everywhere in company, product and media names – I also used it when setting up my PR agency SimComm Europe Ltd in 1998. The technique eventually acquired various descriptions, including medial capitals, InterCaps and, most familiarly in computing, CamelCase.

But in December 1984, when Steve and I launched NewSpace, it was much more unusual. We certainly didn't invent the device and there were some notable earlier examples. CinemaScope had been using its emphatic capital S since 1953, AstroTurf appeared in the 1960s and MasterCard adopted its familiar joined form in 1979.

By the early 1980s, however, the convention was particularly associated with the rapidly expanding computer industry. WordPerfect was in use by 1982 and, when Apple launched the Macintosh in January 1984, two of the programs that helped demonstrate its revolutionary graphical interface were MacPaint and MacWrite. PageMaker would follow in 1985.

So NewSpace appeared at an interesting moment. The medial capital was not new, but it was only just becoming one of the visual signatures of the technological age.

I don't remember there being any great typographical revelation behind our choice. NewSpace simply looked and felt right: compact, modern and unmistakably two words, while simultaneously suggesting that they belonged together.

Looking back four decades later, that seems rather appropriate. The way we wrote the name belonged to a visual convention that was only just becoming mainstream and our magazine’s name anticipated terminology that would eventually become ubiquitous across the global space industry.

We weren't inventing CamelCase in 1984 but, like the name NewSpace itself, we seem to have arrived at the party rather early.

 It would be tempting – particularly for a journalist unexpectedly finding himself part of the story four decades later – to declare that NewSpace was invented by a startup Lincolnshire publishing venture in the UK rather than in the mighty American entrepreneurial space movement.

As far as I can tell there is no evidence that the Space Frontier Foundation encountered our magazine so, assuming this to be the case, the most likely explanation is independent coinage.

NewSpace in the United States of the early 2000s quickly became something more specific, almost an ideological declaration of independence from the ‘Old Space’ of government-directed programmes, traditional aerospace giants, cost-plus contracts and lengthy development cycles. 

The Foundation sought an industry driven by entrepreneurs, private investment, competition and free enterprise. Its current mission still talks about unleashing the power of free enterprise to open the space frontier.

Today’s meaning of NewSpace undoubtedly owes much to the American movement but, as I have attempted to show, the word itself demonstrably predates this time.

From insurgency to establishment

There is another irony in all this. The NewSpace companies that challenged the old aerospace establishment have increasingly become part of the ‘establishment’ themselves.

SpaceX, founded in 2002, is an obvious example. The company that once represented the disruptive outsider is now one of the world's dominant launch providers and a crucial contractor to NASA and the US Government.

Meanwhile, established aerospace companies have adopted NewSpace practices and governments have deliberately created commercial markets through procurement and investment.

The dividing line between Old Space and NewSpace has consequently become increasingly difficult to draw. Tumlinson himself has suggested that NewSpace is now beginning to blur into simply ‘space’ – something he regards as a sign of success.

Perhaps that's inevitable. Every revolution eventually has to confront the problem of becoming the establishment. And every generation likes to believe that it invented the future.

There is perhaps a certain retrospective irony in the fact that NewSpace itself was a shoestring start-up, created outside the established publishing industry to report on a space sector its enterprising creators believed was beginning to change.

Unexpected footnote

Which brings us back to a file containing some pristine copies of a small black and white magazine produced in Lincolnshire more than 40 years ago.

When Steve and I sat down in 1984 and put the words NewSpace across the top of our first issue – making up the magazine by hand from printed galleys produced on a Commodore 64 computer – I don't remember imagining that the same word would eventually become one of the defining labels of the 21st century global space industry.

At its simplest we were combining the words ‘news’ and ‘space’, which seemed an appropriate name for a new magazine reporting space news.  Though we recognised the important role commercial space would play in the future, we weren't consciously launching a movement, at least not in the conventional sense. We were two space enthusiasts with enough experience of journalism and publishing to think we could make a magazine of it.

All these years later, the words in that first editorial now have an oddly prophetic ring: a rapidly changing space world, new technology, international activity and the growing role of commercial space activities in our everyday lives.

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Editor's note: this article is adapted from the book Travels in Space & Time, a memoir by Clive A Simpson, to be published in 2027.