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“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” 

J.G. Ballard passed away in April 2009 following what by no stretch of the imagination could have been called a boring life. Outwardly the majority of Ballard’s life could be said to have resembled an ordinarily dull, suburban life, bringing up three children on the unexciting perphiery of west London, in Shepperton. ‘Outwardly’ is the correct word here as inwardly Ballard was traversing pyshcological inner landscapes like a man obsessed with finding the source of our inner mental Amazon Rivers.

Ballard was a producer of extraordinary fiction, and possessed the finest imagination of any British writer of his generation. Outward appearances were deceptive and hid a brilliantly dark mind. Ballard’s fiction is disturbing and eerily prescient, and often concerns itself with the lifting of the veil of civilisation to reveal the savagery that lies behind.

“What our children have to fear is not the cars on the highways of tomorrow but our own pleasure in calculating the most elegant parameters of their deaths.”

Where did Jim’s imagination come from? Fellow writer and friend, Will Self, believes Ballard was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, from the experiences he went through as a child in the war. Ballard was born in 1930 into a charmed existence in the colonial outpost of the Shanghai International Settlement. After the Japanese invasion and occupation of Shanghai, the Ballard’s were sent to the Lunghua internment camp, where they spent the rest of the war.

The experiences of the young Ballard were later recorded in his novel, Empire Of The Sun, which was then turned into a film by Steven Spielberg, starring a young Christian Bale as Ballard. The novel was heavily fictionalised, but the horrors that accompanied war were not.

“Civilised life, you know, is based on a huge number of illusions in which we all collaborate willingly. The trouble is we forget after a while that they are illusions and we are deeply shocked when reality is torn down around us.” 

Ballard’s dystopian fiction draws heavily from his childhood experiences and the term Ballardian is now common lexicon for a particular style of writing, defined by the Collins English Dictionary as “resembling or suggestive of the conditions described in J. G. Ballard’s novels and stories, especially dystopian modernity, bleak man-made landscapes and the psychological effects of technological, social or environmental developments.” 

His first novel The Drowned World, published in 1962, is science fiction, but to say that Ballard is a science fiction writer is to miss the point, he is as it has been said, a science fiction writer in the way Orwell and Huxley were. His novels slowly moved further and further from science fictions towards that “apocalyptic realism” that fills his later books, via the weird imaginings of The Atrocity Exhibition, and his most controversial novel Crash (described by one critic as “the most repulsive book I’ve ever read”).

“The ambiguous role of the car crash needs no elaboration—apart from our own deaths, the car crash is probably the most dramatic event in our lives, and in many cases the two will coincide.”

Crash is typical Ballardian territory. Centering on characters fixated on the sexual potential of car crashes, it is a strange and disturbing novel that still shocks and revolts. Talking to The Guardian about being labelled a science fiction writer Ballard said, “By calling a novel like Crash science fiction, you isolate the book and you don’t think about what it is. You can forget about it.”

After the death of his wife Mary, Ballard was left to bring up three children alone, but he continued to write and as dystopian landscapes followed advent garde psychological investigations, his reputation and influence grew. Living a quiet suburban life, he continued to plough his particular furrow deep into the consumerist ­landscape, a furrow where the soil is enriched with sly humour, blood, and the debris from the twentieth century’s collision of ­sexuality and technology.

“Sooner or later, all games become serious.” 

Sitting at his desk in Shepperton, Ballard conjured images of the future that while bleak, have a distinct and unsettlingly ‘real’ feel. Many of his novels now feel more and more like acts of precognition rather than mere imaginings. While some writers get the future so wrong when we look back with hindsight, Ballard seems to have predicted the world better than most, and his novels still have a distinct modernity to them.

Ballard’s influence on popular culture looms large, like the high-rise blocks he so artfully dissects, from writers such as Will Self, thinkers like John Gray, the film maker David Cronenberg, and bands ranging from Joy Division, The Manic Street Preachers and Radiohead.

“Town-scapes are changing. The open-plan city belongs in the past — no more ramblas, no more pedestrian precincts, no more left banks and Latin quarters. We’re moving into the age of security grilles and defensible space. As for living, our surveillance cameras can do that for us. People are locking their doors and switching off their nervous systems.”

I now find it difficult to walk through a shopping centre, or drive to the horrible out of town shopping villages marooned in the hinterland of the ring road, without thinking of Ballard. Read his fiction and you will never look at an empty swimming pool the same way again, or walk through deserted city streets without feeling the chill of being watched, not by some alien creature, but by people hiding in the ruins of looted and burnt out shops with dark, urgent, vicious and violent thoughts. People just like you and me in fact.

“We’ve got to immerse ourselves in the most destructive elements and see if we can swim”

“Ballard’s contribution to literature, to the visual arts, to architectural theory and even philosophy will, I feel certain, be increasingly acknowledged in the decades to come.” Will Self.

To read an extract from an interview with Ballard in The Paris Review click here.