J.G. Ballard, 1930-2009

British novelist J.G. Ballard has died this Sunday morning, April 19th, at the age of 78, reports the BBC. Cause of death was not mentioned, but Ballard was diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer in 2006, and that likely was the main cause.

Ballard was born in Shanghai in 1930, the son of a British industrialist, and grew up in the International Settlement there. Shanghai was occupied by the Japanese after the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941, and foreign nationals -- including the Ballards -- were moved to the Lunghua Civilian Assembly Center in early 1943. Ballard turned his experiences as a teenager in the camp into fiction in his most famous novel, Empire of the Sun, and wrote of that time more directly in his last book, the autobiography Miracles of Life.

After the war, Ballard went to England, where he completed school and then went on to study medicine at King's College, Cambridge. He abandoned those studies for reading English literature at the University of London, with hopes of becoming a professional writer. It was only after joining the RAF in 1953 that -- when posted in a airbase in Moose Jaw, Canada -- he discovered American Science Fiction magazines and decided that the stories he wanted to write could fit into that genre.

After returning to the UK after his RAF stint ended, Ballard's writing career began in the British SF magazines, starting with "Prima Belladonna" in New Worlds for December 1956. He continued writing SF short stories, and began to publish novels in the early '60s, quitting his day-job as an editor of a scientific journal almost immediately. His early novels -- The Wind From Nowhere, The Drowned World, The Burning World, and The Crystal World -- were SFnal novels, all stories of apocalypse that moved further and further from the traditional British "cozy catastrophe" as Ballard grew more and more confident with his own writing and voice.

Ballard's career turned to the avant-garde and political with the "condensed novels" collected in his collection The Atrocity Exhibition; many of them were published in SFnal outlets, but, in retrospect, this was the work that saw Ballard break with the SF field and continue his essential obsessions -- sex, death, the anomie of modern life, and a cool, detached viewpoint verging on nihilism -- into more direct and immediate channels based on contemporary life. The three following novels of the early '70s -- Crash, Concrete Island, and High Rise -- are the most uncompromising and fearless of his career, slicing with the detachment of the surgeon he nearly was at the psychological underpinnings of the world as he saw them.

Subsequent novels and works reiterated his central concerns and images, building up the quintessentially Ballardian landscape: drained swimming pools, carefully planned buildings fallen into physical or moral decay, aircraft in the air or crashed on the ground, the outer settings that mirrors the characters' inner worlds. His most successful novel of that period was Empire of the Sun, which explained the bases for so many of Ballard's key images while at the same time contextualizing them into a fine novel that was not simply a retelling of his own life.

Ballard's central concerns never varied, though the styles of his novels and stories did, veering from SF through the avant garde to more traditional literary novels and then into magic realism and the crime story an back out again. He was one of the great British writers of the 20th century, with a instantly recognizable style and matter and a endlessly fecund imagination watered ceaselessly by those same few wells.

He will be greatly missed, and he will now never be a SFWA Grand Master. But he'll still be read in a hundred years, when so many of his contemporaries and competitors are utterly forgotten.

For those who haven't read Ballard: SF readers should start with The Best Short Stories. Readers of mainstream fiction should try Empire of the Sun. And those who want to dive into the deep end should look at Crash or The Atrocity Exhibition.