A War of Fragments: J.G. Ballard's World Versus America

At the very end of J.G. Ballard's work, his preoccupations intensified and sharpened, rather than diminished. Those preoccupations possess an invaluable archival residue in the form of several notebooks (located in time by Ballard's archivist, Chris Beckett, as dating from around 2005-06) outlining a potential new novel, World Versus America. The notebooks provide unique insights into the processes by which Ballard, towards the end of his life, instigated and developed his work, evidently unconcerned by any furore which it could unleash, if taken to publication form. The notebooks also constitute distinctive visual artefacts which resonate with Ballard's visual collages and experimental art-works of the late 1950s to the early 1970s (notably those created for Ambit magazine). This essay, focused on Ballard's final fiction project and using a crossdisciplinary methodological approach, is based on original research conducted in the British Library.