J. G. Ballard
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James Graham Ballard (born November 18, 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.
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 science fiction dystopia. His most celebrated early novel is Crash, wherein cars stand-in metaphorically for the automation of the world and where city life itself is programmed to death – dragging its inhabitants (the protagonist named after the author included) into a macabre lust. Ballard's disturbing novel was turned into a controversial, and also disturbing, film by David Cronenberg.
Ballard's fiction is literary, sophisticated, and profoundly concerned with creating cognitive and aesthetic dissonance in its readers. Because of his tendency to upset readers to enlighten them, Ballard does not enjoy a strong 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 forebearer of the cyberpunk movement by Bruce Sterling in his introduction to the seminal "Mirrorshades" anthology. In another example, 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.
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 by not leaving his house, becoming a hermit.
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Bibliography
Novels
- The Wind From Nowhere (1961)
- The Drowned World (1962)
- The Burning World (1964) AKA The Drought (1965)
- The Crystal World (1966)
- Crash (1973)
- Concrete Island (1974)
- High Rise (1975)
- The Unlimited Dream Company (1979)
- Chronopolis (1979)
- Hello America (1981)
- Empire of the Sun (1984, fictionalised autobiography of his adolescence in a Japanese internment camp in Shanghai)
- The Day of Creation (1987)
- Running Wild (1988)
- The Kindness of Women (1991, follow up to Empire Of The Sun covering his early adulthood)
- Rushing to Paradise (1994)
- Cocaine Nights (1996)
- Super-Cannes (2000)
- Millennium People (2003)
Short Story Collections
- The Voices of Time and Other Stories (1962)
- Billenium (1962)
- Passport to Eternity (1963)
- The Four-Dimensional Nightmare (1963)
- The Terminal Beach (1964)
- The Impossible Man (1966)
- The Venus Hunters (1967)
- The Overloaded Man (1967)
- The Disaster Area (1967)
- The Day of Forever (1967)
- The Atrocity Exhibition (1969, this is an experimental mosaic work that can be considered as a novel)
- Vermilion Sands (1971)
- Chronopolis and Other Stories (1971)
- Love and Napalm: Export USA (1972)
- Low-Flying Aircraft and Other Stories (1976)
- The Best of J. G. Ballard (1977)
- The Best Short Stories of J. G. Ballard (1978)
- Myths of the Near Future (1982)
- The Voices of Time (1985)
- Memories of the Space Age (1988)
- War Fever (1990)
- The Complete Short Stories of J. G. Ballard (2001)
Other
External links
- jgballard.com - unofficial site with extensive Ballard links (http://www.jgballard.com)
- On First Reading J. G. Ballard's Concrete Island & Empire of the Sun (http://www.hirohurl.net/ballard.html)
- Open Directory Project: J. G. Ballard (http://www.dmoz.org/Arts/Literature/Authors/B/Ballard,_J._G./)
- Sleepy Brain Magazine Stories in the Ballardian mode, essays on JGB and interviews with Ballard (http://www.sleepybrain.net/ballardian.html)de:James Graham Ballard
es:James Graham Ballard fr:James Graham Ballard it:James Graham Ballard ja:J・G・バラード sv:J G Ballard