SOURCE: “Ballard/Crash/Baudrillard,” in Science-Fiction Studies, Vol. 19, No. 3, November, 1992, pp. 354–60.

In the following essay, Ruddick examines Jean Baudrillard's commentary on Crash—which Ruddick contends is a misreading of Ballard's work—and Ballard's misdirected attack on postmodern criticism in response to Baudrillard's essay.

Ballard's novel Crash (1973), in its author's words the “first pornographic novel based on technology” (“Some Words” 49), is an extreme fiction.¹ Ballard tells a prepublication anecdote about it that is both credible and revealing:

One of the publisher's readers was either a psychiatrist or the wife of a psychiatrist, and she wrote the most damning and vituperative reader's report [the publisher] ever received. It included the statement: “The author is beyond psychiatric help.”

(Burns 22)

This reader's reaction, based on a confusion between fiction and reality—between the narrator and the author—might be dismissed as naive, were it not for the fact that Ballard invites such...