HIS CLOSEST FRIEND

A Profile of Christopher Evans

First published in Deep Ends: The J. G. Ballard Anthology 2016

(ed. Rick McGrath)

By Mike Holliday

In Miracles of Life, J. G. Ballard describes Dr. Christopher Evans as “the closest friend I have made in my life”. Evans is mostly known for his glamorous image, his TV appearances, and for providing Ballard with the weekly contents of his waste basket. But who was Chris Evans, and what was his impact on Ballard during the twelve years of their friendship before it was ended by Evans’ death from cancer, aged only 48?

Dr Christopher Evans

Christopher Riche Evans was born in the Welsh seaside village of Aberdovey on 29 May 1931 – just six months after Ballard. He spent his childhood in Wales, and was educated at Christ College, Brecon. It was during his school years that he first developed an enthusiasm for science fiction:

I remember coming across, quite by chance, the famous Astounding in some bookshop. ... I was riveted by the concepts and by the adult nature of the writing. ... As I read it I found that, even though the technology was meaningless to me, I could follow the narrative and see immediately that these were speculative stories about a range of possible futures, some of which, or any of which, I knew could easily come true. I became a passionate sf fan from then on; this was before the end of the war.1

It is not particularly surprising that Ballard and Evans should hit it off. They were almost exactly the same age – unlike Mike Moorcock, or some of the younger New Worlds writers. They both had a scientific background, Ballard having studied medicine for two years and then worked for several years as assistant editor on the weekly journal Chemistry & Industry. Both had been interested in science fiction, but become dissatisfied at its lack of ambition and imagination, and its underlying conservative and conformist character. They each had an interest that lay outside of the scientific mainstream: Freud’s psychoanalytical theories in Ballard’s case, and the psychology of belief in paranormal phenomena for Evans. It was also extremely easy for them to meet – Evans worked in Teddington, the London suburb next-door to Shepperton, and Ballard could drive there from his home in Old Charlton Road in quarter of an hour:

I used to visit him at his work frequently and go round the laboratories. I’d discuss everything that was going on with friends and fellow workers of his, in the pubs around Teddington where we would have lunch.15

After his friend’s death, Ballard missed the scientific input and invigorating conversation that these meetings with Evans and his colleagues at the NPL had afforded. A subscription to New Scientist must have seemed like a poor replacement.

Ballard and Evans in 1968, photographed for The Sunday Mirror

After graduating in 1960, Evans spent a short period on a summer fellowship at Duke University, North Carolina, working for the aforementioned Professor Rhine. There he met his future wife, Nancy Fullmer, who was working as a laboratory technician for Rhine. However, both of them quickly became disillusioned with ESP research, and they had departed Rhine’s laboratory by the end of the summer.3 In a later interview, Evans provided a clue as to the reason for his disenchantment. Speaking of the way in which the paranormal had been discussed in the science fiction magazines, he commented:

[T]hey treated ESP in an exceedingly unimaginative way; ... they looked upon it as a form of communication. That is to say that one brain was passing information to another. ESP does imply that, of course; but if one replaced ESP with larger, paranormal psychological experiences, I think communication from mind to mind would be the dullest, least interesting and least likely of the lot. The paranormal world is a very much more interesting one.4

In other words, the ESP enthusiasts and experimenters were viewing the paranormal as just another version of the normal – as an extension of our familiar, everyday world – in a way that is reminiscent of Dr. Duncan MacDougall’s attempt to prove the existence of the soul by weighing it.

On returning to the UK, Evans took up a Research Assistant post in the Physics Laboratory, University of Reading, investigating eye movements and preparing his Ph.D. thesis, “Pattern Perception and the Stabilised Retinal Image”. By this time, he was also disillusioned with the state of science fiction. The launch of Sputnik in 1957 had gradually made it clear that the future of SF now lay with the soft sciences such as psychology and sociology, rather than with technology:

About the time that I began to lose interest in sf, I was going along to the Globe pub in the City for some rather dreary meetings with sf fans. A few writers used to go along; once in a while you’d see someone like Arthur Clarke. ... I remember going there, having just read a story in New Worlds which struck me as being totally fresh and moving on to another dimension over and above anything that was being written at the time. It was called “Billenium” by J. G. Ballard. ... I thought it was a brilliant story. I was horrified to find that no one in the pub liked it; they loathed it, in fact. ...  Attending these Globe meetings, I realised that the sf fan whom I’d thought was very avant-garde and tuned in was, in fact, completely left behind by the next generation of sf.5

Having completed his Ph.D. thesis and married Nancy Fullmer, Evans joined the Autonomics [i.e. Computer] Division of the National Physical Laboratory (“NPL”), located at Teddington, West London. He would remain there until his early death from cancer in 1979. At first, he worked on problems relating to visual and auditory perception, before turning to research on the interaction between people and computers and becoming Head of the NPL’s sections for Speech Recognition and Man-Computer Interaction.

However, Evans’ interest in matters psychological extended well beyond the remit of his work at the NPL. One enduring enthusiasm, which dated back to the early 1960s, was the purpose of sleep and dreaming: why do animals regularly need to disconnect themselves from their environment and enter a state of quiescence and unawareness?

A sleeping animal, it suddenly occurred to me, was a defenceless one, at the total mercy of its environment and its predators. In biological terms sleep was an immensely dangerous exercise—perhaps the most dangerous single thing an animal could do—and yet all animals indulged in it. What fundamental process could it possibly serve?6

Discussing this conundrum with his colleague at the Autonomics Division, Edward Newman, led to the publication of articles in New Scientist and Nature, in which Evans and Newman suggested that sleep serves a purpose akin to that of programme clearance procedures for computers:

In our view, the primary function of sleep is probably to allow such a clearing process to get under way without interference from external information; ‘dreams’ occur when the level of consciousness shifts for one reason or another and the clearing process is interrupted. Prolonged deprivation of the opportunity to dream would inevitably produce a breakdown in human efficiency, most probably in the region where novel situations must be handled.7

Evans was not the only one writing about the possible consequences of a long-term lack of sleep. In his story “Manhole 69”, published in 1957, Ballard had described the disastrous psychological effects of a sleep-deprivation experiment gone wrong: continual awareness results in the brain becoming overloaded, and it retreats into itself – a process which culminates in a state of catatonic withdrawal.

Another of Evans’ extra-curricular interests was modern-day cults, such as the Aetherius Society or Scientology. Although he was now sceptical of their claims, Evans had become curious as to the reasons why people believed in ESP, or Venusians in flying saucers. He speculated that the onward march of scientific knowledge and technological success had opened up a gap between our ability to manipulate our environment, and time-honoured ways of understanding humankind’s place in the universe – a gap which neither traditional religion nor science itself could close:

In their heart of hearts most people still want some fairly simple, reasonably logical answers to the questions that human beings have always asked—answers which will ease the chill which we have all felt when, in the small hours of the morning, we wonder about life and death, time and space, creation and destruction. ... the field is ripe as never before for stop-gap systems, pseudo-scientific philosophies, quasi-technological cults and new Messiahs to emerge.8

Evans’ stance with respect to beliefs about the paranormal was similar to Ballard’s perspective on religion: “My experience,” Ballard later told Frances Welch, “confirmed to me that we live in a godless world. But that said, I'm extremely interested in religion.”10 A few years before his death, Ballard was still echoing Evans’ sentiments about the human need for life-grounding beliefs:

People in the prosperous west are without any sense of direction in their lives. Politics has lost its authority, the monarchy has exhausted its magic, the churches are empty. What can people believe in? All they have is consumerism. They buy, buy, buy, but they feel empty. But they need to believe in something ...11

Chris Evans had first met Ballard sometime in 1967, apparently introduced via the science-fiction writers Mike Moorcock and Charles Platt.12 For a while, Evans was part of the New Worlds coterie, writing science-based articles for the new, large-format version of the magazine edited by Moorcock, but these contributions soon dried up – perhaps neither party had found in the other what they were looking for. But Evans and Ballard went on to develop a long-standing friendship:

Chris was the first 'hoodlum scientist' I had met, and he became the closest friend I have made in my life.13

And Nancy Fullmer Evans recalls that:

Chris also considered Jim as his best friend – they really connected and mutually enjoyed having someone who could understand where they were coming from without a lot of explaining. They always seemed very happy in each other’s company.14

Sometimes they would drink together at the Thames-side pubs, throwing pieces of their cheese rolls to the swans on the river, while Ballard listened to Evans “outlining the invisible technologies already hard at work remaking our lives”.16 This was a subject on which Evans’ had been discoursing for some time: Brian Aldiss recalls it being a major topic of conversation when Chris and Nancy Evans visited him and his wife one evening in January 1969 – a discussion around which Aldiss crafted an entire book, The Shape of Further Things: Speculations on Change (1970). Those invisible technologies became the subject of Evans’ book The Mighty Micro, published in 1979. They are also very evident in the Penthouse interview which Evans conducted with Ballard in January of the same year, in which they speculated that technology would serve to make the home, rather than work, the centre of people’s lives, and that many of our social needs might be met by interaction with computers – something which Ballard had already portrayed in horrifying terms in his 1977 short story “The Intensive Care Unit”.

Another topic that must surely have been discussed over lunch, or in the pub, is the role that the brain plays in constructing a meaningful reality out of the sensory stimuli which it receives – a subject which would become one of Ballard’s favourite interview themes:

What I do have is the notion, which I take from modern experimental psychology, that the universe presented to us by our senses is a kind of ramshackle construct that happens to suit the central nervous system of an intelligent bipedal mammal with a rather short conceptual and physical range. We see rooms and people and have perceptions – but it's all a construct. ... [M]any of my characters wish to escape the time and space of these walls or this chair or this ball-point pen, and they try to break out of all of this by some sort of rearrangement of the perceptual apparatus, which they think can be fuelled by the imagination.17

This sort of thinking – that perception is not a straightforward matter of an organism receiving sensory information about the world that surrounds it – is implicit in the results of Evans’ research on the human visual system. The eye builds up a detailed image by means of continuous, very rapid saccades, and Evans was investigating the unusual consequences of negating the effect of these movements. The original perception starts to dissolve, despite there being a continuous, fixed stimulus to the eye: complex visual structures fragment into simpler components, some of which disappear from experience only to reappear as other elements fade away in turn. The overall effect was, Evans wrote, quite remarkable: “patterns shifting and changing steadily, a kind of cerebral kaleidoscope”.18 This, and numerous other experimental findings, suggested to some scientists that there must exist fundamental “perceptual units”, from which the brain builds its depiction of the external world.19

The notion that the brain in some sense constructs reality is now so commonplace that the neuroscientist David Eagleman recently devoted a six-part TV series to the subject – but in 1970 it would have been a much more striking topic of conversation. For Ballard, this would have been scientific confirmation of his intuitive understanding, derived from his boyhood experiences in war-time Shanghai, that our perceived reality is a stage set that can be dismantled at any time, and that the human imagination therefore has the opportunity to remake the world.20

Perhaps what an artist or writer needs is not so much the company of other creative people – which can lead to a clash of egos and ideas, rather than a beneficial cross-fertilization – but someone who can help give form to the emanations from their unconscious creative processes, the manifest content of which can be, as Ballard once put it, “obscure, meaningless or nightmarish”.23 Newman’s comments suggest that this is precisely what Evans might have provided to Ballard.24

One of the earliest products of their friendship was an idea for a play at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts (“ICA”), which would feature a reconstruction of a car crash, with narration by Evans and dummy figures produced by the artist Eduardo Paolozzi. The play was heralded in advance during May 1968 by a Sunday Mirror article in which Evans explained that:

People are more seriously and more deeply involved with motor cars than they realise; this is a deadly serious attempt to get to the bottom of it. The theatre show is a serious, tragic project and at the same time it is a send-up of the whole business of motoring.25

Although Ballard wrote a detailed, eight-page outline for the ICA, there is no evidence that this proposed theatrical production ever took place. Ballard did, however, go on to stage his own exhibition of three crashed automobiles at London’s New Arts Lab in April 1970, as an experiment to confirm the intuitions on which he would base his next book, Crash. This novel, published in 1973, is the high point of Ballard’s obsession with the interrelationship between human beings and technology – an obsession which represents the author’s creative counterpart to Evans’ day-to-day work as Head of the NPL’s Man-Computer Interaction section. It is therefore of some interest that the aforementioned Sunday Mirror article noted that Evans and Ballard had “spent many months exploring the ‘hidden meaning’ of car accidents for their dramatic presentation ... They studied the behaviour of car crash spectators, read car sales promotion literature and safety propaganda.” Given Edward Newman’s comment about Evans’ ability to dig out the essence of obscure material, and his careful questioning of the claims of its originators, it may well be that Evans was the driving force behind this “research” and that he therefore had a significant input into the early stages of the thought processes which culminated in Crash.26 Nancy Fullmer Evans recalls one example of Evans’ thoroughness in researching the hidden meaning of the automobile:

One kind of extraordinary thing that did happen was that as part of the research Chris decided to get a part-time job as a car salesman, in Twickenham I think it was.  It didn’t last very long but I seem to recall at the end of it he published a feature about it in a newspaper.27

Ballard acknowledged that his friend was, in part, the prototype for Vaughan, Crash’s hoodlum scientist.28 That the basis for Vaughan lay in Evans’ appearance and charisma was evident to David Britton, co-proprietor of the maverick publishers Savoy Books, as soon as he saw Evans in action:

Shortly after first reading Crash in the early 1970s, I’d seen Dr. Chris Evans give a talk at an SF convention. It was quite a revelation: here in the flesh was Vaughan in all his feral erotic intensity. Evans prowled the stage just oozing sexuality. He wore a black biker’s jacket and a blue denim shirt open to the midriff. You might have got into a car with the Doctor, but you wouldn’t have accompanied him up a dark alley. Of his talk, I can’t remember anything, just his physicality remains in my mind.29

Ironically, Evans was in fact ambivalent about driving, and his comment that the proposed play at the ICA was, in part, “a send-up” may well have reflected his true feelings:

I think one should make life as easy for oneself as one can, cut out all the nonessentials like driving, which is one of the biggest wastes of time, and one of the most stress-inducing and fatiguing things I can think of.30

According to Ballard, Evans drove a tiny but powerful Mini-Cooper which travelled at the same speed as a bullet.31 But it seems that Evans was more concerned with getting where he had to be quickly than with the thrill of driving at speed, and according to Nancy Fullmer Evans he eventually gave up driving altogether:

Chris gave up having a car for his own use long before he died ... because he found it much more productive to work in a chauffeur driven hire car, dictating either to [his assistant] Jackie Wilson or to a machine for later translation.  He always had a ton of writing to do and fitting in all his various other activities took a lot of careful planning and discipline. In 1971 we moved to a house directly across the street from the NPL. The Autonomics Building was a 3 minute walk, we could see it from our garden, so he didn’t have to waste a lot of time commuting.32

Evans’ interest in the psychology of pseudo-scientific beliefs culminated in his book Cults of Unreason (1973), approximately half of which was devoted to a discussion of Scientology and the “new Messiah”, L. Ron Hubbard. Evans later claimed that he had received no adverse reaction from Scientologists, precisely because he recognised that their movement had become centred on what were, essentially, religious beliefs:

Curiously enough, I have had less flak from the Scientologists than from practically anybody. This is probably because I think I can credit myself with being the first non-Scientologist to catch on to the fact that it actually is a religion. I poked fun at them and said all kinds of things which should have brought their wrath; normally if you don’t spell Scientology with a capital S you get a libel suit slapped on you. I told what I believed to be the truth about its origins, and it can’t have been palatable to them. Nevertheless, it was obvious to me that it was a religion; there was no doubt about it. I understand they were quite pleased about it.9

Once he had left school, Evans undertook his two years’ National Service with the Royal Air Force, and then worked as a writer and science journalist before starting a degree course in Psychology at University College, London. It was during the 1950s that Evans seems to have developed an interest, at first enthusiastic, in paranormal phenomena. He was active in The Society for Psychical Research, and worked as assistant to the editor of Psychic News, Maurice Barbanell, contributing reviews and investigative articles.2 This sort of interest in the paranormal was not entirely unexpected for an avid science-fiction reader, especially one whose main source was Astounding. That magazine’s long-time editor, John W. Campbell, had taken an interest in J. B. Rhine’s ESP theories and experiments as far back as the 1930s, and after the Second World War Astounding would become a forum for stories and articles concerning such weird and wonderful topics as telepathy, telekinesis, the “Dean Drive” (supposed to produce thrust in violation of Newton’s Third Law), and L. Ron Hubbard’s psychological science of Dianetics, which would later transmute into Scientology.

In fact, there may have been a deeper reason, beyond common interests, for the friendship between Evans, the scientist, and Ballard, the author. In a personal recollection, published in 1981, his NPL colleague Edward Newman – one of the leading British contributors to the development of the computer21 – made a perceptive comment on Evans’ qualities. As well as being a “brilliant experimenter”, wrote Newman,

Chris Evans was a gifted communicator, having a combination of abilities in this field that amounted to genius. He could make clear, and interesting to virtually anyone, any concept, idea or fact that he knew about. ... Chris always got it right. I think this was in large part due to his very quick understanding and powerful critical intellect. He was particularly good at digging the essence out of obscurely and badly presented material. He augmented understanding so obtained by meeting and carefully questioning the originators of the material. Oddly enough Chris was not very creative, and I am beginning to believe that this fact was an essential ingredient of his genius. To understand a poorly expressed novel concept it is important to be creative in the sense that one can extend one’s structure to ‘get a match’, but is important not to read into the description a novel creation of one’s own.22

Certainly, Evans had enough places to visit, given the number of extra-curricular activities that he undertook in addition to his work at the NPL. One such was an event at the ICA – not the putative play with Ballard, but the 1968 exhibition “Cybernetic Serendipity”. Billed as “an international exhibition exploring and demonstrating some of the relationships between technology and creativity”,33 Cybernetic Serendipity featured works by the likes of John Cage, Peter Zinovieff, Gordon Pask, and Bruce Lacey. Such was its impact, that in later years it was seen as “a seminal event, ... of unambiguous historical importance”.34 One of the stars of the show was Nam June Paik’s Robot K-456, a female robot which displayed idiosyncratic, even disturbing, behaviour. Evans’ rather less dramatic contribution was the “Cybernetic Introspective Pattern-Classifier”, a device that was based upon his retinal-image research and which promised people the opportunity to “watch their own cerebral processes in action”.35 The exhibition was accompanied by a series of talks, and Evans spoke about “Sleeping and Dreaming”. Jasia Reichardt, assistant director of the ICA and the exhibition’s organiser, later recalled that of the invited speakers:

The person who was of special importance to me was Christopher Evans of the National Physical Laboratory, because during our conversations we found the title: Cybernetic Serendipity.36

Some of Evans’ other activities outside of the NPL were those of the professional scientist; during the mid-60s, for example, he had co-edited two academic collections – Brain Physiology and Psychology and Cybernetics: Key Papers – and had become a founding member and organising secretary of the Brain Research Association (now the British Neuroscience Association). However, from the late-60s onwards, Evans also developed a strong media profile. He gave talks to audiences ranging from the International Federation for Information Processing Congress to science fiction conventions; conducted numerous BBC radio interviews, including series on The Horror Story (1971) and Ideas in Science Fiction (1971), both of which featured his friend Jim Ballard; edited two collections of horror stories, Mind at Bay (1969), and Mind in Chains (1970); became scientific advisor to ITV’s television science-fiction series The Tomorrow People, which ran from 1973 to 1979; and acted as a contributing editor to the popular science and science-fiction magazine, Omni. Popular books appeared: Cults of Unreason (1973); The Mighty Micro (1979), which ATV turned into a six-part television series presented by Evans himself, filmed not long before he died; and, finally, Landscapes of the Night, an account of the computer-theory of dreaming, which was completed after his death by the science writer and broadcaster Peter Evans (not, apparently, a relation).

Falling somewhere between his job as a professional scientist, and his role as media communicator, were Evans’ interviews with notable scientists, recorded during the mid-1970s. The first series was Brain Science Briefings, a set of discussions with leading brain scientists, released on cassette tape by BSIP Ferranti. Evans’ interviewees included the behaviourist B.F. Skinner, the linguist Noam Chomsky, and the neurophysiologist and Nobel prize winner, Sir John Eccles. The second set was Pioneers of Computing: an Oral History of Computing, recorded for the Science Museum in London, in which Evans talked to around twenty of the early computer scientists, including those who had worked as cryptologists at Bletchley Park during the Second World War and then on the development of the first generation of computers.

Other activities during the 1970s ranged from the sublime to the ridiculous. Under the former category is Evans’ passion for flying, as Nancy Fullmer Evans recounted to David Pringle:

Once he got his license [in the mid-late 60s], he was an avid pilot, flying at every opportunity – in the UK flying to speaking engagements, etc. all over the country, and in the USA (he loved to fly us all to Disney World in Orlando) and in other parts of the world. I remember one harrowing (for me, not him) flight in Senegal when we ran out of petrol and had to cruise into the Dakar airport without power and with no radio.37

Ballard’s fiction often features small or micro-light aircraft, and in Ballardian iconography flight becomes a symbol for the human imagination. Curiously, however, there is no mention in Miracles of Life, or elsewhere, of Evans ever taking Ballard out for a flight in his plane. Talking of his time as a trainee pilot with the RAF during 1954-5, Ballard recalled that:

Flying is a very strange experience, it's very close to dreaming. The normal yardsticks, the parameters of our movements through space, are suspended. You're travelling at 150mph, but if you’re 1,000ft up you're not moving at all. Likewise, you can be travelling quite slowly coming in to land, yet you seem to be hurtling along like a Grand Prix car. The problem with light flying is that it's very unstable and dangerous and also very noisy, there's hardly any time to think.38

Perhaps Ballard’s pilot training had put him off the actual experience of being aloft in a light aircraft, and he was content to let the idea of flying inspire his imagination and his writing.

Turning to the ridiculous, we come to Evans’ involvement in the activities of Uri Geller, possessor of supposed psychic abilities and famed for his bending of spoons. No matter how ludicrous it may seem today, the hype surrounding Geller’s claims in the mid-1970s was such that even New Scientist and Nature became caught up. Evans was invited to be part of a small research committee put together by New Scientist, who had invited Geller to participate in rigorous scientific experiments. Although initially enthusiastic, Geller eventually refused to take part.39 However, Geller did participate in scientific investigations at the Stanford Research Institute, who then submitted a paper to Nature. The journal’s editors were put in a difficult position when their three chosen referees disagreed on whether or not the paper was suitable for publication. They eventually did publish the Stanford paper together with an accompanying editorial comment explaining their decision, in which they thanked “Dr. Christopher Evans of the National Physical Laboratory, whose continued advice on the subject is reflected in the content of this leading article”.40

Meanwhile, papers resulting from Evans’ work as a professional scientist continued to appear. Whereas early publications dealt with his research into stabilized retinal images, the topics of Evans’ later papers reflected his wider interests: the nature of sleep; the brain’s alpha rhythms; computer-based medical evaluation of patients; automatic recognition of speech; and the development of a computerized information system for those with disabilities. Around thirty papers authored or co-authored by Evans appeared in the academic journals, nine of them in Nature.

When Chris Evans died from cancer in October 1979, Ballard lost his best friend – and at a time when his own children had become adults and were in the process of leaving home.41 Evans’ passing was marked not only by his posthumous TV series, but also by a memorial issue of the International Journal of Man-Machine Studies which comprised personal tributes to Evans by several of his professional colleagues, together with papers based on internal NPL reports which he had co-written, and articles describing work which he had originated or which reflected his interests and influence.42 Arthur C. Clarke gave a lecture at the Royal Institution in Evans’ memory, and the Brain Research Association also held a number of Chris Evans Memorial Lectures – a suitable tribute to the gifted communicator, Dr. Christopher Evans, best of friends with Jim Ballard, and a man who might best be characterised using his own description of one of his experiments: “patterns shifting and changing steadily, a kind of cerebral kaleidoscope”.

Acknowledgement: I am extremely grateful to Nancy Fullmer Evans for her input, and for her comments on this profile of her late husband.

Notes:

1 P. Linnett, “The Unimaginable Future: An interview with Dr. Chris Evans”, S.F. Digest #1 (1976).

2 Nancy Fullmer Evans, personal communication.

3 Nancy Fullmer Evans, email communication to David Pringle.

4 P. Linnett, “The Unimaginable Future: An interview with Dr. Chris Evans”, S.F. Digest #1 (1976).

5 P. Linnett, “The Unimaginable Future: An interview with Dr. Chris Evans”, S.F. Digest #1 (1976).

6 Christopher Evans (with Peter Evans), Landscapes of the Night: How and Why We Dream (Gollancz, 1983), pp. 11-12.

7 E. A. Newman & C. R. Evans, “Human Dream Processes as Analogous to Computer Programme Clearance”, Nature, Vol. 206, 1 May 1965. For Newman’s comments on the genesis of this paper, see E. A. Newman, “Recollections of Chris Evans”, International Journal of Man-Machine Studies, volume 14, issue 1 (1981).

8 Christopher Evans, Cults of Unreason (Granada, 1974), p. 10.

9 P. Linnett, “The Unimaginable Future: An interview with Dr. Chris Evans”, S.F. Digest #1 (1976).

10 “All praise and glory to the mind of man”, J.G. Ballard interviewed in The Sunday Telegraph, 20 March 1994.

11 Fax from J. G. Ballard to Agnes Ortega & Andres Criscaut, answering questions for an article which appeared in “Página/12”, Buenos Aires on 24 July 2005 (emphasis added); held in the Ballard Archives at the British Library, Reference: Add MS 88938/4/5.

12 Charles Platt, email communication to David Pringle.

13 J. G. Ballard, Miracles of Life (Fourth Estate, 2008), pp. 211-12.

14 Nancy Fullmer Evans, email communication to David Pringle.

15 “Psychoanalyst Of The Electronic Age: J.G. Ballard interviewed by David Pringle”, Words: The New Literary Forum”, Vol. 1 no. 4, September 1985.

16 Ballard’s review of The Mighty Micro for "Writers' Choice for Christmas Reading", The Guardian, 13 December 1979.

17 “The Strange Visions of J. G. Ballard”, an interview in Rolling Stone, 19 November 1987.

18 Christopher Evans, “A New Look at Vision”, New Worlds #175, September 1967 – a contemporaneous, non-technical discussion of the topic. Evans’ research followed on from work by R. W. Ditchburn in the 1950s. This early research had used a cumbersome apparatus attached to a contact lens worn by the experimental subject; one of Evans’ original contributions was to instead utilize after-images, which are perfectly stabilised by their very nature since they occur directly on the back of the eye and are therefore unaffected by eye saccades.

19 Christopher Evans, “A New Look at Vision”, New Worlds #175, September 1967.

20 J. G. Ballard, Miracles of Life (Fourth Estate, 2008), p. 58.

21 During the late-1940s and early-1950s, Newman had been one of the leaders of the NPL team that were developing the ACE computer, based upon a design by Alan Turing – who had worked at the NPL from 1945 to 1948.

22 E. A. Newman, “Recollections of Chris Evans”, International Journal of Man-Machine Studies, volume 14, issue 1 (1981).

23 J. G. Ballard, “Time, Memory and Inner Space”, Woman Journalist, Spring 1963.

24 Mike Moorcock appears to have construed this as sycophancy: “... they got on well, mainly because [Evans] didn't argue with Jimmy! Chris absorbed Jimmy's ideas faithfully and handed them back to him” (letter published in Relapse #21, Spring 2013, available at http://efanzines.com/Prolapse/Relapse21.pdf).

25 June Rose, “If Christ came again he would be killed in a car crash”, Sunday Mirror, 19 May 1968.

26 This might help explain the comment by Mike Moorcock that “Evans encouraged all [of Ballard’s] most self-destructive traits and I still can't open Crash without experiencing some sense of sadness” (letter published in Relapse #21, Spring 2013, available at http://efanzines.com/Prolapse/Relapse21.pdf).

27 Nancy Fullmer Evans, personal communication.

28 J. G. Ballard, Miracles of Life (Fourth Estate, 2008), p. 212.

29 “Enthusiasm for the mysterious emissaries of pulp: an interview with David Britton (the Savoy interviews, part 2a)”, https://web.archive.org/web/20100225152329/http://www.ballardian.com/enthusiasm-for-mysterious-emissaries-britton-2a.

30 “Christopher Evans Talks With Peter Linnett”,  Wordworks #6 (1975).

31 J. G. Ballard, Miracles of Life (Fourth Estate, 2008), p. 211.

32 Nancy Fullmer Evans, personal communication.

33 “Cybernetic Serendipity: the computer and the arts”, a special edition of Studio International which acted as a catalogue for the exhibition;https://archive.org/details/cybernetic-serendipity.

34 Brent MacGregor, “Cybernetic Serendipity Revisited”: https://ohiostate.pressbooks.pub/app/uploads/sites/45/2017/09/cyberserendipity.pdf.

35 “Cybernetic Serendipity: the computer and the arts”: https://archive.org/details/cybernetic-serendipity.

36 Jasia Reichardt, “Spaces in Between”, http://excelsior.biosci.ohio-state.edu/~carlson/history/externalpages/stuttgart/jasia.htm.

37 Nancy Fullmer Evans, email communication to David Pringle. Evans’ involvement did not end with his own flying, since he designed Flight magazine’s “Pilot’s Diary” and undertook its production each year until his death.

38 Chris Hall, “Super Cannes : Flight And Imagination”, an online interview with Ballard in 2000: http://www.spikemagazine.com/1100jgballard.php.  

39 See the detailed investigation of the Geller phenomenon in New Scientist, 17 October 1974, pp. 170-185.

40 Nature, Vol. 251, 18 October 1974.

41 “Interview by A. Juno & Vale” in Re/Search 8-9: J.G. Ballard (Re/Search Publishing, 1984; the interview was conducted in October 1982).

42 International Journal of Man-Machine Studies, volume 14, issue 1 (1981).