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J. G. Ballard

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James Graham Ballard (born November 15, 1930 in Shanghai) is a British novelist. Ballard, at eleven years old, lived through the Japanese takeover of China. He was moved to a civilian detention camp where he spent the remainder of World War II. These experiences were described in the semi-autobiographical Empire of the Sun (which was adapted for film by Steven Spielberg). After the war's end he returned to England. Ballard wrote about these and later events in another semi-autobiographical novel The Kindness of Women.

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J.G. Ballard.

Those who know Ballard from his autobiographical novels will not be prepared for the subject matter that Ballard most commonly pursues, as his most common genre is dystopia. His most celebrated early novel is Crash, in which cars symbolise the mechanisation of the world and man's capacity to destroy himself with the technology he creates; and the characters (the protagonist, called Ballard, included) become involved in a violent obsession with the psychosexuality of car crashes. Ballard's disturbing novel was turned into a controversial, and also disturbing, film by David Cronenberg.

Several of Ballard's earlier works deal with scenarios of 'natural disaster', for instance the novels The Wind From Nowhere, The Drowned World and The Drought.

In addition to his novels, Ballard has made extensive use of the short story form. Many of his earliest published works in the 1950s and 1960s were short stories.

Ballard's fiction is sophisticated, often bizarre, and a constant challenge to the cognitive and aesthetic preconceptions of his readers. As Martin Amis has written: "Ballard is quite unlike anyone else; indeed, he seems to address a different - a disused - part of the reader's brain." Because of this tendency to upset readers in order to enlighten them, Ballard does not enjoy a large mass market following, but he is recognized by critics as one of the U.K.'s most prominent writers. He has been influential beyond his mass market success; he is cited as perhaps the most important forebear of the cyberpunk movement by Bruce Sterling in his introduction to the seminal "Mirrorshades" anthology. Also, his parody (or psychoanalysis) of American politics, Why I Want To Fuck Ronald Reagan was photocopied and distributed by pranksters at the 1976 Republican convention.

Ballard has also had a noticeable influence popular music, where his work has been used as a basis for lyrical imagery, particularly amoungst British post-punk groups. Examples include albums such as Metamatic by John Foxx, various songs by Joy Divison, and Warm Leatherette by The Normal.

In 2003, a short darkly comic story of his was adapted into an hour-long television film for the BBC entitled Home by Richard Curson Smith, who also directed it. The plot follows a middle class man who chooses to abandon the outside world and restrict himself to his house, becoming a hermit.

Bibliography

Novels

Short Story Collections

Other

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