Ballard, J(ames) G(raham)

Ballard, J(ames) G(raham) (1930- ), English novelist, short-story writer, and essayist. Ballard was born in Shanghai in China, and spent part of his childhood interned with his family in a Japanese prison camp after the attack on Pearl Harbor. These experiences inform much of his writing, most notably his 1984 novel Empire of the Sun, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, won the Guardian Fiction Prize, and was also filmed by Steven Spielberg. The family returned to England in 1946 and Ballard subsequently spent two years at the University of Cambridge studying medicine, and worked as a copywriter and a porter before joining the Royal Air Force (RAF). After his discharge from the RAF, he worked on a scientific journal for six years before becoming a full-time writer.

Ballard’s writing is heavily influenced by science fiction and fantasy, and explores contemporary concerns about impending environmental catastrophe and the effect on human nature of the ascendancy of technological processes. Perhaps more than any other modern novelist, he has brought other genres to play in the literary novel. His first major novel, The Drowned World (1962), imagined the devastation caused by melting polar ice caps, and was followed by The Drought (1965; published as The Burning World, New York, 1964), and The Crystal World (1966), which is set in a forest area in western Africa that is literally crystallizing.

In 1973 Ballard published Crash, a disturbing and explicit meditation on the relationship between sexual desire and cars. It was filmed by David Cronenberg in 1996, provoking fierce debates over censorship and obscenity before being passed for British distribution by the British Board of Film Classification in 1997. Crash was followed by the novels Concrete Island (1974), High-Rise (1975), The Unlimited Dream Company (1979), and Hello America (1981). Ballard achieved a much wider audience with his semi-autobiographical novel Empire of the Sun in 1984, which told a wartime story through the eyes of a young boy; a sequel, The Kindness of Women, appeared in 1991. The Day of Creation, another novel set in Africa, was published in 1987, and Running Wild in 1988. Ballard’s subsequent novels are Rushing to Paradise (1994), an apocalyptic tale set on a Pacific atoll, Cocaine Nights (1996), which reworks the traditional thriller in a decadent Costa del Sol setting, Super-Cannes (2000), a conspiracy mystery set in a hi-tech business park on the French Riviera, Millennium People (2003), about middle-class revolutionaries, and Kingdom Come (2006), which casts modern-day consumerism as a new form of fascism.

Ballard is also a prolific short-story writer, and a collection of essays and reviews, A User’s Guide to the Millennium, appeared in 1996.