JG Ballard, 1930 - 2009.

By David Hudson on 04/19/2009

[Updated through 4/28]

"JG Ballard, novelist and short-story writer, has died after a long battle with illness," reports Jo Adetunji in the Guardian. "The 78-year-old author, who was best known for the award-winning 'Empire of the Sun,' a semi-autobiographical novel written in 1984, and his controversial novel, 'Crash,' later adapted into film by David Cronenberg."

"Despite being referred to as a science fiction writer, Ballard said his books were instead 'picturing the psychology of the future,'" notes the BBC.

"If one were to plunge directly into his most fragmented and troubling novel, 'The Atrocity Exhibition,' or his most psycho-pathological, 'Crash,' one would be adrift in a deepening ocean as destructive as the lagoons that flood the city of London in 'The Drowned World,'" wrote Richard Behrens in 2003. "But seen as a unified whole, his work emerges as a powerful meditation on the human consciousness - often brutal and morally repulsive, politically insouciant, at times even nihilist; but unwaveringly focused on the rare and poetic beauty existing in the profound light that his characters feel radiating from the fabric of matter itself."

See also: Ballardian.

Updates: "Esteemed for his wayward imagination and his ability to create a distinctively Ballardian world, his fiction moved through various phases while remaining instantly recognizable," writes David Pringle in the Guardian. "[H]is first fame, in the early 1960s, was as a science fiction writer, hailed by slightly older peers such as Kingsley Amis and Brian Aldiss. But within a decade or so his reputation had modulated into that of an avant garde provocateur, admired by visual artists and punk rockers. Another decade on and he reemerged as a great novelist of the second world war experience with 'Empire of the Sun,' shortlisted for the Booker prize and winning his widest-ever public. Yet another decade on and he seemed to redefine himself as a special kind of crime writer - one with a peculiar, sinister vision of late 20th-century modernity that appealed particularly to the younger end of Britain's literary and arts scene."

"There is a distrust of technology and human nature in Ballard's novels, a sense of the absurdity of shopping malls and an intuitive understanding how architecture, especially in its most banal forms, affects our emotions," writes Joanne McNeil:

Apart from maybe Beckett, no other modern writer crossed as many cultural mediums in his scope of influence. Artists, architects, philosophers, and musicians took to his books immediately, but strangely, for reasons I still can't understand, he is still largely ignored by the "book world" outside of the UK. His fanbase speaks for itself. Ian Curtis, hugely influenced. David Cronenberg, of course. Jean Baudrillard, Susan Sontag. Filmmakers Mary Harron and Vincenzo Natali. Just about every artist I meet has "Super-Cannes" on his shelf. Here's a fascinating post and another from Ballardian on "Autopsy of the New Millennium" an art show in Barcelona last summer entirely dedicated to dedicated to the life and work of JG Ballard. New wave (and its brief c. 2003 revival) was largely inspired by some of his wilder sci-fi novels. Gary Numan, The Normal, Anne Clark and John Foxx very clearly articulated his concepts in their music.

"Despite Ballard's avuncular appearance and booming voice, his air of bonhomie belied a much darker side," writes the Telegraph. "Acquaintances recalled that as young man he was 'obsessed' with topics such as assassination, car crash injuries and psychosis.... Friends, while remembering Ballard as 'generous and jovial' also described him as 'jolly peculiar' and on occasion 'straightforwardly mad.'... The publisher's reader who first saw the manuscript [for 'Crash'] described Ballard as being 'beyond psychiatric help.' Ballard took her comment as a compliment."

"His characters are typically scientists of their own disorder, cooly observing the ways in which their own psychologies are being redrawn by forces they are only beginning to understand," writes Scott Macaulay at Filmmaker. "Fascination often replaced emotion, and the character psychology one associates with literary naturalism was replaced by one informed by a bleak, often chic, but always clearly articulated dystopian philsophy. In fact, the psychologies of the outer world - the associations and symbolisms of drained swimming pools, decaying luxury hotels, empty roadways - were just as suggestive as the thoughts of any of his characters. Despite all this, Ballard was a witty writer whose austere visions were always rendered with a hint of glee."

Updates, 4/20: "Ballard was a lifelong and unrepentant enthusiast for the Surrealists, with a repainting by Brigid Marlin of a lost Paul Delvaux prominent in one of his rooms (a picture often featured in photo portraits)," writes John Coulthart. "I always admired the way he never felt the need to apologise for Salvador Dalí's excesses, unlike the majority of art critics who dismiss Dalí after he went to America. The paintings of Dalí, Delvaux, Tanguy and Max Ernst became stage sets which Ballard could populate with his affectless characters."

More from Scott Macaulay, specifically, a pointer to Mark Dery's piece in the LA Weekly on Miracles of Life: From Shanghai to Shepperton: "For anyone remembering or thinking about Ballard on the occasion of his passing away, Dery's piece is essential."

"Three of the feature films adapted from his oeuvre - Steven Spielberg's 'Empire of the Sun' (1987), David Cronenberg's 'Crash' (1996), and Jonathan Weiss's 'The Atrocity Exhibition' (1999) - are as different from each other, it seems, as might be considered possible," writes Glenn Kenny. "Yet each film accurately reflects and refracts essential portions of Ballard's vision. And each is an individual masterpiece."

The Guardian opens a special section and gathers tributes from Michael Moorcock, Iain Sinclair and Toby Litt.

The London Times quotes Martin Amis: "Ballard is quite unlike anyone else; indeed, he seems to address a different - a disused - part of the reader's brain."

"What interested him was 'the evolving world, the world of hidden persuaders, of the communications landscape developing, of mass tourism, of the vast conformist suburbs dominated by television - that was a form of science fiction, and it was already here,'" quotes Time's Lev Grossman. Then: "Reading him, you often get sense that there's some kind of hideous hallucinatory order threatening to break through into ordinary reality. And part of Ballard wanted it to break through. It was too much for me as a reader - at a certain point, don't you just have to turn away? I did. But somehow Ballard didn't."

Paddy Johnson notes that frieze has posted Ralph Rugoff's 1997 interview with Ballard.

Dan North finds a "cool and unusual reminder of the inspirational reach of the author's work, and his intellectual infiltration of every place where humans, machines and architecture jostle for position."

Updates, 4/21: "JG Ballard's influence on the cinema is elusive, indirect, glimpseable at the margins," writes the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw. "Perhaps searching for a Ballardian cinema in ordinary terms is obtuse: we should be looking instead at CCTV footage taken from any shopping-mall security camera, or the Big Brother daytime live feed, or one of the direct-impact 9/11 World Trade Centre plane-crash shots - avidly consumed on YouTube, but now considered too brutal for television."

Further down that same page, Deyan Sudjic, Dave Simpson, Iain Sinclair and Mark Lawson consider Ballard's influence on, respectively, architecture, pop, visual art and television. Also: "I think 'Super-Cannes' might make a great film," proposes William Leith. "It's the sort of thing Sam Mendes would do very well, with [James] Spader as the haunted hero and Kate Winslet as his doctor wife. I think the best treatment of his work has yet to happen."

"The prescience of Mr Ballard's work and its harsh conflation of the present and the future often resulted in comparisons to writers like Huxley and Orwell," writes Bruce Weber in the New York Times. "'His fabulistic style led people to review his work as science fiction,' said Robert Weil, Mr Ballard's American editor at Norton. 'But that's like calling 'Brave New World' science fiction, or '1984.'"

John Coulthart on "Ballard and the painters": "Following my observations yesterday about Ballard's Surrealist influences, this post seems inevitable."

Updates, 4/22: "For Ballard, to gaze into inner space - the world within the skull - was to gaze upon the antic face of the world, upon a landscape governed by Thanatos and Eros, the two great world-shaping principles common to Freud and the Surrealists." John Clute in the Independent: "His genius was in his ability to 'actualize' these principles in his fiction, and to choose protagonists who might plausibly embody his convictions about our state. Ballard's lead characters are almost invariably middle-class professionals: affectless physicians, benumbed apparatchiks, deracinated engineers, the swelling mob of rootless death-fixated suburbanites who are (his recent novels claim) the real terrorists to come. Ballard's 21st century is a vision of gated communities occupied by potential suicides and real killers, glassy with disinterest but deadly: Thanatos Unbound."

Granta collects tributes from writers.

"When characterizing Ballard's tales, whether fantastically dystopian or chillingly realist, one's repeatedly tempted by the term 'alienating,' yet what makes the work so arresting and provocative is the fact that his protagonists aren't really alienated at all," writes Josef Braun. "They witness horrors that, rather than simply deadening affect, awake a new level of fascination with phenomena far grander in scale than individual lives or even civilizations."

Update, 4/23: "Strangely, although we live in an ever more Ballardian reality, I can't really see a Ballardian school of writing out there, even within science fiction," writes Simon Reynolds in Salon. "Perhaps JG is easier to parody than to be positively influenced by. Instead, his direct impact is most evident in music, particularly late 70s and 80s postpunk. Ironically, the art he had the least feeling for was the one that responded most fervently and productively to his vision."

Update, 4/25: The Guardian runs Ballard's last short story, "The Dying Fall," and a remembrance from Martin Amis:

I first came across Ballard when I was a teenager. He was a friend of my father's, and my father championed his early work, calling him "the brightest star in postwar SF" (all purists call science fiction SF, and have nothing but contempt for "sci fi"). Ballard was a beautiful man, with a marvellously full, resonant face and hot eyes, and talked in the cadences of extreme sarcasm with very heavy stresses - he wasn't being sarcastic, merely expressive. The friendship between the two did not survive Ballard's increasing interest in experimentalism, which my father always characterised as "buggering about with the reader." But I was always delighted to see Jim later on. Funnily enough, he was an unusually lovable man, despite the extraordinary weirdness of his imagination.

Also, Alison Flood: "As tributes to the late, great JG Ballard continue to roll in from all quarters, his publisher has quietly cancelled publication of what would have been his final book."

David L Ulin in the Los Angeles Times: "Novels such as 'Crash' and 'High-Rise' uncovered the orgiastic possibilities of violence years before the concept became common cultural currency; 'Vermilion Sands' and 'Running Wild' investigated a nightmare suburbia where chaos simmered beneath the landscaped surfaces of subdivisions and lawns. It's easy, from the perspective of the present, to minimize just how revolutionary all this was - we now live, after all, in Ballard's world."

Update, 4/26: "Ballard described Walsh as 'my inspiration and life companion' and suggested that after all of their travels together 'there is scarcely a city, museum or beach in Europe that I don't associate with Claire.'" Tim Adams meets her for the Observer.

Update, 4/28: Mark Fisher points to the collection of tributes at Ballardian.

Tags: David Cronenberg, JG Ballard