RIP, JG Ballard
Jay sez, "After some rumors on twitter, Michael Moorcock and BBC confirmed the death of author J.G. Ballard.
Sad stuff - but he needs to be noted."
Cult author JG Ballard dead at 78 (Thanks, Jay!)The author JG Ballard, famed for novels such as Crash and Empire of the Sun, has died aged 78 after a long illness.
His agent Margaret Hanbury said the author had been ill "for several years" and had died on Sunday morning.
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For a second there, I misread that, and thought that Moorcock was dead, which would have saddened me. Can't say I've ever heard of Ballard, though I think I might have seen the Empire of the Sun movie when younger.
A great author. I read some of his works when I was, perhaps, a bit too young for the material. Influential for me to say the least. It is authors such as J.G. Ballard that you remember over time, when others have been forgotten.
Daemon: you may not have heard of Ballard, but believe me, he's at least as important to the development of the SF genre as Philip K. Dick.
(You've heard of Dick. Right?)
Amusingly, I remember having an argument with a SF hating friend about the SF-ness of Ballard (whom he loved.)
Anyhoo point is RIP, JG. I came to you a bit late because I read and saw Empire of the Sun as a young kid (loved) then made the mistake of reading some of his more adult material, which put me off for years as it was such a bad experience for me at the time.
Standing on the edge of a drained swimming pool at an abandoned hotel on the edge of the desert in Tozeur in Tunisia a year ago while working on a film project and having just finished reading his autobiography, I planned to send Ballard a letter telling him how much I'd enjoyed his stuff over the years since first reading him in about 1975 - but I never got round to it.
"Standing on the edge of a drained swimming pool at an abandoned hotel on the edge of the desert in Tozeur in Tunisia..."
A perfect opening line for a JG Ballard story.
I'm really sad to hear that JG Ballard is dead. I guess he wasn't as well known as other Sci-Fi authors but he wrote some seriously mind-blowing fiction. 'Myths Of The Near Future' is a great collection, especially the title story. I was still thinking about it weeks after I read it.
It may help younger audiences to note that it was the Dark Knight himself Christian Bale who plays the young JG Ballard in Empire of the Sun.
Recently I was house sitting in SoCal at the type of gated community featured in 'Running wild'. A near continuous anxiety of youth revolt permeated my waking consciousness.
I became fascinated with George W. Bush and his constructed prep pedigree during the 2000 US election. After the Supreme Court decision in his favor, I became keenly aware of how appropos it would be to have a 24/7 live video feed of his every activity, with lower third printout of vital stats and biochemical analysis in real time. The idea was presaged by Ballrds invention of a Reagan TV channel, broadcasting the comatose presidents inert form with stats, the highest rated show in the history of the medium.
'Crash' for me was a revelation, but more so a challenge. I felt there were deep truths to be deciphered concerning futurity. More apt than any ethics lecture. But ambiguous. The 'Vaughn' in all of us.
Given birth to the 'Ballardian' worldview is immortalizing. For me, however, it's a bit too harsh & incomplete. Predicting Reality TV is one thing. But somehow missing the impact of Susan Boyle.
I'd really like to see his mind rebooted for the 21st century.
"I would sum up my fear about the future in one word: boring." - JG Ballard, interview in Re/Search no. 8/9 (1984)
I'm quite astounded by the number of people who say they haven't heard of Ballard. I consider myself pretty clueless but his name has popped up so many times throughout my reading life that I couldn't have avoided him if I'd tried.
He wrote some of my favorite books, and I even enjoyed the movie version of Crash. I wish they'd made a movie of High Rise back in the 70s when it would have worked. RIP.
Empire of the Sun is singlehandedly responsible for taking my mind off the fact that I was in danger of failing 8th Grade math at the time... RIP, JG Ballard.
SF? Fantasy? Futurist. Prophet? Ballard defies classification. However, I like to think of him as Kafka with a British accent
It must have been an amazing experience for Ballard to witness the modern world more and more resembling his fiction. So...no new Ballard novel to look forward to. How sad.
sniff.
FWIW over the years I became more impressed with Ballard than Dick.
Crash was the only fiction I recall which actually made me queasy. oh perhaps some of the surgery in Gravity's Brainbow.
I just finished reading Crash a week ago, such a brilliant and unique novel. Such a shame he's passed away
A recent US television series on The History Channel -LIFE AFTER PEOPLE - made me think that only Mr. Ballard and possibly the young American writer David Foster Wallace -- now also sadly having left us -- might be able to explain it to a 'dimbulb' such as myself. In LIFE AFTER we are treated to what will happen to the monuments of our civilization once we've all disappeared. The only question that the series seems unwilling to reply to is, ah, what became of us? Would have seemed a rather important detail. But no, that's glossed over. Ballard would have been able to tell us where we'd gone. And he'd have done it in such a way that, had we the wit to listen, we might have prevented it.
Humorous aside, possibly; I've been watching the series and shopping malls are never mentioned.
No wonder they often seem to have become more real than their patrons. KINGDOM COME indeed.
What a loss to the world of books. An online tribute where fans can leave memories for Mr Ballard has been created at http://www.lastingtribute.co.uk/tribute/ballard/3063355
I first read, I think it was in the summer of '64 the short story "The Garden of Time". It really stuck me , I can still feel the summer heat of that moment, the old rooming house , the busy street from my window. I am still standing there in the brambled belladonna garden with the two stone statues, the single rose, and the mob smashing the estate.
After that his fiction changed very strangely. "New Wave" had come.
Tony Hillerman
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Arthur C. Clarke
David Foster Wallace
Paula Gunn Allen
Nuala O'Faolain
Robert Lynn Asprin
Michael Crichtonw
Patrick McGoohan
Philip Jose Farmer
Thomas M. Disch
J.G Ballard
The hits keep coming. Names I have lived with. All in the garden of time now.
If you didn't hear of him, don't worry about it. He probably never heard of you either.