James Graham Ballard, Author. Born 15 November 1930; Died 19 April 2009Six days ago, one of the most violent, disquieting, visionary novelists put down his pen for the final time. JG Ballard, author of several novels, most notably Empire of the Sun and Crash, both of which were adapted for the cinema (the film version of the latter being the 1996 film by David Cronenberg, and NOT the 2004 film about racism in Los Angeles); he could be compared with Anthony Burgess (A Clockwork Orange) and Philip K Dick (A Scanner Darkly and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, inspiration for Ridley Scott's Blade Runner), in viewing nightmare futures in which the fat and dull masses live off a diet of self-obssessive entertainment while being easily controlled by a small and corrupt élite.
Only a few days ago, I spotted Ballard's novel Empire of the Sun outside the El Corte Inglés department store near my house, still popular with readers today and speakers of languages other than English. It might be interesting to note that my Ballard's novella High Rise - in which a group of tennants in a newly-built high-rise living block become trapped and dehumanised by the convenience of the technology and ultimately revert to basic, animalistic behaviour - was cited as a reference point for the 1987 Doctor Who story Paradise Towers, featuring similar themes and with a similar tone (barring Bonnie Langford's character, of course).
His obituary on the BBC website can be found here, while his obituary in The Guardian can be found here.
Mr Ballard, you will be greatly missed...
You don't know what you've got till it's gone... Only through reading the obits did I realise the vision of the man.
ReplyDeleteEmpire of the Sun is one of my favourite films, and I've been meaning to read High Rise for a long time (and not because of the Paradise Towers connection - it's just exactly the sort of thing that fascinates me, utopia gone wrong).
I've yet to see the film of Empire of the Sun, I'm more into his dystopian novels, like your good self.
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