JG Ballard's autobiography excerpt and sad news of cancer

The Times ran an excerpt of surrealist science fiction author JG Ballard's forthcoming autobiography, Miracles Of Life. Ballard, my favorite living novelist, wrote such mindbending books as Crash, Concrete Island, and Cocaine Nights. His boyhood in a Japanese internment camp in Shanghai became the book, and movie, Empire of the Sun. Accompanying the excerpt from the new autobiography is a brief profile of Ballard that publicly reveals for the first time that he has advanced prostate cancer. I'm very saddened by this news and wish him comfort. From the interview:

Ballard is courteous and genial in a slightly donnish way. At 77, he takes his time assembling his thoughts, but they remain unflinching and provocative, expressed with the verbal tics of his colonial background. But time, the malleable stuff of his science fiction, is running out. After being diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer in 2006, he sat down at his electric typewriter – “The computer age came too late for me” – and rapidly wrote his autobiography.

It is a remarkable story, told modestly and with great eloquence. If Ballard’s Shanghai years seemed like a fantasy to him, his subsequent life reads like even stranger fiction. His agenda to pin down reality led him to cut up corpses as a medical student and to provoke uproar by speculating on the links between sex and smashed cars in his novel Crash.

Link to interview with Ballard, Link to Miracles Of Life excerpt, Link to buy JG Ballard books, Link to pre-order Miracles Of Life (via Ballardian, thanks Mark Dery!)

[#1 posted by Jeff , January 21, 2008 10:45 AM]

This is sad news. You just want talent like his to keep going forever. :(

[#2 posted by mindysan33 , January 21, 2008 10:56 AM]

Coming not long after the news of Pratchett, this really makes me very sad. These are two of my favorite writers. I love his books. :-( I am looking forward to his autobio, though. I wonder if it will be available state side (I had to order his last from GB).

Thanks for the links.

Mindysan

[#3 posted by Mafoo , January 21, 2008 12:23 PM]

Very sad indeed. I found this very twisted and beautiful 1971 film on YouTube about Ballard's Crash, made before the novel, when it was just a short story from The Atrocity Exhibition. It features Ballard himself!

It's here on my blog:
http://mattmarksmusic.blogspot.com/2008/01/jg-ballard-autobiography-and.html

[#4 posted by gretagretchen , January 21, 2008 1:06 PM]

Yes sad news indeed. Ballard is my favorite author.

[#5 posted by charliekkendo , January 22, 2008 6:39 AM]

Very sad to hear this! You'll be happy to know that I just started reading Ballard. I've started with 1978's "The Best Short Stories Of."