J. G. Ballard

James Graham Ballard (15 November 1930 – 19 April 2009) was an English novelist, short story writer, satirist, and essayist known for provocative works of fiction, which explored the relations between human psychology, technology, sex, and mass media. He first became associated with the New Wave of science fiction for post-apocalyptic novels such as The Drowned World (1962). Still, he later courted controversy for works such as the experimental short story collection The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), which included the 1968 story "Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan," and the novel Crash (1973), a story about a renegade group of car crash fetishists.

In 1984, Ballard won broader recognition for his war novel Empire of the Sun, a semi-autobiographical account of a young British boy's experiences in Shanghai during Japanese occupation; the story was adapted into a 1987 film directed by Steven Spielberg. The author's journey from youth to mid-age would be chronicled, with fictional inflections, in The Kindness of Women (1991) and indirect autobiography in Miracles of Life (2008). Several of his earlier works have been adapted into films, including David Cronenberg's controversial 1996 adaptation of Crash and Ben Wheatley's 2015 adaptation of Ballard's 1975 novel High-Rise.

The literary distinctiveness of Ballard's fiction 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." The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry describes Ballard's work as being occupied with "Eros, Thanatos, mass media and emergent.

In 1960 Ballard moved with his family to the middle-class Shepperton in Surrey, where he lived for the rest of his life and which would later give rise to his moniker as the "Seer of Shepperton." Finding that commuting to work did not leave him time to write, Ballard decided he had to make a break and become a full-time writer. He wrote his first novel, The Wind from Nowhere, over a two-week holiday to gain a foothold as a professional writer, not intending it as a "serious novel"; in books published later, it is omitted from the list of his works. When it was published in January 1962, he resigned from his job at Chemistry and Industry and, from then on, supported himself and his family as a writer.

Later that year, his second novel, The Drowned World, was published, establishing Ballard as a notable figure in the fledgling New Wave movement of science fiction. Collections of his stories started getting published, and he began a period of great literary productivity while pushing to expand the scope of acceptable material for science fiction with such stories as "The Terminal Beach."

In 1964 Ballard's wife Mary died suddenly of pneumonia, leaving him to raise their three children—James, Fay, and Bea Ballard—by himself. Ballard never remarried, but a few years later, his friend and fellow author Michael Moorcock introduced him to Claire Walsh, who became his partner for the rest of his life (he died at her London residence) and is often referred to in his writings as "Claire Churchill." Walsh, who worked in publishing during the 1960s and 1970s, was a sounding board for many of his story ideas and introduced him to the expatriate community in the south of France, which formed the basis of several novels.

After the shock of his wife's death, Ballard began 1965 to write the stories that became The Atrocity Exhibition while continuing to produce stories within the science fiction genre.[citation needed] In 1967, Algis Budrys listed Ballard, Brian W. Aldiss, Roger Zelazny, and Samuel R. Delany as "an earthshaking new kind of" writer and leaders of the New Wave.[38] The Atrocity Exhibition (1969) proved controversial—it was the subject of an obscenity trial, and in the United States, publisher Doubleday destroyed almost the entire print run before it was distributed—but it gained Ballard recognition as a literary writer. It remained one of his iconic works and was filmed in 2001.

A chapter of The Atrocity Exhibition is titled "Crash!" and in 1970, Ballard organized an exhibition of crashed cars at the New Arts Laboratory, simply called "Crashed Cars." The crashed vehicles were displayed without commentary, inspiring vitriolic responses and vandalism. In both the story and the art exhibition, Ballard dealt with the sexual potential of car crashes, a theme he also explored in a short film in which he appeared with Gabrielle Drake in 1971. His interest in the topic culminated in the novel Crash in 1973. The main character of Crash is called James Ballard and lives in Shepperton. However, other biographical details do not match the writer, and curiosity about the relationship between the character and his author increased when Ballard was in a serious car accident shortly after completing the novel.

The crash was also controversial upon publication. In 1996, the film adaptation by David Cronenberg was met with a tabloid uproar in the UK, with the Daily Mail campaigning for it to be banned. In the years following the initial publication of Crash, Ballard produced two further novels: 1974's Concrete Island, about a man who becomes stranded in the waste area of a high-speed motorway, and High-Rise, about a modern luxury high-rise apartment building's descent into tribal warfare.

Ballard published several novels and short story collections throughout the 1970s and 1980s, but his breakthrough into the mainstream came with Empire of the Sun in 1984, based on his years in Shanghai and the Lunghua internment camp. It became a best-seller, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and was awarded the Guardian Fiction Prize and James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction. It made Ballard known to a wider audience, although the books that followed failed to achieve the same degree of success. Empire of the Sun was filmed by Steven Spielberg in 1987, starring a young Christian Bale as Jim (Ballard). Ballard himself appears briefly in the film, and he has described the experience of seeing his childhood memories reenacted and reinterpreted as bizarre.