The Man Who Walked on the Moon

J. G. Ballard was born to British parents in Shanghai, China. At a young age, Ballard experienced the effects of the Second Sino-Japanese War, which changed his worldview and eventually helped inspire one of his most famous works, Empire of the Sun. In 1945, Ballard moved to England to study medicine, but he ended up dropping out of college to work as a writer. After publishing one of his early short stories, he struggled to place his work, and in 1954 he joined the Royal Air Force, where he served for about a year before leaving. In 1955 he met and married Helen Mary Matthews, and in 1956 they had their first of three children. By the end of the same year, Ballard published his next two stories and decided to pursue writing professionally. Ballard became a pioneer of New Wave Science Fiction, and his first novels, The Wind From Nowhere and The Drowned World explored society’s responses to natural disaster. Crash, published in 1973, became controversially famous for its characters’ obsession with violence and psychosexuality. Ballard’s most successful novel was Empire of the Sun, which was eventually adapted into a movie directed by Steven Spielberg.

J. G. Ballard was one of the prominent writers of New Wave Science Fiction, a response to the strict cultural separation between literature and genre fiction like fantasy and sci-fi. New Wave turned the questions of science fiction inward, and instead of looking at the possibilities for science in the physical world, it looked at the science of the self: psychology and sociology were major topics for New Wave writers. This is most obvious in “The Man Who Walked on the Moon” when the narrator’s curiosities fall not on the technological excitement of the Apollo missions, but on the ways they (allegedly) affected Scranton. The Apollo Program consisted of 14 space flight missions run by NASA between the years of 1961 and 1972. The most famous of these missions was Apollo 11, which landed the first men on the moon in 1969. The crew of this mission, including Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins, and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin, were hailed as national heroes in the race to beat the USSR to the moon. The Apollo missions were a crucial cultural turning point in the Cold War and provided evidence of the great technological innovation and advancement that the US made as a result of the competitive pressure of their Soviet counterparts.

Ballard’s work had a large impact on the literary world of the late-20th century. He is known to have admired Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, and he even coined the term “inverted Crusoeism” to describe characters who separate themselves from society on purpose, as opposed to Defoe’s protagonist, who is accidentally marooned on an island. Scranton and the narrator in “The Man Who Walked on the Moon” are both inverted Crusoes. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” similarly explores themes of isolation and its effect on perception. Like Ballard’s story, Gilman’s uses sight to explore the blurred lines between reality and fantasy. Both stories are also concerned with the ways in which powerful social structures oppress the powerless. Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis is a third work vitally concerned with these topics: the novel’s protagonist, Gregor Samsa, has a surreal experience that isolates him from his family and society. Another Ballard short story, “The Drowned Giant,” explores the dissolution of identity over time and the ways in which the world around people shapes how they think of themselves.