J. G. Ballard

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Ballard, J. G. (James Graham Ballard) (băl'ərd), 1930-2009, English writer, mainly of dystopian science fiction. Born to English parents in Shanghai, he was torn from his affluent surroundings as a child during World War II, separated from his family, interned in a Japanese prison camp, and in general subjected to a harsh and often bizarre new life. These experiences are mirrored in his best-known work, the autobiographical novel Empire of the Sun (1984, film 1987). A later novel, The Kindness of Women (1991), continues his autobiographical tale. Ballard's other books, more than 20 novels and short-story collections, are richly imagistic and tinged with the surreal and the erotic. They often mingle fantasy and catastrophe in their portrayal of a bleak world devastated by technology and violence. His novels include The Drowned World (1962), The Crystal World (1962), the controversial The Atrocity Exhibition (1969), Crash (1973, film 1996), High Rise (1975), The Day of Creation (1988), Cocaine Nights (1996), and Super-Cannes (2001). His Complete Short Stories was published in 2002 (upd. ed., 2009).

Bibliography

See his autobiography (2008); V. Vale, ed., J. G. Ballard Conversations (2005); studies by J. Goddard and D. Pringle, ed. (1976), D. Pringle (1979), P. Brigg (1985, repr. 2007), G. Stephenson (1991), R. Luckhurst (1997), A. Gasiorek (2005), and J. Baxter (2008 as ed. and 2009).

Quotes:

"We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind -- mass merchandising, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the instant translation of science and technology into popular imagery, the increasing blurring and intermingling of identities within the realm of consumer goods, the preempting of any free or original imaginative response to experience by the television screen. We live inside an enormous novel. For the writer in particular it is less and less necessary for him to invent the fictional content of his novel. The fiction is already there. The writer's task is to invent the reality."

"I would sum up my fear about the future in one word: boring. And that's my one fear: that everything has happened; nothing exciting or new or interesting is ever going to happen again... the future is just going to be a vast, conforming suburb of the soul."

"A car crash harnesses elements of eroticism, aggression, desire, speed, drama, kinesthetic factors, the stylizing of motion, consumer goods, status -- all these in one event. I myself see the car crash as a tremendous sexual event really: a liberation of human and machine libido (if there is such a thing)."

"The American Dream has run out of gas. The car has stopped. It no longer supplies the world with its images, its dreams, its fantasies. No more. It's over. It supplies the world with its nightmares now: the Kennedy assassination, Watergate, Vietnam..."

"Hell is out of fashion -- institutional hells at any rate. The populated infernos of the 20th century are more private affairs, the gaps between the bars are the sutures of one's own skull. A valid hell is one from which there is a possibility of redemption, even if this is never achieved, the dungeons of an architecture of grace whose spires point to some kind of heaven. The institutional hells of the present century are reached with one-way tickets, marked Nagasaki and Buchenwald, worlds of terminal horror even more final than the grave."

"Pop artists deal with the lowly trivia of possessions and equipment that the present generation is lugging along with it on its safari into the future."

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