262- ] English Literature
J. G. Ballard
British author
J.G.
Ballard (born November 15, 1930, Shanghai, China—died April 19, 2009, London,
England) was a British author of science fiction set in ecologically unbalanced
landscapes caused by decadent technological excess.
The
son of a British business executive based in China, Ballard spent four years of
his boyhood in a Japanese prison camp near Shanghai during World War II. This
experience is recounted in his largely autobiographical novel Empire of the Sun
(1984; film 1987). The devastated city and nearby countryside also provided
settings for several of his apocalyptic novels. He attended King’s College,
Cambridge, but left without a degree. His first short stories appeared in the
1950s. Beginning in the 1960s, Ballard wrote longer works, including The Drowned
World (1962), The Wind from Nowhere (1962), The Burning World (1964), and The
Crystal World (1966).
With
the gory images of his surreal short stories in The Atrocity Exhibition (1970;
also published as Love and Napalm: Export U.S.A.; film 2000), Ballard began
writing of dehumanized sex and technology at their most extreme. His novels
Crash (1973; film 1996), Concrete Island (1974), and High Rise (1975; film
2015) depict 20th-century middle-class people devolving into savagery.
Contrasting with this apocalyptic vision of the future were his almost wistful
short stories about the decadent technological utopia Vermilion Sands; these
were collected in Vermilion Sands (1971). His short-story collection War Fever
(1990) contains humorously nihilistic meditations on such topics as compulsory
sex and the oblivious attitudes of a media-saturated society.
Ballard’s
stylistic debts to Joseph Conrad are evident in his novel The Day of Creation
(1987). The Kindness of Women (1991) follows the alternately dissipated and
transcendent later life of the protagonist of Empire of the Sun and is written
in the same semiautobiographical vein as its predecessor. Ballard infused later
works with new variations on the dystopian themes of his earlier novels.
Rushing to Paradise (1994) concerns an environmentalist so rabidly committed to
her cause that she becomes homicidal, and Cocaine Nights (1996) centres on an
island community whose cultured lifestyle is supported by crime. Ballard
deploys events of extraordinary violence in the plots of Super-Cannes (2000),
Millennium People (2003), and Kingdom Come (2006), effectively exposing the
foibles of his middle-class characters by documenting their reactions to the
violence against a stark backdrop of shopping malls and office parks.
Ballard’s
essays and reviews were compiled in A User’s Guide to the Millennium (1996).
The Complete Short Stories of J.G. Ballard was released in two volumes in 2006.
An autobiography, Miracles of Life, was published in 2008.
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