... I feel that the balance between fiction and reality has changed significantly in the past decade. We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind - mass-merchandizing, advertising, the instant translation of science and technology into popular imagery, the increasing blurring and intermingling of identies within the realm of consumer goods, the pre-empting of any free or original response to experience by the television screen. We live inside an enormous novel. For the writer in particular it is less and less necessary for him to invent the fictional content of his novel. The fiction is already there. The writer's task is to invent the reality.

J G Ballard, Introduction to the French Edition of Crash (1974)