J. G. Ballard
J. G. Ballard is an author.
J. G. Ballard grew up in the International Settlement in Shanghai, the son of a chemist, and in 1943 the family was interned by the Japanese at the Lunghua camp, where they spent two years. He reached England in 1946, went up to Cambridge in 1949 to read medicine, gave it up in 1952 for writing, trained with the air force in Saskatchewan where he discovered science fiction, and published his first story in 1956. By 1960 he was writing full time. Almost every element of that sequence returns later as landscape: drained water, abandoned architecture, a European sitting calmly inside a collapsing system.
His real subject is the psychology of the built environment. Ballard wrote about what motorways, high-rises, business parks and television do to the people inside them, and he wrote it in the flat, clinical register of a case report, which is precisely what makes it unnerving. The Drowned World, in 1962, floods London and then declines to treat this as a disaster, because its characters are quietly regressing into the landscape and rather enjoying it.
He grew more confrontational from there. The Atrocity Exhibition, a 1970 collection assembled from fragments, reads like a psychiatric file on the decade, and Crash, in 1973, pushed the sexualisation of technology to its most literal endpoint and made him permanently controversial. He died in 2009.
Books (8)
Where to start with J. G. Ballard
The Drowned World first, always. It is his cleanest statement: a flooded tropical London, a small scientific expedition, and characters who keep drifting toward the heat instead of away from it. Read it as psychology with a climate attached rather than as a disaster novel and the rest of him opens up.
The Drought is the mirror image and nearly as good, the same logic run dry. The Voices of Time gathers early short fiction, where his images are at their most concentrated, and it is the fastest way to find out whether you get on with him at all.
Then decide how far you want to go. Crash is the notorious one, cold and deliberately repellent, and it is a serious novel as well as a provocation. The atrocity exhibition is barely a book in the ordinary sense and should be taken last, in pieces. Super-Cannes is the late mode, a gated business park on the French coast where the professional class has arranged its own violence, and it is the most immediately readable thing here.