James Graham Ballard (15 November 1930 – 19 April 2009) was an English novelist and short story writer. He was a prominent member of the New Wave movement in science fiction, but his best-known books are the controversial Crash (1973), an exploration of automobile-accident sexual fetishism, and the autobiographical novel Empire of the Sun (1984). The latter was based on his boyhood in Shanghai, where he was born in the International Settlement, and on his internment by the Japanese Imperial Army during the Second World War. Both novels were adapted into films, by David Cronenberg and Steven Spielberg respectively.
The literary distinctiveness of his work has given rise to the adjective "Ballardian," defined by the Collins English Dictionary as “resembling or suggestive of the conditions described in J. G. Ballard’s novels and stories, especially dystopian modernity, bleak man-made landscapes and the psychological effects of technological, social or environmental developments.”
Easton Press J. G. Ballard books
J. G. Ballard biography
Ballard, at eleven years old, lived through the Japanese takeover of China. He was moved to a civilian detention camp where he spent the remainder of World War II. These experiences were described in the semi-autobiographical Empire of the Sun (which was adapted for film by Steven Spielberg). After the war's end he returned to England. Ballard wrote about these and later events in another semi-autobiographical novel The Kindness of Women.
Those who know Ballard from his autobiographical novels will not be prepared for the subject matter that Ballard most commonly pursues, as his most common genre is dystopia. His most celebrated early novel is Crash, in which cars symbolise the mechanisation of the world and man's capacity to destroy himself with the technology he creates; and the characters (the protagonist, called Ballard, included) become involved in a violent obsession with the psychosexuality of car crashes. Ballard's disturbing novel was turned into a controversial, and also disturbing, film by David Cronenberg.
Several of Ballard's earlier works deal with scenarios of 'natural disaster', for instance the novels The Wind From Nowhere, The Drowned World and The Drought.
In addition to his novels, Ballard has made extensive use of the short story form. Many of his earliest published works in the 1950s and 1960s were short stories.
Ballard's fiction is sophisticated, often bizarre, and a constant challenge to the cognitive and aesthetic preconceptions of his readers. As Martin Amis has written: "Ballard is quite unlike anyone else; indeed, he seems to address a different - a disused - part of the reader's brain." Because of this tendency to upset readers in order to enlighten them, Ballard does not enjoy a large mass market following, but he is recognized by critics as one of the U.K.'s most prominent writers. He has been influential beyond his mass market success; he is cited as perhaps the most important forebear of the cyberpunk movement by Bruce Sterling in his introduction to the seminal "Mirrorshades" anthology. Also, his parody (or psychoanalysis) of American politics, Why I Want To Fuck Ronald Reagan was photocopied and distributed by pranksters at the 1976 Republican convention.
Ballard has also had a noticeable influence popular music, where his work has been used as a basis for lyrical imagery, particularly amoungst British post-punk groups. Examples include albums such as Metamatic by John Foxx, various songs by Joy Divison, and Warm Leatherette by The Normal.
In 2003, a short darkly comic story of his was adapted into an hour-long television film for the BBC entitled Home by Richard Curson Smith, who also directed it. The plot follows a middle class man who chooses to abandon the outside world and restrict himself to his house, becoming a hermit.
Death
Ballard was diagnosed with prostate cancer in June 2006, from which he died in London in April 2009.
Books in order
The Wind From Nowhere (1961)
The Drowned World (1962)
The Burning World (1964; also The Drought, 1965)
The Crystal World (1966)
Crash (1973)
Concrete Island (1974)
High Rise (1975)
The Unlimited Dream Company (1979)
Hello America (1981)
Empire of the Sun (1984)
The Day of Creation (1987)
Running Wild (1988)
The Kindness of Women (1991)
Rushing to Paradise (1994)
Cocaine Nights (1996)
Super-Cannes (2000)
Millennium People (2003)
Kingdom Come (2006)
Short stories
The Voices of Time and Other Stories (1962)
Billennium (1962)
Passport to Eternity (1963)
The Four-Dimensional Nightmare (1963)
The Terminal Beach (1964)
The Impossible Man (1966)
The Venus Hunters (1967)
The Overloaded Man (1967)
The Disaster Area (1967)
The Day of Forever (1967)
The Atrocity Exhibition (1969, also Love and Napalm: Export USA, 1972)
Vermilion Sands (1971)
Chronopolis and Other Stories (1971)
Low-Flying Aircraft and Other Stories (1976)
The Best of J. G. Ballard (1977)
The Best Short Stories of J. G. Ballard (1978)
Myths of the Near Future (1982)
The Voices of Time (1985)
Memories of the Space Age (1988)
War Fever (1990)
The Complete Short Stories of J. G. Ballard (2001)
The Complete Short Stories of J. G. Ballard: Volume 1 (2006)
The Complete Short Stories of J. G. Ballard: Volume 2 (2006)
The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard (2009)
Other books
A User's Guide to the Millennium: Essays and Reviews (1996)
Miracles of Life (Autobiography; 2008)
J. G. Ballard quotes
"The future is just going to be a vast, conforming suburb of the soul."
"I would sum up my fear about the future in one word: boring."
"In a completely sane world, madness is the only freedom."
"The only truly alien planet is Earth."
"Everything is becoming science fiction. From the margins of an almost invisible literature has sprung the intact reality of the 20th century."
"The American Dream has run out of gas. The car has stopped. It no longer supplies the world with its images, its dreams, its fantasies. No more. It's over. It supplies the world with its nightmares now."
"The suburbs dream of violence. Asleep in their drowsy villas, sheltered by benevolent shopping malls, they wait patiently for the nightmares that will wake them into a more passionate world."
"We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind—mass merchandising, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the instant translation of science and technology into popular imagery, the increasing blurring and intermingling of identities within the realm of consumer goods, the preempting of any free or original imaginative response to experience by the television screen. We live inside an enormous novel."
"The marriage of reason and nightmare which has dominated the 20th century has given birth to an ever more ambiguous world. Across the communications landscape move the specters of sinister technologies and the dreams that money can buy."
"I would define the poetic effect as the capacity that a text displays for continuing to generate different readings, without ever being completely consumed."
Source and additional information: J. G. Ballard