Crash Porn

I made the statement the other day that I consider Crash a porn novel and that it is not a work of sci-fi, now after having read the second half of the novel I still stick with that assertion even more so than before.

The novels obsession with sex, fetishism, death, eroticism, pain, injury, mutilation, homo-erotic, gore, and pedophilia, and such, are simply topics and themes that are screaming so loudly that I cannot hear anything else the author may have intended. Just because the theme for this novel happens to center around transportation in general and cars in specific they only happen to be the instruments of the fetish/eroticization. It could have been literally about the fetishization of any object or technology in general, but that would still just make it a porn novel.

Now it may be an objectified porn novel, or it may be a high-brow porn novel, it may be a fictional porn novel, or some sub-genre of porn but not sci-fi. It seems to me that it is simply a contemporary pornographic work of fiction.

I have been since I started reading this novel trying to get a better idea of how I would define sci-fi and I am still working on that, but unless sci-fi is defined overly broadly (so broadly that it loses any meaning as a definition) I cannot see putting this novel in that genre.

Suffice to say I did not like this work or enjoy it. Anything that might be culled out as worthy(?) of discussion is out weighed by the novels over-the-top use of all the above mentioned topics. Whatever Ballard may have been aiming at, other than controversy for sales sake, has been lost on me.