Photo courtesy of Steve Double.

JEANNETTE BAXTER, writer/academic

The KINDNESS OF JG BALLARD

I was fortunate enough to interview JG Ballard on a couple of occasions. What struck me most about our exchanges — and this is something I am truly grateful for — was the amount of time and effort which he’d clearly put into them. A day or so after faxing through my lists of questions, I would receive page upon page of incisive, provocative and witty comment. This would then be followed by a fat package in the post: Ballard’s original type-script (he diligently sent it as ‘backup’). To receive these original sheets was a real thrill because I could actually touch the editing process: alternative words and phrases had been pressed by hand into clumps of tippex (what might these chalky lumps conceal?). Even when, as he revealed so honestly in our final piece of correspondence, time was no longer showing itself to be his ally, JG Ballard remained enormously generous with the time he had left. Witty, generous, encouraging and kind: that’s how I remember JG Ballard.

MIKE BONSALL, writer/JGB archivist

At first sight Ballard perfectly fulfilled Flaubert’s dictum: ‘Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work.’ Sometimes his upper-class veneer felt more like a disguise, but mostly I think it was a kind of armour.

As Ballard said in his beautifully open and honest autobiography Miracles of Life: ‘I was happy with the prospect of becoming a psychiatrist, and knew that I already had my first patient — myself.’ When he left Cambridge though, he didn’t fail to study psychiatry, he went on to invent a new branch of it.

The complete dislocation of his comfortable life as a child in Shanghai led to his imagining the destruction of the earth in his first ‘disaster’ novels, such as the beautiful, haunting The Drowned World.

The death of his wife at a tragically early age redoubled his feeling that the world was without meaning. His cry of rage found form in the condensed novels that make up The Atrocity Exhibition and the novel Crash, which contain some of the most coruscating, inventive prose since William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch. This work, and some would argue, the much more popular Empire of the Sun, put Ballard in the top rank of British writers in the late twentieth century.

Ballard was more than a writer, he was a scientist of the human spirit. He was Kali-like in his propensity to destroy his characters (and with them possibly all humankind). Confusingly, he was also Kali-like in being a ‘nurturing mother’ figure, enjoying enormously bringing up his children and, as his long-time friend Michael Moorcock revealed, being happy to lend a friend his last hundred pounds.

Ballard was kind enough to comment on my article about his early years as assistant editor of the scientific magazine, Chemistry & Industry, saying: ‘I’m very impressed by the high level of your detective work, even if it does make me feel a little like a deep-level spy being slowly exposed to daylight.’ Before going on to completely refute my arguments with a few well-chosen sentences. All done with such kindness and insight that I was left with a smile rather than a frown.

In his short stories Ballard’s intelligence, wit and inventiveness rivalled that of Jorge Luis Borges, as in the marvellous ‘The Index’, which consists entirely of the index of a book which may never have existed, written about a mysterious messianic figure who may himself never have existed.

In his later novels, Ballard became more openly satirical, imagining, for example, a half-hearted and hilarious revolt of the middle classes of Chelsea in Millennium People.

All too aware of the grim nature of the human condition, Ballard had the courage not only to look the frightening truth in the eye, he even embraced it. In doing so he turned catastrophe into something transcendent.

Claire Walsh’s moving tribute to him gives us a glimpse behind Ballard’s armour: as well as a great intellect, he had a great heart. He was a quiet, kindly, even shy, man who had seen too much inhumanity and desperately wanted to make sense of it. Our society is the less for his passing.

..:: Previously on Ballardian:
+ The Real Concrete Island?
+ J.G. Ballard’s Experiment in Chemical Living
+ Another Atrocity? A ‘New’ Work by J.G. Ballard

MARK FISHER, writer/theorist

THE ASSASSINATION OF J.G. BALLARD

They wanted to kill Ballard again, but this time in a way that made sense. The British know how best to kill something, softly. Assimilation is sometimes the most effective kind of assassination.

“You say these constitute an assassination weapon?” So here they come again — all the familiar profiles, all the old routines. All that over-rehearsed musing about the supposed contrast between Ballard’s writing and his lifestyle and persona. All that central London cognoscenti condescension: he lived in Shepperton, he wore a tie and drank gin and yet he could come up with this — imagine that. As if it isn’t obvious that English suburbs are seething with surrealism. As if you could think for a minute that The Drowned World or The Atrocity Exhibition were written by anyone wearing jeans. Ballard mapped another America, another 1960s, one beyond the pleasure principle of rock n roll and its paraphernalia. (That was one of the reasons that Ballard should have been so integral to postpunk’s unlearning of r and r and to electro’s pursuit of a colder mechano-erotics outside rock‘s passional regime.) As if Ballard’s works could be mistaken as anything other than the work of a bourgeois — Ballard’s was to have unashamedly fixated on the psychopathologies of his class (so no Keith Talents here, only a litany of deranged professionals), a class which he had a special insight into because he was always semi-detached from it.

You: Coma: Princess Diana Assessing cultural figures by their alleged influence, their legacy, is an egregious postmodern tic — as if it reflected any merit to have inspired the Klaxons. Ballard is important precisely because it is completely unimaginable that any equivalent of his work could emerge from current conditions. As he made clear in his 1989 annotations to his most important work, The Atrocity Exhibition, he was a metapsychologist of the Pop age, his sensibility unsuited to the era of Reality, with its flattening fusion of celebrity and the hyper-banal. “A unique collision of private and public fantasy took place in the 1960s, and may have to wait some years to be repeated, if ever. The public dream of Hollywood for the first time merged with the private imagination of the hyper-stimulated TV viewer. People have sometimes asked me to do a follow-up to The Atrocity Exhibition, but our perception of the famous has changed — I can’t imagine writing about Meryl Streep or Princess Di, and Margaret Thatcher’s undoubted mystery seems to reflect design faults in her own self-constructed persona. One can mechanically spin sexual fantasies around all three, but the imagination soon flags. Unlike [Elizabeth] Taylor, they radiate no light. … A kind of banalisation of celebrity has occurred: we are now offered an instant, ready-to-mix fame as nutritious as packet soup.” Ballard’s 60s were inaugurated by the Kennedy assassination. The founding event of the media environment we live in now, in which consensual sentimentality has long since occluded Ballard’s death of affect, was Princess Diana’s car crash death in 1997. In his later novels, Ballard tried to get a grip on this mall-world of Ikea psychosis and shopping channel charismatics, but they never produced the same spinal charge as his encounters with the 60s telecinematic arcades presided over by Elizabeth Taylor and Ronald Reagan. Ballard’s most probing contributions in later years came in interviews and articles rather than in the novels: it was here that he identified retail parks and anonymous non-places as the authentic landscape of the twenty-first century, but he was not able to poeticise this hyper-banal terrain in the same way that he mythologised the brutalist concourses and high rises of the 60s and 70s.

A Pulp Modernist Magus What better way to destroy something than send in Martin Amis to praise it? Ballard was never a ‘good writer’ in the way that Amis and his admirers and cronies in urbane Brit lit, with their handcrafted sentences, their well-drawn characters, their concerned social commentary, were. The significance of The Atrocity Exhibition was to have obsolesced this machinery of mediocrity, which he eviscerated in his 1964 profile of Burroughs. “To use the stylistic conventions of the traditional oral novel — the sequential narrative, characters ‘in the round’, consecutive events, balloons of dialogue attached to ‘he said’ and ‘she said’ — is to perpetuate a set of conventions ideally suited to a period of great adventures in the Conradian mode, or to an overformalized Jamesian society, but now valuable for little more than the bedtime story and the fable.” But Ballard’s strategy in his best works was also opposed to that of another of his admirers and appropriators, Iain Sinclair. Whereas Sinclair transforms popcultural material into something opaque, obscure and hermetic, Ballard innovated a kind of pulp modernism in which the techniques of high modernism and the riffs of popular fiction intensified one another, avoiding both high cultural obscurantism and middlebrow populism. Ballard understood that collage was the great 20th century artform and that the mediatized unconscious was a collage artist. Where are his 21st century inheritors, those who can use the fiction-kits Ballard assembled in the 60s as diagrams and blueprints for a new kind of fiction?

..:: Previously on Ballardian:
+ Fantasy Kits: Steven Meisel’s State of Emergency

OWEN HATHERLEY, writer/critic

It’s enormously difficult to write about Ballard after his death, so inextricably formed have so many of us been by his peculiar obsessions. We can all tell similar stories — we all discovered him as teenagers, we all had our perceptions permanently warped by it. But what made this warping so effective is that Ballard took those parts of modern life – particularly our built environment — which we habitually don’t think about, and forced us to recognise how enormously strange they actually are. All those things ignored or excoriated as eyesores or hidden behind privet hedges, looked at anew – he was one of the 20th century’s finest deployers of what Viktor Shklovsky called ‘making strange’, the technique of estranging the mundane.

This is why it’s so odd to read him described as a ‘dystopian writer’, as many of the obituaries have. Rather, he celebrated the liberatory potentials of the multi-storey carpark, the tower block, the hotel strip on the Riviera, the moderne house on the outer reaches of Metroland with its surrealist interior. But the liberation he saw in them was not, contrary to the promises of their modernist creators, that they presaged a new, rational kind of man, but rather that they promised a new kind of glorious irrationality. In all of these ‘dystopias’, whether the Triassic London of The Drowned World or the primal penthouse of High-Rise, his protagonists always follow the logic of these places to their illogical conclusions out of choice, not because it is imposed upon them. When in the ’80s anathemas were pronounced on tower blocks, he stated his irreconcilable disdain for Postmodernist architecture, for any retreat from the new world.

In the last few years you could already see a certain tussle over Ballard, with some wanting to claim him as a realist novelist, others as an avant-gardist. I prefer to see him as an explorer of architectural space practically without rival, the space of Modernism in all its ambiguity, its promises and failures. We have to be vigilant against letting Ballard be assimilated into the Georgiana and Victoriana of Hampstead. His spirit resides in the vast glass atrium of the Heathrow Hilton, in the unreadable contours of a Watford car park, amid the overgrown creepers of the Barbican, in the sun-baked concrete of Brasilia, in the exploded landscapes of the New Brutalism, and in the the balconies of the Park Lane Hilton transmuted into the gill-slits of the dead actress Elizabeth Taylor.

MIKE HOLLIDAY, writer/JGB archivist

One of my favourite Ballard quotes comes from an interview a few years ago, when Hans Ulrich Obrist asked him whether ambiguity was a central theme in his writings. ‘I hope everything I have written is ambiguous,’ responded Ballard, ‘reflecting the paradoxical faces that make up human nature.’ To me, this is quintessential Ballard, and shows how his writings work as surreal explorations of our divided selves, from Kerans’ journey South to death and fulfilment at the end of The Drowned World, through the psychopathic hymn/cautionary tale of Crash, and ending with the consumers who pray before the very goods that are their hearts’ desires in Kingdom Come. Promise and threat, the rational and the irrational, the conscious and the unconscious, all coexist together, and meaning has to found in the gaps, in the angles, and in the strange linkages that our imaginations perceive. I think it also helps explain the apparent contradiction between Jim Ballard, the family man in Shepperton, and J.G. Ballard — ‘probably a complete fiction, my greatest creation’, as he once described his authorial self.

I’ve been reading Ballard for over four decades, thanks to a school teacher who set a science fiction reading list which included — along with Wyndham, Clarke, and Asimov — the Amis & Conquest ‘Spectrum’ anthologies. After I’d located one of these at the local library, the librarian stamped the book and handed it back with the comment ‘The Voices of Time is very good’. On reading that story, I had to agree — at 14, I found it rather bizarre yet somehow strangely inspiring, though I now suspect that I understood little of what I had read. My enthusiasm for Ballard continued after my interest in SF disappeared during the 1970s, but it’s only in the last few years that I’ve come to understand how sui generis he was as a writer, and how completely irreplaceable.

…:: Previously on Ballardian:
+ Three Levels of Reality: J.G. Ballard’s ‘Court Circular’
+ Ballard and the Vicissitudes of Time
+ A Home and a Grave
+ Angry Old Men: Michael Moorcock on J.G. Ballard

NINA POWER, writer/academic

I believe in the right to confuse middle England by being autobiographical,
Thus disconcerting Mail readers who might like Empire of the Sun but would take to the streets to prevent Crash being screened in cinemas, even though both films were shot in the wrong places.

I believe in not making my characters merely bourgeois.
I believe in the end of the world
But I also believe in boredom.

I believe in the fictional importance of scientific journals.
I believe in the cultural revolution of the middle classes, even if they’ll never have the guts to blow up the NFT.
I believe in never getting out of the car.

I believe in your obsessions. I believe that the inexistence of the universe means that JG Ballard is not, nor ever will be, dead.

..:: More Ballardosphere tributes:
+ Part 1: Ben Noys, Chris Nakashima-Brown & Mark Dery
+ Part 2: Michael Moorcock
+ Part 3: Tim Chapman, Rick McGrath, Solveig Nordlund, Dan O’Hara, Dominika Oramus, Rick Poynor, David Pringle, Simon Sellars, Supervert and V. Vale

Photo by Simon Durrant.

+ Share your tributes and memories of JGB.

TIM CHAPMAN, WRITER

I first read JG Ballard when I was 12 or so, after picking up Crash (with that lurid orange Chris Foss cover) at a village hall jumble sale. I occasionally wonder to what degree this might have affected my development.

Over the next decade or so, I picked up a few other titles, but none hit me with quite the same force. I just wasn’t struck by that intensity, that outrageous lucidity, which radiated from that battered paperback. But I gradually started to appreciate the subtler qualities of the writing, the humour, and the semi-detached perception. Gradually, his books started to just make sense to me. By the time I was living in a tiny flat in the dullest part of south London, barely writing a first novel and trying to find that elusive first job in journalism, I was a devotee.

So sometime round autumn 1996, I was thinking Ballardian thoughts as I trundled through the South Croydon wastelands towards an interview at some obscure trade journal. At the interview, the editor noted that, according to my desperately padded CV, I was working on a novel. ‘Oh yeah,’ he said. ‘JG Ballard used to work here.’ I got the job.

That’s basically my Ballardian claim to fame — I used to do JG Ballard’s old job at Chemistry & Industry. Well, more or less — he was deputy editor, a role that didn’t exist in my time, while I was production assistant and reporter. The magazine was still at the same premises on Belgrave Square, surrounded by the same pubs and curved balconies of concrete hotels, and my desk was certainly old enough to pre-date the 1950s. I felt a certain kinship.

The one time I met the man himself was in February 1998 at the ICA, where he was talking about movies with David Leland. Afterwards, Ballard stayed on stage to chat with anyone who wanted to jump up and say hello, even as the ICA staff tried to clear the room for the next event. I said I was doing his old job and showed him my business card. He briefly reminisced about his own time there, and seemed genuinely pleased and interested to hear how things were going, some four decades after.

My plan to follow in his footsteps by rapidly finishing an acclaimed novel or two, then quitting work to write in creative seclusion, never quite worked out. But he remained an inspiration, in work and life. That long-unfinished first novel definitely bears his influence (along with Norman Mailer, another recent loss), though possibly not in ways detectable to anyone else. As an intensely visual writer, he’s also a constant presence when I’m out taking photographs. Whether in stories or pictures, that influence comes from his unique way of seeing — that forensic examination of the landscapes of the late 20th century, the disasters and psychopathologies, the art and the technology. That medically-trained analysis of the nature of the catastrophe, and the acceptance of it all.

Ballard’s also proved a near-infallible guide to a parallel world of literature (though, personally, I still can’t be bothered with Self or Amis Jr). Any book I might find while scavenging secondhand shops which carries an adulatory blurb from the man gets added to the pile. Equally, I’ve found various writers (from Nathanael West to John Gray) by other routes and been greatly impressed by them, only later finding that they’re also favourites of Ballard’s. And of course you could build a library out of the many other writers, artists, musicians and film-makers who’ve acknowledged their deep debts to the man.

Unlike many of the other folk adding their tributes here, I’m not a literary critic or academic (nor, to be honest, would I wish to be). I’m a fan, though I wish there was another word for that. And through my developing fascination with the man’s work, I’ve been privileged to meet, drink, and make friends with a whole bunch of fantastically creative and intelligent people, of all ages and professions, from as near as Sheffield to as far as Australia, who’ve all been equally enthused in their own idiosyncratic ways.

Apart from the infinitely explorable mass of his writing, I think maybe that’s the legacy of JG Ballard — the dispersed generations of people who might call themselves, in whatever sense, Ballardians. The readers for whom his writing and his vision just made sense. The saddest realisation is that there’ll be no more.

..:: Previously on Ballardian:
+ ‘When in doubt, quote Ballard’: An interview with Iain Sinclair

RICK McGRATH, WRITER & JGB ARCHIVIST

JG Ballard was inexplicably kind to me, even though I’ve long thought he perceived me in a sort of Mr Burns & Homer Simpson way, never really recognizing this perhaps mad chap from Toronto who insists on breaking the peace with odd correspondence. I first wrote JG in 2001, having finally tracked down his address, with questions about my copy of the Doubleday Atrocity Exhibition. His response, on two postcards, included the phrase “thought police”, and I was hooked on these phonics, and in the hope of receiving more sayings from the seer I tended to whisk off letters until the fall of 2008, when I received my last postcard on November 22, the same day as Kennedy was killed.

During the intervening years JG conversed on a wide range of topics, such as the production of ice wine in Ontario, my take on Kingdom Come from an advertising perspective, new information on the “Project for a New Novel”, the seven CBC plays of his short stories, and, perhaps most interestingly, about my trip to Shanghai in 2007 to visit his Amherst Avenue house and Lunghua camp home. He was both funny and instructive in his advice, suggesting he hoped “it was a McDonald’s or KFC” to my news that the Amherst mansion had been turned into a restaurant, and frugally advising I take a bus rather than a cab the seven miles from the house to Lunghua. One of his more charming gestures was to draw me a plan of the main floor of Amherst Avenue. Granted, he had once returned to view it in 1991, but I’m sure he did this plan from childhood memory, and it was not surprising when I arrived and wandered through the place to find his layout correct not only in position but in proportion. He was keenly interested in the pictures I sent him and probably less excited about my “report”, which he simply deemed “interesting”, no doubt because it was rife with ballardian figures of speech. The photos he studied “like a deranged estate agent”, and after pointing out the changes made to the original admitted to finally being relieved that the past had gone, that these cyphers of yesterday were now only preserved in his and a few other memories.

The trip to Shanghai had as strong an impact on me as reading, say, The Drowned World for the first time. It gave a real location to so much of the imagined landscapes, a focal point for the big bang of imagination that was to follow. It was almost voyeuristic to stand in JG’s childhood bedroom and try to imagine a well-dressed kid playing alone, but I soon discovered the temporal flux of Empire was located in the old untouched stairwells, a place where it was very easy to descend into memory and merge into Ballard’s formative past.

The child that became the man is still in a few memories. In 2008 I talked with fellow Lunghua child internee Irene Duguid Kilpatrick, and she still firmly remembers “young Jimmy” running with his gang of boys, and telling “outrageous stories” about “flying with the Japanese pilots” at nearby Lunghua Airport. In essence, she was outlining Ballard’s modus operandi: blend a great imagination with a proclivity to shock. Sound like a plan? Shanghai is where JG learned to love being a storyteller, and that child’s desire – and attention-compelling technique — stayed with him his entire career.

Tomorrow I go down to Toronto’s Gardiner Expressway, where Cronenberg shot the moving car scenes in Crash. I’ll have a flask of scotch with me, and I’ll drink a wee dram to the pleasure and influence JG has on my life. Thanks, kind man. Thanks for everything.

..:: Previously on Ballardian:
+ ‘Like Alice in Wonderland’: Solveig Nordlund on J.G. Ballard
+ Rick McGrath’s Letter from Barcelona: The Exquisite Corpse, An Autopsy of the New Millennium
+ Review: Grave New World
+ It’s an Ad, Ad, Ad World
+ ‘Woefully Underconceptualised’: Rick McGrath on J.G. Ballard’s Cover Art

SOLVEIG NORDLUND, director of Aparelho Voador a Baixa Altitude (based on JGB’s ‘Low-Flying Aircraft’)

I got the news about Jim’s death from a radio journalist who wanted me to comment on the loss. Loss? I have an excerpt of my interview with Jim on YouTube. During the night and the following day comments didn’t stop dropping in: RIP JGB, and, as an echo, RIP JGB.

It was like Voices of Time, an anonymous collective mourning in cyberspace.

Loss? JGB and his work is an enormous gift that will live forever.

Thank You, JGB

..:: Previously on Ballardian:
+ ‘Like Alice in Wonderland’: Solveig Nordlund on J.G. Ballard

DAN O’HARA, ACADEMIC/TRANSLATOR

I first read Ballard’s short stories when I was 8 or 9, an age young enough to care about the story alone, but too young to care about the author. Only later, perhaps when I was in my twenties, did I re-read Ballard with an uncanny sensation of recognition: these worlds, I knew; I had met these characters before. But then maybe that sense of recognition is common to all of Ballard’s readers, whether they’ve read him before or not. His fictions are universal, and his characteristic landscapes and motifs speak directly to an atavistic, Jungian collective unconscious.

So often does he describe an ethereal, transcendental aspect of the everyday world, demonstrating a kind of anarchic faith in the abstract, that there’s a thrilling sense of vicarious exploration in reading his stories; yet it’s a very specific exploration not into the unknown but into a structured, abstract world which exists beyond human perception. Perhaps Martin Amis put it best when he said that Ballard “seems to address a different — a disused — part of the reader’s brain”. In stories such as ‘The Terminal Beach’ or ‘The Overloaded Man’, Ballard comes closer to a coherent and original literary-philosophical statement than any English writer since Coleridge.

Lately, I’ve found that what keeps me reading Ballard is his style, that most ephemeral of all writerly qualities. I do not believe that he will find posterity solely for his ideas, though he has dissected the political, social, and psycho(patho)logical ambiguities of the West with more imagination than we deserve, and with more acuity than any other English novelist. I believe that we will come to value his consummate control of language, rather than his cathexis of car-crashes, or his ironic praise of shopping malls and airports as secular cathedrals. When automobiles and suburbs and all the tawdry grey concrete sprawl of the 20th and 21st centuries are forgotten, we will still read Ballard for his translucent, crystalline prose.

..:: Previously on Ballardian:
+ ‘Le passé composé de J. G. Ballard’: JGB on Empire of the Sun
+ ‘Content in their little prisons’: J.G. Ballard on ‘The Towers’
+ ‘Violence without end’: An Interview with J.G. Ballard
+ ‘I really would not want to fuck George W. Bush!’: A Conversation with J.G. Ballard
+ ‘Der Visionär des Phantastischen’: An Interview with J.G. Ballard
+ ‘It would be a mistake to write about the future’: J.G. Ballard in Conversation with Jörg Krichbaum and Rein A. Zondergeld
+ Munich Round-Up: Interview with J.G. Ballard
+ ‘You are Hochhaus!’: Ballard in Berlin

DOMINIKA ORAMUS, ACADEMIC

For many years now in Poland J.G. Ballard has been considered one of the most important contemporary British writers. It is significant that his texts started to be translated and published in this country in the days of communism, well before the world-wide success of Empire of the Sun. His early stories were published in science fiction magazines, and he made his name as an author of complex and beautiful studies of inner space. His texts that were translated into Polish in the late 1970s and early 1980s drew their inspiration from surrealism, and were full of dense similes and allusions to visual art. The first of his books to be published in Poland, a short story collection prepared by his translators and entitled Ogród czasu (“Garden of Time”), was very well received. For Polish readers Ballard became synonymous with the literary avant-garde and psychoanalysis-inspired phantasmagorias. He was also recognized as a writer for having elevated the disaster story tradition to the level of great art. When Empire of the Sun (both the novel and the movie) appeared, readers and the critics considered this war epic to reveal the “sources” of Ballard’s predilection for catastrophes.

In the early 1990s, after the fall of the “iron curtain”, most of his works were translated into Polish and his position as a writer of contemporary classics was established for good. Yet he was primarily considered a war novelist and an autobiographical writer, an opinion which is much too narrow. Only in recent years – following David Cronenberg’s film version of Crash, and with growing interest in Jean Baudrillard’s theories in Polish Academia — were Ballard’s other texts re-read and re-considered. The first studies of Ballard’s oeuvre have now been published and he is very popular today with both undergraduate and postgraduate students interested in mediascape and the culture of simulacra. J.G. Ballard, together with Philip K. Dick and William Gibson, are the most important English-language science fiction writers of the twentieth century.

..:: Previously on Ballardian:
+ Grave New World: Introduction

RICK POYNOR, AUTHOR & CULTURAL CRITIC

Like so many other Ballard admirers, I found him as a teenager. The Disaster Area came first and then, two or three volumes later, The Atrocity Exhibition, a book rigged for maximum mental havoc, like a stainless steel mind trap. I was obsessed with the surrealists then (still am) and here was a novelist citing Ernst’s Robing of the Bride, Tanguy’s Indefinite Divisibility, Dalí’s Impressions of Africa, as though the reader would, naturally enough, know these pictures already. The library hardback had a bizarre Dalí drawer-woman on the cover. I was half visual, half literary, torn between wanting to make images myself and wanting to write, and Ballard was the perfect author, a writer who loved art and wanted to be an artist, a hypnotic stylist who endlessly reverted to a private lexicon of visual themes, reworking them exactly like a painter.

No other contemporary writer has meant as much to me. Books by other novelists might excite for a while only to fade in time, but Ballard’s routines and rhythms, his terminal visions, pitched camp in my head and never moved on. It wasn’t just the luminescence of the writing; it was the example of the man: The violently productive imagination able to operate in the most ordinary domestic setting, transcribing the unthinkable in longhand, while taking care of the kids. The self-exile in suburbia that revealed, more than anything, his unwavering seriousness of purpose. The politely contemptuous distance he maintained from the careerism and managerialism that now dominate the arts. The rejection of honours bestowed by an outmoded system he declined to support. The likeable, almost garrulous good humour that underpinned the lethal accuracy of the social observations, psychological insights and provocations that he spun out to interviewers with effortless wit and style. The way he subverted his own educated virtues of reason, self-control and civic-mindedness with a readiness to pursue an idea to the outer limits, however alarming or offensive, and revel in it: a surrealist to the end. Above all, though, it was his ability to paint the mind’s canvas with ineluctable images of strangeness, disturbance and wonder, his world becoming ours.

..:: Previously on Ballardian:
+ Collapsing Bulkheads: The Covers of Crash

DAVID PRINGLE, WRITER/EDITOR & JGB ARCHIVIST

I interviewed Jim Ballard seven times, each occasion involving a visit to his house in Shepperton, over a period of 21 years, from 1975 to 1996. He was always most welcoming, very affable, and perfectly happy to give hours of his time. He loved talking, I think.

When I and a bunch of other people started Interzone magazine in 1982 he was very supportive — he promptly took out a subscription, and agreed to write us a story (“Memories of the Space Age”). He always renewed his subscription, for the next 22 years, and never failed to write an encouraging note to me on his renewal slip. He was a great supporter of the magazine all round, and gave us a couple of very nice quotes which we used in our publicity. Whenever I pestered him for permission to reprint something of his from an obscure source (“What I Believe,” “Project for a Glossary of the 20th Century,” etc) he always said “yes” and never asked for payment — although of course we did pay him for the original stories he wrote for us.

He was a kindly, generous man — which perhaps not many people realize fully.

I also met him on a number of occasions at publishers’ parties and other events in London. Most memorable, for me, were the launch parties Gollancz gave for Empire of the Sun in 1984, and for The Day of Creation in 1987. The guest-lists of those parties were pretty amazing, and, along with Ballard, I met a host of people there from Kingsley Amis to Kathy Acker. So many gone now — Angela Carter too.

I also met Jim Ballard’s partner Claire Walsh at some of those functions, and at this difficult time I think we should remember her especially: she must have had a nigh-unendurable few months.

It’s a devastating fact that he has gone. I’m surprised the world hasn’t blinked out of existence — like the tree that falls in the forest, how can it carry on without him to observe it (sardonically, of course)?

– David Pringle (writing on Day One of the Post-Ballard Era — a bleaker age)

SIMON SELLARS, WRITER/EDITOR, PUBLISHER BALLARDIAN.COM (This is the full version of a tribute written for the Evening Standard)

J.G. Ballard taught me about hyperreality long before Baudrillard — what is the motorway system in Crash if not the ultimate simulacrum? He taught me how to be ‘punk’, and of the jouissance of well-bred anarchy way before the Pistols — ‘I want to fuck Ronald Reagan’, he wrote, and so did I (I didn’t take him literally). He explained to me the implications of our wraparound media landscape with more daring and less sentimentality than McLuhan — The Atrocity Exhibition remains The Anarchist Cookbook for making dirty bombs in the mind. He demonstrated semiotics and the veiled reality of advertising to me with more verve than even Barthes — look to ‘The Subliminal Man’ for the purest explication. He opened my eyes to our apocalyptic surveillance/reality TV culture with more humour than Virilio — most explosively in ‘The Intensive Care Unit’, the darkest energy at the heart of the sun. He taught me that architecture, if done badly, is not just a machine for living in, it’s a cell block locked up in our connivance — High-Rise is the manifesto for breaking free.

Then he taught me to love the circular boredom of motorways — strength through repetition, a holistic recycling of memory that forms the model for a total program of resistance to capitalism…

…to love/fear malls, gated communities, feeder roads, micro-societies — anywhere that slips between the gaps, with the ambivalent emotion forever playing on the borderzones, crucial to keeping the mind free and agile.

He gave me a philosophy and a worldview that has sustained the darkest times, both internal and external…

…by teaching me to believe in myself and my addled imagination: always preserving the sovereignty of inner space, infinitely more preferable to the governances of madmen.

Thank you, JGB.

..:: Previously on Ballardian:
+ Index of Simon Sellars’s posts

SUPERVERT, PUBLISHER OF BURROUGHS SITE REALITY STUDIO

Given the “false,” “alternate,” and “conceptual” deaths envisioned in his most experimental work, The Atrocity Exhibition, it is difficult to accept the banality of J.G. Ballard’s demise. Biographically, it would have been satisfying to contemplate an alternate Ballard killed in the automobile accident he suffered two weeks after completing the text of Crash. “If I had died,” wrote Ballard in his memoir Miracles of Life, “the accident might well have been judged deliberate, at least on the unconscious level.” Instead, Ballard succumbed to prostate cancer — a sort of kick in the nuts for the writer who, imagining “sexual stimulation by newsreel atrocity films,” blithely described how the films were “shown to both disturbed children and terminal cancer patients with useful results.” Did he remember writing that on the day he received his diagnosis?

Whether Ballard is remembered as a novelist, a visionary, a stylist, or a philosopher (the “sage of Shepperton”), one thing is certain: his anatomist’s gaze was scalpel sharp. Ballard remained lucid even in the difficult art of self-analysis. He recognized, for example, that his era had drastically transformed the role of the writer. “The balance between fiction and reality has changed significantly,” he wrote in the introduction to a French edition of Crash. “We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind… We live inside an enormous novel.” For William Burroughs, the antidote was to “cut word lines.” For Ballard, “the fiction is already there. The writer’s task is to invent the reality.” How so? “He offers the reader the contents of his own head, a set of options and imaginative alternatives.”

Sadly, to contemplate Ballard’s death is to realize that the “options and imaginative alternatives” disappear with him. What new role would he have envisioned for the writer in a world where everyone seems to write — or at least to blog, comment, tweet, and send “text messages?” Would he have offered up a startling insight in interview? Composed one of his brilliant conceptual efforts? One imagines a short story with a title something like “Deleting the Facebook Account of the Last Writer in the World.” The protagonist, named Jim, decides that, in an age in which everybody “writes,” the true writer is he who erases (in much the same spirit as Robert Rauschenberg once created an artwork by erasing a Willem de Kooning drawing). He tries to delete every trace he ever left on the internet. He hunts down the subscribers of Ambit in order to torch their houses and thereby rid the world of every printed magazine containing his name…

But ultimately he discovers that there is one account, such as a Facebook profile, that he cannot delete. It’s bureaucracy. We’ve all run up against such inane dilemmas. “What do you mean I can’t delete myself?” But then, on another level, it’s parable. Ballard may be dead, but we refuse to grant him permission to delete the account he created with literature.

V. VALE, WRITER & FOUNDER OF RE/SEARCH PUBLICATIONS

I particularly hate it when “rebels” die — there are already so few of them/us. Sometimes it seems like virtually everyone you meet these days in the world is a slave to the profit motive/capitalist imperative: “What’s the meaning of life?” “To make money!” J.G. Ballard, and another of my relatively recently deceased role models, W.S. Burroughs, both refused to prostitute their writing, and they both refused to shmooze and “network” merely to further their “careers.” Both had a hatred of bourgeois hypocrisy and phony politeness, while at the same time being deeply polite and courteous, almost to a fault …

But for now, let us think of ways to publicly mourn one of the greatest thinkers and poets of the past century. By some irony, “The Complete Short Stories of J.G. Ballard” is reportedly soon to be published in the United States, complete with two additional stories not included in the U.K. edition. Short stories, more than novels, may appropriately suit the trend of the increasingly shorter attention span of the human populace, who demand more flash ads, tiny videos and music quotations as they read their two-minute, two-page articles on the Internet. I suggest that for the next month (or year), readers shut out everything else and read ONLY J.G. Ballard novels, short stories, essays, interviews and reviews. Your mind, language, and outlook are guaranteed to be permanently altered…

“Death always presents the face of surprised recognition,” wrote William S. Burroughs. He also advised all of us to “Stay out of hospitals,” and “Avoid Doctors.” Well, even though I had been concerned about J.G. Ballard’s health after hearing two years ago that he had been diagnosed with “advanced” prostate cancer, I still felt a kind of unthinking complacency mixed with my concern: “Almost every humane male has prostate cancer when he dies; it acts very slowly and can take decades to kill a man.” To be honest, having seen him recently in October 2008, I really didn’t think he would die THIS SOON. And when I found out he had died — I had arrived home from a 9-hour bus trip today to hear the news on our answering machine — well, my first thought was, “There’s no thinker left alive that I can totally trust. They’re all dead.”

For the past two or more years Ballard had been undergoing state-of-the-art, high-tech treatment from a young doctor who reportedly was trying every new medical breakthrough remedy or procedure which promised “hope” for Ballard’s condition. Recently, however, Ballard had been rushed to a hospital, and after sustained care there had returned to the home to his longtime (40-plus years) companion, Claire Walsh. The latest word was that he had recently required around-the-clock care by visiting professional nurses, which sounded somewhat alarming. Still, I maintained calm. Now I wish I had tried to telephone him and talk one last time, even if just for a minute. I think I expected Ballard to live at least as long as Burroughs, who reached the age of 83, even after having been “a junkie” for years of his life. By a strange logic, I felt that since Ballard hadn’t been a junkie, he should live even longer than 83. Well, I was wrong. And now the world will miss his unique, witty, and sometimes acerbic commentaries on itself. We miss him and are grateful for his dark sense of humor and generous output.

..:: More Ballardosphere tributes:
+ Part 1: Ben Noys, Chris Nakashima-Brown & Mark Dery
+ Part 2: Michael Moorcock
+ Part 4: Jeannette Baxter, Mike Bonsall, Mark Fisher, Owen Hatherley, Mike Holliday and Nina Power

Michael Moorcock, J.G. Ballard and Claire Walsh in September, 2006 (photo courtesy Linda Moorcock).

+ Share your tributes and memories of JGB.

MICHAEL MOORCOCK, AUTHOR

‘Jimmy’ to an early generation of friends, JG Ballard was as stoical in dealing with his painful cancer (which began with asymptomatic prostate cancer already widely spread by the time it was detected) as he had been when dealing with the sudden early death of his wife Mary. The telegram my then-wife Hilary and I received the day Mary died was typically laconic: MARY DIED TODAY OF PNEUMONIA. GREAT HEART. LOVE, JIMMY. I remember how, shortly after his return to England, he said he had to keep pulling to the side of the road on the long drive back from Spain when he began to cry; one of the few occasions he ever directly referred in conversation to his grief. Of course, he discovered that stoicism in the Japanese camp where he was interned as a boy and this tendency to redirect conversation away from his own problems remained with him all his life, even when he suffered from the cancer which eventually killed him.

Like many great visionaries, he had an enormous store of common sense and ordinary wisdom, which enabled him to raise the children and, as Fay, his daughter, said, always have the sheets washed on time, even if the baked bean was one of their almost daily dishes. In private he was a generous, affectionate, humorous friend who, even when he had very little money, would phone me if he heard I was broke and offer to lend me his last hundred pounds.

A couple of years after Mary’s death I was able to introduce him to Claire Walsh, who remained his companion for over forty years and selflessly nursed him through the final staqes of his very painful illness. His capacity for kindness and understanding is reflected in his moving and very honest memoir — Miracles of Life — which remains one of the very best books of its kind. I knew him casually in the late fifties and we became close friends from about 1960 on when we attended a conference of sf writers and, together with Barry Bayley, became very disappointed with what we regarded as the boring and rather commercial interests of our fellow writers. We discovered that we had a common interest in using the conventions of sf to write a kind of fiction which addressed what we perceived as the specific experience of post-war life, which the conventions of the modernist social novel singularly failed to address. We did not have much of an interest, except incidentally, in improving the sf genre as such, but of putting certain sf tropes to our own uses.

In this, we were inspired by the work of William Burroughs to whom I introduced him in the early 60s. His first evident break with the sf genre came when E.J.Carnell published ‘The Terminal Beach’. Carnell was reluctant to publish the story until Bayley and I insisted on it, just as Carnell published my own ‘breakthrough’ story The Deep Fix only when Jimmy persuaded him to run it. When I became editor of New Worlds in 1964, he wrote one of our two ‘manifestoes’ in the first issue I produced. That issue also carried the opening episode of his serial Equinox, which became The Crystal World, but I was keen to get him to do work closer to ‘The Terminal Beach’ and while ‘You:Coma:Marilyn Monroe’ was the first of these to appear in our companion magazine Science Fantasy, it was ‘The Assassination Weapon’, written, as I recall, a little earlier, which helped define the character of the kind of fiction we were to run increasingly, making a clear break with generic science fiction. These ‘condensed novels’ reflected a theory we had developed whereby iconographic figures, with their own dense stories, helped us carry many narratives in a very small space.

Jimmy produced a number of these narratives within a relatively short time during the mid-sixties, placing others with Ambit, a literary magazine run by Martin Bax whom we met at one of sf writer John Brunner’s parties and for which he became prose editor, commissioning me in turn! Others appeared in IT and Transatlantic Review, with whom we also had a relationship. They were collected in The Atrocity Exhibition published by Cape under the editorship of Tom Maschler, who had also been encouraged to publish Philip K. Dick after reading what New Worlds had to say about him. New Worlds also ran such stories as ‘The Assassination of John F Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race’, an homage to Jarry, who was another of our enthusiasms. Our friend Bill Butler also ran his story ‘Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan’, famously prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act. Jimmy did not appear at the trial because he was asked to defend himself against charges of obscenity. He claimed that the story was intentionally obscene. This collection also featured the short version of Crash! which would later become the novel, and ‘A Plan for the Assassination of Jaqueline Kennedy’, the specific story which caused Nelson Doubleday, boss of the American publisher Doubleday, to order the US edition pulped. In the eyes of many, including me, this book contains Ballard’s finest and most innovative work. Together with Empire of the Sun, his autobiographical novel, it remains perhaps his best single work.

Although the literary press was quick to minimise his years as an sf writer, he made no effort to divorce himself from his sf roots, though preferring to call himself first a ‘speculative’ and later an ‘apocalyptic’ writer. His influence was seen in the work of several of his admirers including Martin Amis, Will Self, Iain Sinclair, M. John Harrison and Christopher Priest. Tending, in those early years, to rely on me to introduce him to fellow spirits, like Burroughs, Chris Evans, Eduardo Paolozzi and even his companion Claire Walsh, Jimmy remained a private, modest and rather shy man, a loyal friend who, in spite of being admired by some of our best known literary writers, avoided what he called ‘the literary crowd’ even more than sf conventions, living quietly at home in Shepperton which famously remained unchanged since the mid-60s, with his typewriter in one corner of the room and commissioned copies of lost Delvaux masterpieces in another, while a unicycle stood in his hallway.

At one time his back garden served as a pit in which he burned review copies (I remember him phoning me to complain bitterly that Fahrenheit 451 was NOT the temperature at which book paper burned) or as a jungle of sunflowers, which he had seeded. While unreliable sources, such as Lynn Barber, claimed he regularly took LSD, the only tab he ever dropped he obtained from me. I gave him some important advice about how best to take it which, somewhat typically, he completely ignored. The subsequent trip was so horrific, he never took another. Like many men of his generation, his drug of choice remained alcohol. It can fairly be argued that his vivid and intense imagination scarcely needed acid stimulus. Devoted to his children and becoming almost mystical when he described their births, he believed that the art of raising his three was to have a glue gun and a staple gun handy at all times, for running repairs and alterations.

While we by no means shared all the same enthusiasms, we remained close friends for fifty years, only very occasionally having our differences, and I shall miss him enormously.

..:: Previously on Ballardian:
+ Angry Old Men: Michael Moorcock on J.G. Ballard

..:: More Ballardosphere tributes:
+ Part 1: Ben Noys, Chris Nakashima-Brown & Mark Dery.
+ Part 3: Tim Chapman, Rick McGrath, Solveig Nordlund, Dan O’Hara, Dominika Oramus, Rick Poynor, David Pringle, Simon Sellars, Supervert and V. Vale.
+ Part 4: Jeannette Baxter, Mike Bonsall, Mark Fisher, Owen Hatherley, Mike Holliday and Nina Power.

+ Share your tributes and memories of JGB.

BENJAMIN NOYS, AUTHOR & THEORIST

‘The dreams that money can buy’
i.m. J.G. Ballard

The writer’s task is to invent the reality.
J.G. Ballard

The fact that an event has taken place is no proof of its valid occurrence.
The Atrocity Exhibition

We have all lived for a long time, in my case for my entire life, in J.G. Ballard’s head. Writing in the Introduction to the French edition of Crash, Ballard argued that the only ‘reality’ left for the writer to offer ‘in a world ruled by fictions of every kind’ was ‘the contents of his own head, he offers a set of options and imaginative alternatives’. The loss of J.G. Ballard is the loss of that ‘set of options and imaginative alternatives’ that his fiction consistently explored. We are left in world that is more radically constricted to those mediatised fictions that compose ‘the dreams that money can buy’.

..:: Ben Noys at Ballardian:
+ Crimes of the Near Future: Baudrillard/Ballard

CHRIS NAKASHIMA-BROWN, AUTHOR & CULTURAL CRITIC

In Miracles of Life, J.G. Ballard describes the unexpected joy of the birth of his first grandchild. He manages to do so in a uniquely Ballardian way, talking about the overwhelming peace that came from feeling one’s genetic duty had at last been discharged. For me that moment, more than any, helped me understand why Ballard had such a profound impact on me from the time I discovered him in my late teens: the way he rigorously applied his singular techniques of writerly psycho-pathology to dissect the deeper evolutionary and instinctual programming of the naked ape made insane by its modern mediated techno-context, while at the same time informing even his most brutal narrative laboratory experiments with absolute integrity and profound empathy. In the end, Ballard is for me the greatest ethicist of the 20th century. The one who came closest to answering the unanswerable questions of era now disappearing behind us, and helping scope out the guidebook for the future.

His death is a moment of great sadness. But for readers and colleagues it should be an opportunity to celebrate a life so amazingly well-lived, marked by fifty years of immense productivity, three distinct periods of work each of which leave a greater mark than most other single authors, exploding not only the boundaries of genre, but the disciplinary confines of literature itself to appropriate the territories of psychology, philosophy, and sociology. And a role model for other writers, as so well elucidated by Bruce Sterling in the interview we did for Ballardian in 2005:

Any reasons for optimism?

Well, yeah. I think it’s an optimistic thing that Ballard’s lived a long time. He’s sort of a great, spreading oak tree, really. If you had looked at the wild boys of the British New Wave in their heyday, you might’ve thought, “Oh, well, they’ll all hang themselves,” or “They’ll throw themselves into the sea like beatniks,” or “This will end in murder”. And if anybody was going to come to a wicked end, it would have been Jimmy Ballard – the obsessive, the psychotic crank, the man who’s staring right into the eyes of it. His condensed novels [collected in The Atrocity Exhibition] really have a freak-out quality to them. But he didn’t die of that. On the contrary, he just sort of fed on it. You can read his critical works now and he’s obviously in full possession of his senses. He’s funny, he’s on top of his game. He’s still an interesting guy to read even though he’s at an advanced age now. He’s got things to say that are remarkable and make you feel better about things and really demonstrate some analytical insight. I envy that. I hope that if I live that long I have that many marbles left in my little velvet drawstring bag. To me that’s reason for optimism. I don’t like to call it optimism, because as a futurist I think there’s something wrong with that term. If you say you’re optimistic or pessimistic about the future, it’s just giving you an excuse to place a patch over one eye and ignore half of the determining factors. You should struggle hard not to be optimistic or pessimistic about a future prospect. What you should do is be engaged and in command of the facts. So to be optimistic or pessimistic are really intellectual vices. But on the other hand, there’s nothing wrong with a role model.

Ballard is somebody who really has something to say. He’s saying it to a lot of different people. He’s never sold out, never wrote a cheesy trilogy. He had movies made of his books. He recovered. He didn’t care. They were okay movies, even. He had some money. His children grew to adulthood. He has grandchildren. He was never arrested. He hasn’t been in a jail or a clinic. He’s not Jeffrey Archer. He didn’t come to a bad end. He’s not an alcoholic. He has a life that many people would envy. And justly so. To that end, I feel very pleased about him. Not that I am an optimist about him or his worldview. I would not want him to have another worldview. I’m not going to criticise his sensibility. He’s a great artist. He’s given something very few people can give; in his case, he’s the only one who could possibly have given that. He gave a lot of it, it was good, it was consistently interesting. What more does one want?

..:: Chris Nakashima-Brown at Ballardian:
+ ‘Child of the Diaspora’: Sterling on Ballard

MARK DERY, AUTHOR & CULTURAL CRITIC

J.G. Ballard is gone, wheels-up from the abandoned airstrip of our imaginations, but his coiled brilliance will lie in waiting for just the right unsuspecting teenager — and there’s always one, in every suburb — who opens Crash to read the unforgettable lines, “Vaughan died yesterday in his last car crash. During our friendship, he had rehearsed his death in many car crashes, but this was his only true accident.” She will read those lines, and 224 pages later, close the book dazedly, firm in the knowledge that her worldview has been shattered and wired back together, and for the darker better.

The sci-fi novelist William Gibson was one such teenager.

“I was so young when I first discovered Ballard’s work,” he told me, in an interview for my L.A. Weekly review of Ballard’s memoir, Miracles of Life. (The interview ended up on the cutting-room floor.) “Thirteen, fourteen. I probably read him before I read Burroughs, but only by a few months. I seem to remember Burroughs baffling me at first, too many moving parts, but Ballard seemed to have the keys to the kingdom. In retrospect it was like a lot of great foreign cinema that I hadn’t seen yet. Long pans without actors. I remember finding it all enormously welcoming, and calming somehow. He became a literary hero of mine without my ever having to think about it.

[...] Most ‘influence’ questions just cause me to shrug, but Ballard? Huge. And durable. More than anyone else, really.

My first work of fiction, ever, consisted of a single faux-Ballardian sentence: ‘Seated each afternoon in the darkened screening room, [ ] came to perceive the targeted numerals of the academy leader as hypnagogic sigils preceding the dream state of film.’ I worked on that for so long, months, that I’ve never forgotten it.”

Gibson’s unindicted co-conspirator in the cyberpunk insurgency, Bruce Sterling, offered his thoughts.

“He’s truly a great science fiction writer,” he told me, by e-mail. “One of the few. Lovecraft is also a great science fiction writer, and creates the same intensely visionary world, the same kind of lasting, all-devouring, even bewildering appeal. But Ballard certainly writes much better than Lovecraft. He’s a better artist.” Even so, noted Sterling, he remains a cult figure — ”globally notorious,” a “persistent critics’ darling” with a swelling following, but a cult figure nonetheless. “Ballard’s intelligence and surreal worldview simply intimidate readers,” said Sterling. “Most people who might read Ballard pick up one of his books, forge 30 pages in, become baffled and obscurely terrified, and never dare to open another one. Of course he’s a good writer, but he’s the strong stuff; nobody picks up six-packs of Laphroaig.”

Paradoxically, Ballard — the pathologist of the 20th century — was always an affable soul; the man who wrote “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan” and who loved to scandalize journalists by rhapsodizing (tongue in cheek? we’ll never know…) about the Caligulan charisma of Margaret Thatcher was, at all times, the perfect gentleman. Nor was he ever less than witty, whether in my interviews with him or in all the others I obsessively read (a form of which he, like Boswell’s Johnson, was the incomparable master, tossing off apercus and deftly skipping insights across the surface of a conversation). To be sure, the well-rehearsed insights cycled around with reassuring regularity, but his fans were always glad to hear them; like the signature one-liners of some existential comedian, they never lost their ECT jolt, or at least their bracing buzz. Ballard was always able to play new variations on old themes, like Glenn Gould revisiting the Goldberg Variations. Not that he wasn’t willing, even at the end, to modulate into new keys. His curtain call, Miracles of Life, written while cancer gnawed, is the most exuberantly life-loving of all his books, ironically; a last review of the home movies with the children who, he insisted, raised him (after his wife died) and a passionate valentine to all the women in his life.

It is also a drily funny score-settling with Little England, whose rattletrap cars he described as “coal scuttles,” on first seeing them after moving back to Britain from China, and whose morose, “putty-faced” people had won the war but acted, he thought, as if they’d lost it. Ballard was perversely fond of America in the way that, say, Kafka or Baudrillard were; he regarded the U.S.A. with a kind of horrified delight, and loved best all that is worst about our theme-parked nightmare, which he reimagined in Hello America as a post-apocalyptic disaster zone, presided over by a President Charles Manson. And he cordially detested the class-conscious, parochial England of Prince Charles’s Poundbury and the Boy’s Own Paper, refusing Commander of the British Empire honors in 1993 with the withering quip that such “Ruritanian charade[s]” help “prop up our top-heavy monarchy.”

Yet, to this closet anglophile, Ballard was in some ways inescapably English: magnanimous in his support of younger writers (he blurbed both my books — extravagantly) yet reclusive in his personal life; generous of spirit yet, according to those who knew him best, fiercely private and, during the exhausting death march of the past years, stoic. In that sense, he represented the best of British reserve. In later years, with his domed forehead, jowls, and long, white hair curling over his collar, he looked like Charles Laughton in a Roman role — Juvenal, perhaps. And that voice! To this American ear, Ballard’s drawling delivery and plummy tone always sounded unmistakably donnish. The marriage of his matter-of-factly outrageous pronouncements with that Oxonian drawl, together with his elocutionary emphasis on certain syllables (presumably for dramatic effect) — a tendency to it-Al-i-cize a single syllable — was drily funny. I test-drove these impressions with the cultural critic (and Englishman) Rick Poynor, who agreed that ”Ballard speaks like an elderly…member of the well-off, professional, upper-middle classes — someone who might work as a doctor, a barrister, a banker, or indeed an Oxford don. He sounds like the kind of clubbable chap who would once routinely have been found, gin in hand, in members-only London gentlemen’s clubs. It’s a very English voice. It’s the accent of the ruling classes and we still love it in small doses (though I’m not suggesting JGB trades on this) because it suggests breeding, refinement and intelligence, and it reminds us of greater days. It’s perfect for delivering outrageous pronouncements.”

In the L.A. Weekly, I wrote, “It’s not yet time to write Ballard’s epitaph, but when it is, his poetic, almost liturgical credo, ‘What I Believe’ (1984), will do nicely:

I believe in the power of the imagination to remake the world, to release the truth within us, to hold back the night, to transcend death, to charm motorways, to ingratiate ourselves with birds, to enlist the confidences of madmen.

I believe in the non-existence of the past, in the death of the future, and the infinite possibilities of the present.

Among the neurotic condos of Vermilion Sands; beside the concrete bunkers of the Terminal Beach, half-submerged in silt; across the manicured grounds of that sociopathic Club Med, Eden-Olympia; and in all the Sheppertons of the soul and Shanghai mansions of memory, flags are flying at half-staff.

..:: More Ballardosphere tributes:
+ Part 2: Michael Moorcock.
+ Part 3: Tim Chapman, Rick McGrath, Solveig Nordlund, Dan O’Hara, Dominika Oramus, Rick Poynor, David Pringle, Simon Sellars, Supervert and V. Vale.
+ Part 4: Jeannette Baxter, Mike Bonsall, Mark Fisher, Owen Hatherley, Mike Holliday and Nina Power.

Goodbye, Jim…

As publisher of this site, my goal has always been to take J.G. Ballard as a philosopher, rather than simply a ‘novelist’. Sometimes this has truly angered fans and champions of his work, more often it has brought me into brilliant and inspiring contact with writers, artists, musicians, filmmakers and theorists who all see the world through that same Ballardian lens — and with Jim Ballard himself, who, along with his partner Claire Walsh, always remained supportive of the site.

Ballard articulates clearly to me the implications of living in an age of total consumerism, of blanket surveillance, of enslavement designed as mass entertainment. But he also speaks to me of resistance through irony, immersion, ambivalence, imagination — of remixing, recycling, remaking, remodelling.

Ballard embraces dystopian scenarios, including the archetypal non-space often characterised as a deadening feature of late capitalism. But this is not simply a call for nihilism. Ballard’s characters are not disengaged from their world. Rather, they embody a sense of resistance that derives from full immersion, a therapeutic confrontation with the powers of darkness, whereby merging with dystopian alienation negates its power.

This is predicated on concurrency: Ballard’s writing turns objectivity into subjectivity, opens up gaps where there is room for new subjects. His scenarios are what I term ‘affirmative dystopias’, neither straight utopia nor straight dystopia, but an occupant of the interstitial space between them, perpetual oscillation between the poles – the ‘yes or no of the borderzone’, to use a phrase from his work.

Here, dystopia becomes the real utopia, and utopian ideals, typically represented as a stifling of the imagination, the true dystopia. He reinhabits the frame to present a clearinghouse in which corporate and national governance is overthrown and regoverned as a ‘state of mind’.

To read and to understand Ballard, then, is to be gloriously, finally liberated.

To James Graham Ballard: thank you.

Share your tributes and memories of JGB in the comments section below.

>> Further news, links etc at my Twitter stream — where I post the bulk of my links and new info.

>> I have asked Ballardian contributors & associates for their thoughts on JGB’s passing:

+ Part 1: Ben Noys, Chris Nakashima-Brown and Mark Dery.
+ Part 2: Michael Moorcock.
+ Part 3: Tim Chapman, Rick McGrath, Solveig Nordlund, Dan O’Hara, Dominika Oramus, Rick Poynor, David Pringle, Simon Sellars, Supervert and V. Vale.
+ Part 4: Jeannette Baxter, Mike Bonsall, Mark Fisher, Owen Hatherley, Mike Holliday and Nina Power.

Elsewhere:

WRITERS/PUBLISHERS/JGB’S FAMILY & FRIENDS
+ Claire Walsh
(1) @The Evening Standard (2) @The Guardian
+ Bea Ballard
+ Michael Moorcock
(1) @Multiverse (2) @Ballardian
+ Iain Sinclair
+ David Pringle
+ Jeff VanderMeer
+ Christopher Priest
+ V. Vale
+ Toby Litt
+ Malcolm Edwards
+ Neil Gaiman
+ John Clute
+ Will Self
+ John Gray
+ Chris Petit
+ Simon Reynolds
+ David Cronenberg
+ Martin Amis
+ Bruce Sterling

M.S.M./MAGAZINES
+ BBC News
+ The Times
+ The Guardian
+ The Independent
+ The Telegraph
+ New York Times
+ Wall Street Journal
+ Salon
+ A.V. Club
+ Time
+ Wall Street Journal

FEATURES
+ Jimmy, the sweet sage of Shepperton
+ How J.G. Ballard cast his shadow right across the arts
+ Nine J.G. Ballard stories that must be filmed
+ What pop music tells us about JG Ballard
+ In pictures: J.G. Ballard’s architectural inspiration
+ What sort of doctor would JG Ballard have made?
+ Ballard and the painters
+ ‘JG Ballard was our own private, Home Counties, prophet of doom’
+ Was J.G. Ballard a prophet of doom – or the future?
+ ‘Between the Tower and the Parking Lot: A Spatial Appreciation of J.G. Ballard’
+ Fans want car park named after celebrated writer
+ Divergent perspectives on J.G. Ballard
+ Crashing through to dystopia

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BLOGS
+ John Coulthart
+ Joanne McNeil
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