264 - ] English Literature
J. G. Ballard
British author
In
October 2008, before his death, Ballard's literary agent, Margaret Hanbury,
brought an outline for a book by Ballard with the working title Conversations
with My Physician: The Meaning, if Any , of Life to the Frankfurt Book Fair.
The physician in question is oncologist Professor Jonathan Waxman of Imperial
College London, who was treating Ballard for prostate cancer. While it was to
be in part a book about cancer, and Ballard's struggle with it, it reportedly
was to move on to broader themes. In April 2009 The Guardian reported that
HarperCollins announced that Ballard's Conversations with My Physician could
not be finished and plans to publish it were abandoned.
In
2013, a 17-page untitled typescript listed as "Vermilion Sands short story
in draft" in the British Library catalogue and edited into an 8,000-word
text by Bernard Sigaud appeared in a short-lived French reissue of the
collection by Éditions Tristram (ISBN 978-2367190068) under the title "Le
labyrinthe Hardoon" as the first story of the cycle, tentatively dated
"late 1955/early 1956" by B. Sigaud, David Pringle and Christopher J.
Beckett. Reports From the Deep End, an anthology of short stories inspired by
J. G. Ballard (London: Titan Books, 2023, edited by Maxim Jakubowski and Rick
McGrath), could have included "The Hardoon Labyrinth"—the original
edition by B. Sigaud enriched to about 9,400 words by D. Pringle—but opposition
from the J. G. Ballard Estate terminated the project.
Archive
In
June 2010 the British Library acquired Ballard's personal archives under the
British government's acceptance in lieu scheme for death duties. The archive contains
eighteen holograph manuscripts for Ballard's novels, including the 840-page
manuscript for Empire of the Sun, plus correspondence, notebooks, and
photographs from throughout his life. In addition, two typewritten manuscripts
for The Unlimited Dream Company are held at the Harry Ransom Center at the
University of Texas at Austin.
Dystopian
fiction
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With
the exception of his autobiographical novels, Ballard most commonly wrote in
the post-apocalyptic dystopia genre.
His
most celebrated novel in this regard is Crash, in which the characters (the
protagonist, called Ballard, included) become increasingly obsessed with the
violent psychosexuality of car crashes in general, and celebrity car crashes in
particular. Ballard's novel was turned into a controversial film by David
Cronenberg.
Particularly
revered among Ballard's admirers is his short story collection Vermilion Sands
(1971), set in an eponymous desert resort town inhabited by forgotten starlets,
insane heirs, very eccentric artists, and the merchants and bizarre servants
who provide for them. Each story features peculiarly exotic technology such as
cloud-carving sculptors performing for a party of eccentric onlookers,
poetry-composing computers, orchids with operatic voices and egos to match,
phototropic self-painting canvases, etc. In keeping with Ballard's central
themes, most notably technologically mediated masochism, these tawdry and weird
technologies service the dark and hidden desires and schemes of the human
castaways who occupy Vermilion Sands, typically with psychologically grotesque
and physically fatal results. In his introduction to Vermilion Sands, Ballard
cites this as his favourite collection.
In
a similar vein, his collection Memories of the Space Age explores many
varieties of individual and collective psychological fallout from—and initial
deep archetypal motivations for—the American space exploration boom of the
1960s and 1970s.
Will
Self has described much of his fiction as being concerned with "idealised
gated communities; the affluent, and the ennui of affluence [where] the
virtualised world is concretised in the shape of these gated
developments." He added in these fictional settings "there is no real
pleasure to be gained; sex is commodified and devoid of feeling and there is no
relationship with the natural world. These communities then implode into some
form of violence." Budrys, however, mocked his fiction as "call[ing]
for people who don't think ... to be the protagonist of a J. G. Ballard novel,
or anything more than a very minor character therein, you must have cut
yourself off from the entire body of scientific education".
In
addition to his novels, Ballard made extensive use of the short story form.
Many of his earliest published works in the 1950s and 1960s were short stories,
including influential works like Chronopolis. In an essay on Ballard, Will
Wiles notes how his short stories "have a lingering fascination with the
domestic interior, with furnishing and appliances", adding, "it's a
landscape that he distorts until it shrieks with anxiety". He concludes
that "what Ballard saw, and what he expressed in his novels, was nothing
less than the effect that the technological world, including our built
environment, was having upon our minds and bodies."
Ballard
coined the term inverted Crusoeism. Whereas the original Robinson Crusoe became
a castaway against his own will, Ballard's protagonists often choose to maroon
themselves; hence inverted Crusoeism (e.g., Concrete Island). The concept
provides a reason as to why people would deliberately maroon themselves on a
remote island; in Ballard's work, becoming a castaway is as much a healing and
empowering process as an entrapping one, enabling people to discover a more
meaningful and vital existence.
Television
On
13 December 1965, BBC Two screened an adaptation of the short story
"Thirteen to Centaurus" directed by Peter Potter. The one-hour drama
formed part of the first season of Out of the Unknown and starred Donald
Houston as Dr. Francis and James Hunter as Abel Granger. In 2003, Ballard's
short story "The Enormous Space" (first published in the science
fiction magazine Interzone in 1989, subsequently printed in the collection of
Ballard's short stories War Fever) was adapted into an hour-long television
film for the BBC entitled Home by Richard Curson Smith, who also directed it.
The plot follows a middle-class man who chooses to abandon the outside world
and restrict himself to his house, becoming a hermit.
Influence
Ballard
is cited as an important forebear of the cyberpunk movement by Bruce Sterling
in his introduction to the Mirrorshades anthology, and by author William
Gibson.[66] Ballard's parody of American politics, the pamphlet "Why I
Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan", which was subsequently included as a chapter
in his experimental novel The Atrocity Exhibition, was photocopied and
distributed by pranksters at the 1980 Republican National Convention. In the
early 1970s, Bill Butler, a bookseller in Brighton, was prosecuted under UK
obscenity laws for selling the pamphlet.
According
to literary theorist Brian McHale, The Atrocity Exhibition is a
"postmodernist text based on science fiction topoi".
Lee
Killough directly cites Ballard's seminal Vermilion Sands short stories as the
inspiration for her collection Aventine, also a backwater resort for
celebrities and eccentrics where bizarre or frivolous novelty technology
facilitates the expression of dark intents and drives. Terry Dowling's milieu
of Twilight Beach is also influenced by the stories of Vermilion Sands and
other Ballard works.
In
Simulacra and Simulation, Jean Baudrillard hailed Crash as the "first
great novel of the universe of simulation".
Ballard
also had an interest in the relationship between various media. In the early
1970s, he was one of the trustees of the Institute for Research in Art and
Technology.
In
popular music
Ballard
has had a notable influence on popular music, where his work has been used as a
basis for lyrical imagery, particularly amongst British post-punk and
industrial groups. Examples include albums such as Metamatic by John Foxx and
The Atrocity Exhibition... Exhibit A by Exodus, various songs by Joy Division
(most famously "Atrocity Exhibition" from Closer and
"Disorder" from Unknown Pleasures), "High Rise" by
Hawkwind, "Miss the Girl" by Siouxsie Sioux's second band The
Creatures (based on Crash), "Down in the Park" by Gary Numan,
"Chrome Injury" by The Church, "Drowned World/Substitute for
Love" by Madonna, "Warm Leatherette" by The Normal and Atrocity
Exhibition by Danny Brown. Songwriters Trevor Horn and Bruce Woolley credit
Ballard's story "The Sound-Sweep" with inspiring The Buggles' hit
"Video Killed the Radio Star", and the Buggles' second album included
a song entitled "Vermillion Sands". The 1978 post-punk band Comsat
Angels took their name from one of Ballard's short stories. An early
instrumental track by British electronic music group The Human League "4JG"
bears Ballard's initials as a homage to the author (intended as a response to
"2HB" by Roxy Music).
The
Welsh rock band Manic Street Preachers include a sample from an interview with
Ballard in their song "Mausoleum". Additionally, the Manic Street
Preachers song, "A Billion Balconies Facing the Sun", is taken from a
line in the J. G. Ballard novel Cocaine Nights. The English band Klaxons named
their debut album Myths of the Near Future after one of Ballard's short story
collections. The band Empire of the Sun took their name from Ballard's novel.
The American rock band The Sound of Animals Fighting took the name of the song
"The Heraldic Beak of the Manufacturer's Medallion" from Crash.
UK-based drum and bass producer Fortitude released an EP in 2016 called "Kline
Coma Xero" named after characters in The Atrocity Exhibition. The song
"Terminal Beach" by the American band Yacht is a tribute to his short
story collection that goes by the same name.[citation needed] American indie
musician and comic book artist Jeffrey Lewis mentions Ballard by name in his
song "Cult Boyfriend", on the record A Turn in The Dream-Songs
(2011), in reference to Ballard's cult following as an author.
In
the 2024 Met Gala
The
2024 Met Gala dress code was "The Garden of Time", inspired by
Ballard's 1962 short story "The Garden of Time".
Awards
and honours
This
list is incomplete; you can help by adding missing items. (December 2012)
1979
BSFA Award for Best Novel for The Unlimited Dream Company
1984
Guardian Fiction Prize for Empire of the Sun
1984
James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction for Empire of the Sun
1984
Empire of the Sun shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction
1997
De Montfort University Honorary doctorate.
2001
Commonwealth Writers' Prize (Europe & South Asia region) for Super-Cannes
2008
Golden PEN Award
2009
Royal Holloway University of London Posthumous honorary doctorate
Works
Novels
The
Wind from Nowhere (1961)The Drowned World (1962)The Burning World (1964; also
The Drought, 1965)The Crystal World (1966)The Atrocity Exhibition (1970, first
published as Love and Napalm: Export USA, 1972)
Crash
(1973) Concrete Island (1974) High-Rise (1975) The Unlimited Dream Company
(1979) Hello America (1981) Empire of the Sun (1984) The Day of Creation (1987)
Running Wild (1988) The Kindness of Women (1991)
Rushing
to Paradise (1994) Cocaine Nights (1996) Super-Cannes (2000)
Millennium
People (2003) Kingdom Come (2006) Short story collections
The
Voices of Time and Other Stories (1962) Billennium (1962) Passport to Eternity
(1963) The 4-Dimensional Nightmare (1963) The Terminal Beach (1964) The
Impossible Man (1966) The Overloaded Man (1967) The Disaster Area (1967) The
Day of Forever (1967) Vermilion Sands (1971) Chronopolis and Other Stories
(1971) Low-Flying Aircraft and Other Stories (1976) The Best of J. G. Ballard
(1977) The Best Short Stories of J. G. Ballard (1978)
The
Venus Hunters (1980) Myths of the Near Future (1982) The Voices of Time (1985) Memories
of the Space Age (1988) War Fever (1990) The Complete Short Stories of J. G.
Ballard (2001) The Complete Short Stories of J. G. Ballard: Volume 1 (2006) The
Complete Short Stories of J. G. Ballard: Volume 2 (2006) The Complete Stories
of J. G. Ballard (2009)
Non-fiction
A
User's Guide to the Millennium: Essays and Reviews (1996) Miracles of Life
(autobiography; 2008)
Interviews
Paris
Review – J.G. Ballard (1984) Re/Search No. 8/9: J.G. Ballard (1985)
J.G.
Ballard: Quotes (2004) J.G. Ballard: Conversations (2005) Extreme Metaphors
(interviews; 2012)
Adaptations
Films
When
Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth (1970, Val Guest) Empire of the Sun (1987, Steven
Spielberg) Crash (1996, David Cronenberg) The Atrocity Exhibition (1998,
Jonathan Weiss) Low-Flying Aircraft (2002, Solveig Nordlund) High-Rise (2015,
Ben Wheatley)
Television
"Thirteen
to Centaurus" (1965) from the short story of the same name – dir. Peter
Potter (BBC Two) Crash! (1971) dir. Harley Cokliss "Minus One" (1991)
from the story of the same name – short film dir. by Simon Brooks.
"Home"
(2003) primarily based on "The Enormous Space" – dir. Richard Curson
Smith (BBC Four) "The Drowned Giant" (2021) from the short story of
the same name, is the eighth episode of the second season of the Netflix
anthology series Love, Death & Robots
Radio
In
Nov/Dec 1988, CBC Radio's sci-fi series Vanishing Point ran a seven-episode
miniseries of The Stories of J. G. Ballard, which included audio adaptations of
"Escapement," "Dead Astronaut," "The Cloud Sculptors
of Coral D," "Low Flying Aircraft," "A Question of Re-entry,"
"News from the Sun" and "Having a Wonderful Time".
In
June 2013, BBC Radio 4 broadcast adaptions of The Drowned World and Concrete
Island as part of a season of dystopian fiction entitled Dangerous Visions.
