This week we’ll see yet another man dragged backward through time, just like those in the Drowned & Crystal Worlds, into a violent subtropical dream, into landscapes so baroque and savage as to defy belief. The man this time, though, is Ballard himself, and the world is our own. The real world of his un-imagined past, transformed by war, is every bit as outlandish, every bit as science-fictional as his invented futures. In the literature of the uncanny, Weird War has a long and extraordinary history, from Wilfred Owen’s 1918 trench-murder of his doppelgänger in “Strange Meeting” to the Jungle of Screaming Souls in Bao Ninh’s Vietcong battle-journal “the Sorrow of War”, from Ambrose Bierce’s 1890 “Incident at Owl Creek Bridge” to the 2017 atomic-bomb detonation scene in Twin Peaks, set to Penderecki’s equally weird, cold-sweat-inducing “Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima”. War both reflects and generates weirdness in fiction and popular culture, and of all the wars ever fought by man, World War Two was by all accounts the maddest, the most surreal, the most preternatural. Real-world uncanniness swept from continent to continent like a pandemic, infecting the child that would become JG Ballard along with tens of millions of others. Every fear contained in the pantheon of supernatural literature comes to life in war. Angry revenants, cursed areas, fire raining from the sky, mad scientists, zombies, invisible death, torturing demons, pits of liquid flame ~~ it all manifests, often consciously. Consider Nazi Germany’s “werwolf” program of post-war resistance guerrillas, indistinguishable from the populace by day but transforming into a terrible force by the light of the moon; or the “night witches” of the soviet union’s all-female 588th night bomber regiment, gliding low over German positions with their engines shut off and only the wind noise across their dark wings to reveal their spectral presence before the explosions began. And so on, almost infinitely. Name a horror trope and it has come true in modern war. Monsters roam the earth. Random people are unexpectedly torn from their lives and dropped, in the blink of an eye, into dimensions darker than any found in fiction. Entire societies go stark mad and write their madness in blood and fire across the landscape. Man is wolf to man, and god, as an organizing principle and a giver of comfort, is considerably more absent than usual. Ballard believed in his bones that the death-haunted, baroque landscapes of his youth, in all their capacity to suddenly rewrite their own forms and laws in chaotic, lethal, spectacular ways, were always still just over the hill, just beyond the hedge. On any given day you might open your front door and find the world transformed utterly, and you with it…