J.g. Ballard
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James Graham Ballard (15 November 1930 – 19 April 2009) was a British novelist and short story writer and former Japanese internee. He was a prominent member of the New Wave in science fiction.
Ballard's novels and stories, especially dystopian modernity, bleak man-made landscapes and the psychological effects of technological, social or environmental developments", has been included in the Collins English Dictionary.
A January 2008 interview in The Sunday Times, promoting Ballard's autobiography Miracles of Life (2008), revealed that Ballard was diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer in June 2006. On 17 October 2008, the UK web site BookBrunch reported that Ballard's agent, Margaret Hanbury, had just arrived at the Frankfurt Book fair with a new manuscript from Ballard with the working title, Conversations with My Physician: The Meaning, if Any, of Life. The physician in question is oncologist Professor Jonathan Waxman of Imperial College, London, who was treating Ballard for prostate cancer.
While it is in part a book about cancer, and Ballard's struggle with it, it reportedly moves on to broader themes. Hanbury is in conversation with publishers.
Biography
Shanghai
Ballard's father was a chemist at a Manchester-headquartered textile firm, the Calico Printers Association, and became chairman and managing director of its subsidiary in Shanghai, the China Printing and Finishing Company.
Ballard was born and raised in the Shanghai International Settlement, an area under foreign control and dominated by American cultural influences. After the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War, Ballard's family were forced to temporarily evacuate their suburban home and rent a house in downtown Shanghai to avoid the shells fired by Chinese and Japanese forces.
After the Pearl Harbor attack, the Japanese occupied the International Settlement.
In early 1943 they began interning Allied civilians, and Ballard was sent to the Lunghua Civilian Assembly Center with his parents and younger sister. His family lived in a small area in G block, a two-story residence for 40 families.
He attended school in the camp, the teachers being inmates from a number of professions. These experiences formed the basis of Empire of the Sun, although Ballard exercised considerable artistic licence in writing the book (notably removing his parents from the bulk of the story).
It is often supposed that Ballard's exposure to the atrocities of war at an impressionable age explains the apocalyptic and violent nature of much of his fiction. Martin Amis wrote that Empire of the Sun "gives shape to what shaped him." However, Ballard's own account of the experience is more nuanced: "I don't think you can go through the experience of war without one's perceptions of the world being forever changed.
The reassuring stage set that everyday reality in the suburban west presents to us is torn down; you see the ragged scaffolding, and then you see the truth beyond that, and it can be a frightening experience." But also: "I have — I won't say happy — not unpleasant memories of the camp. I remember a lot of the casual brutality and beatings-up that went on — but at the same we children were playing a hundred and one games all the time!"
UK and Canada
In 1946, after the end of the war, Ballard went to the UK with his mother and sister on the SS Arrawa.
They lived in the West Country outside Plymouth, and he attended The Leys School in Cambridge. After a couple of years his mother and sister returned to China, rejoining Ballard's father, and leaving Ballard to live with his grandparents when not boarding at school.
In May 1951, when Ballard was in his second year at King's, his short story "The Violent Noon" (a Hemingwayesque pastiche written to please the jury) won a crime story competition and was published in the student newspaper Varsity.
Encouraged by the publication of his story and realising that clinical medicine would not leave him time to write, Ballard abandoned his medical studies in 1952 and went to the University of London to read English Literature. He kept writing short fiction but found it impossible to get published.
In 1953 Ballard joined the RAF and was sent to the RCAF flight-training base in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, Canada.
While in the RAF, he also wrote his first science fiction story, "Passport to Eternity", as a pastiche and summary of the American science fiction he had read.
Ballard left the RAF in 1954 after two years and returned to the UK. Their first child (of three) was born in 1956, and his first published science fiction story, "Prima Belladonna", was printed in the December issue of New Worlds that year.
Carnell, would remain an important supporter of Ballard's writing and would publish nearly all of his early stories.
From 1957, Ballard worked as assistant editor on the scientific journal Chemistry and Industry. His interest in art led to his involvement in the emerging Pop Art movement, and in the late fifties he exhibited a number of collages that represented his ideas for a new kind of novel.
He wrote his first novel, The Wind from Nowhere, over a two-week holiday simply to gain a foothold as a professional writer, not intending it as a "serious novel" (in books published later, it is omitted from the list of his works). (The autobiographical novel The Kindness of Women gives a different, apparently fictional account of her death.) After this profound shock, Ballard began in 1965 to write the stories that became The Atrocity Exhibition, while continuing to produce stories within the science fiction genre.
The Atrocity Exhibition proved controversial (it was the subject of an obscenity trial, and in the United States, publisher Doubleday destroyed almost the entire print run before it was distributed), but it also marked Ballard's breakthrough as a literary writer.
It remains one of his seminal works, and was filmed in 2001.
One chapter of The Atrocity Exhibition is titled "Crash!", and in 1970 Ballard organised an exhibition of crashed cars at the New Arts Laboratory, appropriately called "Crashed Cars". The crashed vehicles were displayed without commentary, inspiring vitriolic responses and vandalism.
In both the story and the art exhibition, Ballard explored the sexual potential of car crashes, a preoccupation which culminated in the novel Crash in 1973.
The main character of Crash is called James Ballard and lives in Shepperton (though other biographical details do not match the writer), and curiosity about the relationship between the character and his author gained fuel when Ballard suffered a serious automobile accident shortly after completing the novel. Regardless of real-life basis, Crash proved just as controversial as The Atrocity Exhibition, especially when it was later filmed by David Cronenberg.
Although Ballard continued to write throughout the seventies and eighties, his breakthrough into the mainstream came only with Empire of the Sun, based on his years in Shanghai and the Lunghua internment camp. Empire of the Sun was filmed by Steven Spielberg in 1987, starring a young Christian Bale as Jim (Ballard).
His last book was his autobiography Miracles Of Life, written after he was diagnosed with terminal prostate cancer (which metastasised to his spine and ribs) in June 2006. His most celebrated novel in this regard is Crash, in which cars symbolise the mechanisation of the world and man's capacity to destroy himself with the technology he creates; 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 disturbing novel was turned into a controversial – and likewise disturbing – cerebral film by David Cronenberg.
Particularly revered among Ballard's admirers is his short story collection Vermilion Sands, 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. Many of his earliest published works in the 1950s and 1960s were short stories.
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. As Martin Amis has written: "Ballard is quite unlike anyone else; indeed, he seems to address a different - a disused - part of the reader's brain." Because of this tendency to upset readers in order to enlighten them, Ballard does not enjoy a mass-market following, but he is recognised by critics as one of the UK's most prominent writers.
In the early 1970s, Bill Butler, a bookseller in Brighton, was prosecuted under United Kingdom obscenity laws for selling this pamphlet.
According to Brian McHale, The Atrocity Exhibition is an essentially post-modern text operating with sci-fi topoi.
Early magazine printing of one of the tales eventually included in The Atrocity Exhibition (1969).
In Simulacra and Simulation, Jean Baudrillard hailed Crash as the first great novel of the universe of simulation.
Lee Killough directly cites his 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.
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 groups. Examples include albums such as Metamatic by John Foxx, various songs by Joy Division (most famously "The Atrocity Exhibition" from Closer), the song "Down in the Park" by Gary Numan and "Warm Leatherette" by The Normal.
Songwriters Trevor Horn and Bruce Woolley credit Ballard's story, "The Sound-Sweep," with inspiring The Buggles' hit, "Video Killed the Radio Star", and 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 earlier recording of Ballard speaking in an interview is sampled in the Manic Street Preachers' song 'Mausoleum' from the 1994 album The Holy Bible. The Jawbox song "Motorist" is also heavily influenced by the Ballard novels, Crash and Concrete Island.
On their PXR5 album, the British psychedelic rock band Hawkwind included the song "High Rise", inspired by both the novel of the same name, and by the short story "The Man on the 99th Floor".
The 2002 album Bitterness, Spite, Rage & Scorn by British garage rock band Dan Melchior's Broke Revue includes the song "Me and JG Ballard", a narrative about Melchior and Ballard (both residents of Shepperton, UK) unknowingly mirroring each others actions ("Me and JG Ballard, we walk down different streets/Going to the supermarket for something to eat/JG Ballard gets there first, buys some frozen peas/They were the last packet and there’s none there left for me").
UK Dubstep pioneer Kode9, founder of the influential Hyperdub label, cites Ballard's fiction as a main musical influence as well.
The 2007 album by the British 'new rave' act the Klaxons takes its name from Ballard's collection of short stories Myths of the Near Future.
Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke posted extracts from Ballard's anti-consumerist novel Kingdom Come on the band's blog, Dead Air Space, in the months leading up to the release of their 2007 album, In Rainbows.
Andrew Eldritch, frontman of rock group The Sisters of Mercy has posted his favourite works of Ballard on his site, which contains Crash, The Atrocity Exhibition, High Rise, Low-Flying Aircraft, The Unlimited Dream Company and Myths Of The Near Future.
(Crash and Burn and Doktor Jeep).
The opening song title of Madonna's Ray of Light album, "Drowned World/Substitute for Love" (and the Drowned World tour title) is said to be inspired by British author J.G.