A passage of fiction is not an account of something that might once have happened in the visible world; it is not even an account of something that could conceivably have happened in that world… Such issues are irrelevant; a passage of fiction reports his or her contemplation of what did happen or what did not happen or what might have happened or what can never happen.
“The consumer conformism — “the suburbanization of the soul” — on the one hand and the gathering ecological and other crises on the other do force the individual to recognize that he or she is all he or she has got. And this sharpens the eye and the imagination. The challenge is for each of us to respond, to remake as much as we can of the world around us, because no one else will do it for us. We have to find a core within us and get to work. Don’t worry about worldly rewards. Just get on with it!”
J. G. Ballard | Rolling Stone, 1987