The Estranged Worlds of J. G. Ballard

THE BRITISH AUTHOR J. G. Ballard (1930–2009) was one of the most brilliant and incisive, but also one of the most perplexing, English-language fiction writers of the past 80 years or so (the period since the end of World War II). He was never part of the literary mainstream. Initially, he was classified and marketed as a science fiction writer; during the 1960s, he was a leading figure of SF’s so-called New Wave, which embraced sexual, psychological, and psychedelic themes, and focused more on the social sciences than on the hard sciences. As Ballard’s career progressed, however, his books increasingly departed altogether from what we usually recognize as science fiction. For instance, there is no exploration of outer space in Ballard’s fiction: there are no robots or supercomputers, and the scientist characters who continue to populate his novels are usually extremist cranks. Ballard’s early novels featured world-shaking apocalyptic scenarios, but his later work was concerned with smaller—more mundane and intimate—disasters.