J. G. BALLARD (1930–2009)

The author J. G. Ballard, famed for novels such as Crash and Empire of the Sun, has died, reports the BBC. Despite being referred to as a science-fiction writer, Ballard said his books were instead “picturing the psychology of the future.” The author of fifteen novels and scores of short stories, he grew up among the expatriate community in Shanghai. His most acclaimed novel was perhaps Empire of the Sun, based on his childhood in a Japanese prison camp in China. During World War II, at the age of twelve, he, along with his parents and younger sister, was interned for three years in a camp run by the Japanese.

He later moved to Britain and in the early 1960s became a full-time writer. Ballard built up a passionate readership, particularly after Empire of the Sun, a fictionalized account of his childhood, was made into a film by Steven Spielberg. Director David Cronenberg brought Ballard’s infamous book about the sexual desires stimulated by car crashes to the screen in the film Crash. The film caused a media stir, adding to Ballard’s reputation for courting controversy. In later years, he wrote other acclaimed novels such as Super-Cannes and Millennium People.

Hephzibah Anderson, former fiction editor at the Daily Mail and books columnist for The Observer, said Ballard’s work had anticipated life as it is now. “If you look at the start of his career, he began writing science-fiction stories and was regarded as very avant-garde. And there was a kind of violence lurking beneath the texture of these novels. And they’ve come to seem less and less futuristic and, you know, it’s as if we’re embodying, we’re living in now, a kind of Ballardian world.”