Terminal Beach--J.G. Ballard Dies

As a teenager, I was a member of the Doubleday Science Fiction book club, which sent you a scifi novel every month for a $1. When I received a double volume of J.G. Ballard's "Drowning World" and "The Wind from Nowhere" I was hooked. So much so I bought every book of his the moment they were published. He told interviewers he was not a science fiction author but instead his books were "picturing the psychology of the future."

Iain Sinclair declared him a major literary figure and not simply a cult author as his obituaries maintain. " He was one of the first to take up the whole idea of ecological catastrophe. He was fascinated by celebrity early on, the cult of the star and suicides of cars, motorways, edgelands of cities. All of these things he was one of the first to create almost a philosophy of."

A younger generation got hooked on J.G. Ballard through David Cronenberg's version of his book Crash, which suggested how sexual desires were stimulated by car crashes. For older fans, his more experimental novel The Atrocity Exhibition covered these themes and more with a greater rigor. His books like Terminal Beach conveyed a tight, sleek style of describing post-apocalyptic landscapes, which influenced other writers.

He is probably best known for his much acclaimed novel Empire of the Sun, based on his childhood spent in a Japanese prison camp in China. For years, he never wrote about the subject because " I was afraid people would not understand how kids could have fun in the war." The novel became a somewhat romanticized film by Steven Spielberg.

J.G. Ballard lived most of his life since the 1960s in a small British suburb, where he raised his children after his wife's death. Despite urgings by friends, he never moved and went on to write over 15 novels and countless short stories. In his last years he wrote such novels as Super-Cannes, Millennium People, and Kingdom Come. In his last novel, he explained to his readers that he had terminal cancer and went into detail about his satisfaction with the care he was receiving.

A book editor for the Daily Mail commented on J.G. Ballard's status as very avant garde. " And there was a king of violence lurking beneath the texture of these novels. And they's come to seem less and less futuristic and you know it's as if we're embodying , we living in now a kind of Ballardian world."

In recent years, special editions of J.G. Ballard's Atrocity Exhibition and his interviews have become collectors' items.

J.G. Ballard died at the age of 78 after being ill with cancer for several years. The world of deserted airfields, empty malls and crazed roadways will miss him. Goodby, Jim.