J.G. Ballard

J.G. Ballard (15 November 1930 – 19 April 2009) was an English novelist and short story writer whose work remade science fiction as a literature of psychological exploration — what he called “inner space” — and whose vision of modernity’s pathologies proved so distinctive that the adjective “Ballardian” entered the Collins English Dictionary: “resembling or suggestive of the conditions described in Ballard’s novels and stories, especially dystopian modernity, bleak man-made landscapes, and the psychological effects of technological, social, or environmental developments.” No other postwar British writer has had his surname turned into a dictionary entry.

Life and Career

James Graham Ballard was born in the Shanghai International Settlement, where his father was a businessman. His childhood in Shanghai — and particularly his internment at the Lunghua Civilian Assembly Center during the Japanese occupation from 1942 to 1945 — was the formative experience of his life and the basis for his most commercially successful novel, Empire of the Sun (1984). The boy who watched a familiar world collapse into chaos never stopped writing about the fragility of civilisation and the strange attractions of its ruins.

After the war Ballard came to England — a country he experienced as alien and dull after the intensity of wartime Shanghai — studied medicine briefly at King’s College, Cambridge, then read English at London University before joining the RAF. He began publishing short stories in the late 1950s in New Worlds and Science Fantasy, quickly establishing himself as the most intellectually ambitious writer in British science fiction.

His early novels — The Wind from Nowhere (1961), The Drowned World (1962), The Burning World (1964), The Crystal World (1966) — are catastrophe novels, but they invert the conventions of the genre. Where conventional disaster fiction chronicles survival and social reconstruction, Ballard’s protagonists are drawn toward the catastrophe, finding in it a psychological liberation. Dr. Kerans in The Drowned World does not flee the rising waters but journeys south into them, toward a landscape that corresponds to something in the unconscious mind.

In the mid-1960s Ballard began the experimental work that would make his reputation and cost him his mainstream readership. The Atrocity Exhibition (1970) — a sequence of “condensed novels” that collage imagery from car crashes, the Kennedy assassination, Marilyn Monroe, the space programme, and consumer culture — is his most formally radical work. Its American publication was pulped by the publisher (Doubleday) after a senior executive found it obscene; it was later published by Grove Press.

Crash (1973) — a novel about the eroticisation of the car crash, in which the narrator and a character named Vaughan pursue “the reshaping of the human body by modern technology” through increasingly dangerous automotive collisions — is his most notorious book. It was rejected by the publisher’s reader with the remark “This author is beyond psychiatric help. Do not publish.” Jonathan Cape published it anyway. David Cronenberg’s 1996 film adaptation won a Special Jury Prize at Cannes and was banned by Westminster City Council.

Concrete Island (1974) and High-Rise (1975) completed a trilogy of urban disaster novels. High-Rise — in which the residents of a luxury tower block descend into tribal warfare — has proved Ballard’s most prescient work, its vision of class warfare inside a gated community resonating powerfully in the twenty-first century.

The Suburban Novels

In the 1990s and 2000s, Ballard turned his attention to the landscapes of suburban England — motorway junctions, business parks, gated communities, shopping malls — and found there the same psychopathology he had previously located in crashed cars and drowned worlds. Cocaine Nights (1996), Super-Cannes (2000), Millennium People (2003), and Kingdom Come (2006) explore the violence latent in consumer affluence and the boredom of the professional classes. These novels are more conventionally narrated than his earlier work but no less unsettling.

Empire of the Sun (1984) — shortlisted for the Booker Prize and filmed by Steven Spielberg in 1987 — and its sequel The Kindness of Women (1991) are autobiographical novels that revealed the experiential core of Ballard’s imaginative obsessions. The ruined swimming pools, the abandoned buildings, the drained landscapes that recur throughout his fiction all trace back to the boy walking through the deserted streets of wartime Shanghai.

Critical Standing

Ballard occupies an unusual position in English literature: revered by a devoted readership and by writers (Martin Amis, Will Self, Zadie Smith have all written admiringly about him), but excluded for most of his career from the literary mainstream by the science fiction label and by the transgressive content of works like Crash. His reputation has risen substantially since his death, and he is now widely regarded as one of the most important and original English novelists of the postwar period.

Key Works

• The Drowned World (1962)
• The Atrocity Exhibition (1970)
• Crash (1973)
• High-Rise (1975)
• Empire of the Sun (1984)

Collecting Ballard

The Wind from Nowhere (1961, Berkley Books) — his first novel, which he later disowned — is scarce and brings $100–$300. The Drowned World (1962, Berkley) in first edition brings $200–$500. Crash (1973, Jonathan Cape) in fine condition with dust jacket brings $300–$800. Empire of the Sun (1984, Gollancz) brings $40–$100. The Atrocity Exhibition (1970, Cape) — frequently reissued in variant editions — brings $100–$400 for a true first. Ballard signed readily at events; signed copies are available but values are climbing.