J.G. Ballard’s posthumous status verges on the mythological: he’s a prophet, a visionary, who set on paper arcane and obscene predictions that have come unerringly true. Everywhere we look, we discover that we’re now living in Ballard’s world. As I wrote in my introduction to his selected nonfiction, referring to the plot of his final novel, Kingdom Come, “the next riot in a shopping mall seems perpetually five minutes into the future”. Ballard, we know, was prescient: the Seer of Shepperton.
Which might make what I’m about to argue seem perverse, but here goes. Ballard possessed no supernatural gift of foresight. He was an exceptional writer — one of the greatest of the 20th century — and the possessor of both a powerful imagination and a rare intellectual courage. Most pertinently, he was an extremely acute cultural analyst and observer. He was not a fortune teller. No science-fiction writer is. He was something much more powerful: a diagnostician.
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