J.G. Ballard

J. G. Ballard was born to Edna Johnstone (1905–1998) and James Graham Ballard (1901–1966), who was a chemist at the Calico Printers' Association, a textile company in the city of Manchester, and later became the chairman and managing director of the China Printing and Finishing Company, the Association's subsidiary company in Shanghai.

The China in which Ballard was born featured the Shanghai International Settlement, where Western foreigners "lived an American style of life".

At school age, Ballard attended the Cathedral School of the Holy Trinity Church, Shanghai.

James Graham Ballard (15 November 1930 – 19 April 2009) was an English novelist and short story writer, satirist and essayist known for psychologically provocative works of fiction that explore the relations between human psychology, technology, sex and mass media.

Upon the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945), the Ballard family abandoned their suburban house, and moved to a house in the city centre of Shanghai to avoid the warfare between the Chinese defenders and the Japanese invaders.

After the Battle of Hong Kong (8–25 December 1941), the Imperial Japanese Army occupied the International Settlement and imprisoned the Allied civilians in early 1943.

The Ballard family were sent to the Lunghua Civilian Assembly Centre where they lived in G-block, a two-storey residence for 40 families, for the remainder of the Second World War.

At the Lunghua Centre, Ballard attended school, where the teachers were prisoners with a profession.

In the autobiography Miracles of Life, Ballard said that those experiences of displacement and imprisonment were the thematic bases of the novel Empire of the Sun.

Concerning the violence found in Ballard's fiction, the novelist Martin Amis said that Empire of the Sun "gives shape to what shaped him."

About his experiences of the Japanese war in China, Ballard said: "I don't think you can go through the experience of war without one's perceptions of the world being forever changed. The reassuring stage-set that everyday reality in the suburban West presents to us is torn down; you see the ragged scaffolding, and then you see the truth beyond that, and it can be a frightening experience."

"I have — I won't say happy — [but] not unpleasant memories of the camp... I remember a lot of the casual brutality and beatings-up that went on — but, at the same time, we children were playing a hundred and one games all the time!"

In his later life, Ballard became an atheist, yet said: "I'm extremely interested in religion ... I see religion as a key to all sorts of mysteries that surround the human consciousness."

In late 1945, Ballard's mother returned to Britain with J.G. and his sister, where they resided at Plymouth, and he attended The Leys School in Cambridge, where he won a prize for a well-written essay.

Within a few years, Mrs Ballard and her daughter returned to China and rejoined Mr Ballard; and, whilst not at school, Ballard resided with grandparents.

In 1949, he studied medicine at King's College, Cambridge, with the intention of becoming a psychiatrist.

At university, Ballard wrote avant-garde fiction influenced by psychoanalysis and the works of surrealist painters, and pursued writing fiction and medicine.

His interest in art involved the emerging Pop Art movement, and, in the late 1950s, Ballard exhibited collages that represented his ideas for a new kind of novel.

Moreover, his avant-garde inclinations discomfited writers of mainstream science fiction, whose artistic attitudes Ballard considered philistine.

In his second year at Cambridge, in May 1951, the short story "The Violent Noon", a Hemingway pastiche, won a crime-story competition and was published in the Varsity newspaper.

In October 1951, encouraged by publication, and understanding that clinical medicine disallowed time to write fiction, Ballard forsook medicine and enrolled at Queen Mary College to read English literature.

After a year, he quit the College and worked as an advertising copywriter, then worked as an itinerant encyclopaedia salesman.

Throughout that odd-job period, Ballard continued writing short-story fiction but found no publisher.

In early 1954, Ballard joined the Royal Air Force and was assigned to the Royal Canadian Air Force flight-training base in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, Canada.

In 1955, Ballard left the RAF and returned to England, where he met and married Helen Mary Matthews, who was a secretary at the Daily Express newspaper; the first of three Ballard children was born in 1956.

In December 1956, Ballard became a professional science-fiction writer with the publication of the short stories "Escapement" (in New Worlds magazine) and "Prima Belladonna" (in Science Fantasy magazine).

At the New Worlds magazine, the editor, Edward J. Carnell, greatly supported Ballard's science-fiction writing, and published most of his early stories.

Briefly attending the 1957 World Science Fiction Convention in London, Ballard left disillusioned and demoralised by the type and quality of the science-fiction writing he encountered, and did not write another story for a year; however, by 1965, he was editor of Ambit, an avante-garde magazine, which had an editorial remit amenable to his aesthetic ideals.

From 1958 onwards, Ballard was assistant editor of the scientific journal Chemistry and Industry.

In 1960, the Ballard family moved to Shepperton, Surrey, where he resided till his death in 2009.

Ballard first became associated with New Wave science fiction for post-apocalyptic novels such as The Drowned World (1962), but later courted political controversy with the short-story collection The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), which includes the story "Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan" (1968) and the novel Crash (1973), a story about car-crash fetishists.

In that time, he encountered American science fiction magazines, and, in due course, wrote his first science fiction story, "Passport to Eternity", a pastiche of the American science fiction genre; yet the story was not published until 1962.

To become a professional writer, Ballard forsook mainstream employment to write his first novel, The Wind from Nowhere (1962), during a fortnight holiday, and quit his editorial job with the Chemistry and Industry magazine.

Later that year, his second novel, The Drowned World (1962), also was published; those two novels established Ballard as a notable writer of New Wave science fiction; he also popularized the related concept and genre of inner space.

From that success followed the publication of short-story collections, and was the beginning of a great period of literary productivity from which emerged the short-story collection "The Terminal Beach" (1964).

In 1984, Ballard won broad critical recognition for the war novel Empire of the Sun, a semi-autobiographical story of the experiences of a British boy during the Japanese occupation of Shanghai; three years later, the American film director Steven Spielberg adapted the novel into a film of the same name.

The novelist's journey from youth to mid-age is chronicled, with fictional inflections, in The Kindness of Women (1991), and in the autobiography Miracles of Life (2008).

Some of Ballard's early novels have been adapted as films, including Crash (1996), directed by David Cronenberg, and High-Rise (2015), directed by Ben Wheatley, an adaptation of the 1975 novel.

From the distinct nature of the literary fiction of J. G. Ballard arose the adjective Ballardian, defined as: "resembling or suggestive of the conditions described in J. G. Ballard's novels and stories, especially dystopian modernity, bleak man-made landscapes, and the psychological effects of technological, social or environmental developments".

The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography describes the novelist Ballard as preoccupied with "Eros, Thanatos, mass media and emergent technologies".