From "Kingdom Come" :

"Emotion ruled almost everything, and lies were driven by emotions that were familiar and supportive, while the truth came with hard edges that cut and bruised"

J.G. Ballard got to the heart of everything and will continue to be loved as long as his books remain.

One of the greats.

Amazing SF mind, experiments with form ('The Atrocity Exhibition' - yes, Joy Division were paying close attention), 'Empire of the Sun' and the final run of sinister, world-gone-mad novels...

As you say, he announced his final illness, but sad news all the same.

I was surprised to find this story buried towards the back end of a BBC ceefax newsfeed. I always thought that Ballard was considered one of our great writers. Like William Burroughs before him, he was an author whose ideas have seeped into popular culture.

Ballard, as a former resident of a Japanese interment camp in World War II, spent his literary career picking over the circumstances that cause civilised people to slough off their social graces as they grappled with the politics of survival. In doing so he inadvertently honed the template for reality TV. His books were mostly based on the premise: "I wonder how people would react if..." This would be followed by apocalyptic scenarios of varying scales and magnitudes, in which the world didn’t end with a bang, but instead a slow decline, which over time would gain an unarrestable momentum:

In The Crystal World, as every living thing on the planet begins to crystallize, the characters seem too preoccupied with the minutiae of their own lives to care. In High Rise, the wealthy and educated inhabitants of a self-sufficient tower block find themselves isolated from the outside world and begin to focus their frustrations on each other. In Concrete Island, an architect is marooned on a man-made island in the middle of a motorway intersection.

There was little warmth in Ballard’s prose. His take on human relations was often clinical, as if he was an impassive voyeur of unfolding horrors. Maybe this was a legacy of his World War II childhood . He was unrivalled at taking a simple concept and playing it out to its logical conclusions.

... Ronald Reagan would become president.

And how many writers are turned into adjectives? ("Ballardian").

If you can get hold of the Re/Search book on him, it's well worth it - lots of interviews, excerpts, artwork, associated facts - a perfect introduction to the great man's work:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RE/Search

Cocaine Nights (1996) was okay, but he revisited it and basically rewrote it as Super-Cannes (2000) which is a brilliant, brilliant book.

High Rise (1975) promised so, so much and delivered nothing. David Cronenberg made a film called Shivers that same year which could almost be an adaption as it covers the same subject matter. He then rewrote it as Millennium People (2003) which was also a dud.

Cronenberg then made a film of Crash of 1996. The film was rubbish. I have not read the book.

I enjoyed that.

is also mighty fine - in the same mould (sp?) as Drowned World, but stranger in that a jungle is becoming crystalline. My favourite and his most atypical book is The Unlimited Dream Company. It's set in a version of Shepperton that undergoes a series of increasingly surreal transformations apparently sparked by a pilot crashing his light aircraft into the Thames. IMHO a beautiful book with lots of loose ends to revisit and not tie up.

I'll miss him - if I was ever stuck for something to read I could always rely on JG to deliver something surprising.

Was interested in this piece---

http://philipwomack.blogspot.com/2011/08/london-riots-j-g-ballard-and-li...

tweeted by William Gibson. Anybody read Womack ?

need I go on?