J.G. Ballard

Born in Shanghai, China, James Graham Ballard’s childhood was shaped during World War II when he and his family were sent to a Japanese internment camp. He later wrote about his experiences in the autobiographical novel, Empire of the Sun (1984).

He returned to London when he was 16 and studied medicine and later English. He joined the RAF for a while, worked as a copywriter, an encyclopaedia salesman and later became deputy editor of a scientific magazine. But what he really wanted was to be a full-time writer – an aim he eventually achieved.

Ballard’s early fiction was heavily influenced by psychoanalysis and surrealist painters but he discovered science fiction through American magazines while posted in Canada with the RAF. These influences came together in his work to form his own brand of ‘dystopian fiction’. He imagined the worst possible vision of the world, full of empty buildings, destroyed vehicles and desolate landscapes - the exact opposite of Utopia. His 1973 novel, Crash, explores man’s capacity to destroy himself through technology; in this case, when a group of people develop a dangerous obsession with the sexual overtones of car crashes. Crash was later made into a contraversial movie by director David Cronenberg.

Other common themes of his work were the psycological fall-out from the Space Race, and natural disasters, as in The Drowned World (1962). Such works earned him his reputation as the master of ‘the British catastrophe novel’, for his uncanny ability to represent a dark and horrific view of the future with a good dose of black humour. One of his famous quotes is: “The future is going to be boring. The suburbanisation of the planet will continue, and the suburbanisation of the soul will follow soon after.”