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Concept
J. G. Ballard
Summary
James Graham Ballard (15 November 1930 19 April 2009) was an English novelist and short story writer, satirist and essayist known for psychologically provocative works of fiction that explore the relations among human psychology, technology, sex, and the mass media. Ballard became associated with New Wave science fiction for post-apocalyptic novels, such as The Drowned World (1962), but also courted political controversy with the short-story collection The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), which includes the story "Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan" (1968), and the novel Crash (1973), a story about car-crash fetishists.
In 1984, Ballard won broad, critical recognition for the war novel Empire of the Sun, a semi-autobiographical story of the experiences of a British boy during the Japanese occupation of Shanghai; three years later, the American film director Steven Spielberg adapted the novel into a film of the same name. Biographically, the novelist's journey from youth to mid-age is chronicled, with fictional inflections, in The Kindness of Women (1991), and in the autobiography Miracles of Life (2008). Some of Ballard's early novels have been cinematically adapted, such as Crash (1996), directed by David Cronenberg, and High-Rise (2015), directed by Ben Wheatley, an adaptation of the novel High-Rise (1975).
From the distinct nature of the literary fiction of J. G. Ballard arose the adjective Ballardian, defined 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". The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography describes the novelist Ballard as preoccupied with "Eros, Thanatos, mass media and emergent technologies".
J. G. Ballard was born to Edna Johnstone (1905–1998) and James Graham Ballard (1901–1966), who was a chemist at the Calico Printers' Association, a textile company in the city of Manchester, and later became the chairman and managing director of the China Printing and Finishing Company, the Association's subsidiary company in Shanghai.
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