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James Graham Ballard 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. Ballard first became associated with New Wave science fiction for post-apocalyptic novels such as The Drowned World (1962). He later courted controversy with the short-s…
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culture · English writer (1930–2009) · novelist · writer · science fiction writer · also J. G. Ballard, James Graham Ballard, James Graham "J. G." Ballard, Ballard
Born 15 November 1930 · Died 19 April 2009 · Q140201
54 published statements · 0 followers
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“If their work is satisfying people don't need leisure in the old-fashioned sense. No one ever asks what Newton or Darwin did to relax, or how Bach spent his weekends. At Eden-Olympia work is the ultimate play, and play the ultimate work.”
Public attention spiked: 2,606 Wikipedia readers in one day, 3.2× the usual 821, with 0 article edits.
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The Guardian: The Illuminated Man by Christopher Priest and Nina Allan review – an unconventional portrait of JG Ballard
Published “Accurate structure prediction of biomolecular interactions with AlphaFold 3” in Nature — cited 15,725 times.
The Guardian: JG Ballard’s Crash: an exercise in controlled surrealism – archive, 28 June 1973
Published “Highly accurate protein structure prediction with AlphaFold” in Nature — cited 44,074 times.
The Guardian: JG Ballard:'science fiction celebrates the possibilities of life' – archive, 11 September 1970
The Guardian: Come on in, the water's dystopian! JG Ballard's Drowned World hits an Essex pool
Published “Dementia prevention, intervention, and care: 2020 report of the Lancet Commission” in The Lancet — cited 9,305 times.
Published “Multidisciplinary research priorities for the COVID-19 pandemic: a call for action for mental health science” in The Lancet Psychiatry — cited 4,327 times.
The Guardian: The Drowned World by JG Ballard – archive, 27 January 1963
The Guardian: Applied Ballardianism by Simon Sellars – under the spell of JG Ballard
Published “The Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans” in JAMA — cited 5,522 times.
The Guardian: Were JG Ballard's billboards actually coded Salvador Dalí paintings?
Published “Dementia prevention, intervention, and care” in The Lancet — cited 5,093 times.
Called "Kline Coma Xero" named after characters in The Atrocity Exhibition
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Wall Street Journal: A Search for Traces of J.G. Ballard in Shanghai
A 17-page untitled typescript listed as "Vermilion Sands short story in draft" in the British Library catalogue and edited into an 8,000-word text by Bernard Sigaud appeared in a short-lived French reissue of the collect
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Published “Overview of the <i>CCP</i> 4 suite and current developments” in Acta Crystallographica Section D Biological Crystallography — cited 11,981 times.
Died 2009-04-19.
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“Along with our passivity, we're entering a profoundly masochistic phase — everyone is a victim these days, of parents, doctors, pharmaceutical companies, even love itself. And how much we enjoy it. Our happiest moments are spent trying to think up new varieties of victimhood...”
“I think the key image of the 20th century is the man in the motor car.”
“Original: «Everything is becoming science fiction. From the margins of an almost invisible literature has sprung the intact reality of the 20th century.”
“A car crash harnesses elements of eroticism, aggression, desire, speed, drama, kinesthetic factors, the stylizing of motion, consumer goods, status — all these in one event. I myself see the car crash as a tremendous sexual event really: a liberation of human and machine libido (if there is such a thing).”
“I would sum up my fear about the future in one word: boring. And that's my one fear: that everything has happened; nothing exciting or new or interesting is ever going to happen again … the future is just going to be a vast, conforming suburb of the soul.”
“Everywhere — all over Africa and South America … you see these suburbs springing up. They represent the optimum of what people want. There's a certain sort of logic leading towards these immaculate suburbs. And they're terrifying, because they are the death of the soul … This is the prison this planet is being turned into.”
“The American Dream has run out of gas. The car has stopped. It no longer supplies the world with its images, its dreams, its fantasies. No more. It's over. It supplies the world with its nightmares now: the Kennedy assassination, Watergate, Vietnam.”
“The cine-camera and television set allow us to perceive slow motion. The concept of anything other than real time had never occurred to anybody until the first slow-motion movies were shown, and this radically altered people's perceptions of nature.”
“The advanced societies of the future will not be governed by reason. They will be driven by irrationality, by competing systems of psychopathology.”
“People, particularly over-moralistic Americans, have often seen me as a pessimist and humourless to boot, yet I think I have an almost maniacal sense of humour. The problem is that it's rather deadpan.”
“Twenty years ago no one could have imagined the effects the Internet would have: entire relationships flourish, friendships prosper…there’s a vast new intimacy and accidental poetry, not to mention the weirdest porn. The entire human experience seems to unveil itself like the surface of a new planet.”
Time: J.G. Ballard: The Emperor of Shepperton
Awarded Tähtivaeltaja Award (2004).
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Ballard's short story "The Enormous Space" (first published in the science-fiction magazine Interzone in 1989, subsequently printed in the collection of Ballard's short stories War Fever) was adapted into an hour-long te
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But refused, calling it "a Ruritanian charade that helps to prop up our top-heavy monarchy"
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Published “Predictive coding in the visual cortex: a functional interpretation of some extra-classical receptive-field effects” in Nature Neuroscience — cited 4,618 times.
De Montfort University Honorary doctorate
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The film adaptation by David Cronenberg was met by a tabloid uproar in the UK, with the Daily Mail campaigning for it to be banned
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Published “Stages of embryonic development of the zebrafish” in Developmental Dynamics — cited 10,862 times.
Starring a young Christian Bale as Jim (Ballard)
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Awarded James Tait Black Memorial Prize (1984).
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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
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Based on his years in Shanghai and the Lunghua internment camp
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Won Golden Graoully for Best Foreign Novel (1982).
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“s ascent to the White House. His science fiction of the almost-normal - based around suburbia and urban hinterlands, fixations on celebrity and car crashes - became best known through the film Crash, and the surreal semi-autobiography Empire of the Sun. But his feverish imagination, stoked by pre-lunch whisky and sodas in his study, found an unlikely appeal among pop musicians - many of whom liked to invoke a bit of Ballard in their work. JOY DIVISION The 1980 album Closer - the band”
Awarded BSFA Award for Best Novel for The Unlimited Dream Company (1979).
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At the New Arts Laboratory, Ballard sponsored an exhibition of damaged automobiles titled "Crashed Cars"; lacking the commentary of an art curator, the artwork provoked critical vitriol and layman vandalism
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The novelist Algis Budrys said that Brian W
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After the death of his wife Mary, Ballard's writing yielded the thematically-related short stories, that were published in New Worlds by Moorcock, as The Atrocity Exhibition (1970)
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Mary Ballard died of pneumonia, leaving Ballard to raise their three children, James, Fay and Bea Ballard
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The Ballard family moved to Shepperton, Surrey, where he lived till his death in 2009
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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
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Studied medicine at King's College, Cambridge, with the intention of becoming a psychiatrist
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Born 1930-11-15.
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s ascent to the White House. His science fiction of the almost-normal - based around suburbia and urban hinterlands, fixations on celebrity and car crashes - became best known through the film Crash, and the surreal semi-autobiography Empire of the Sun. But his feverish imagination, stoked by pre-lunch whisky and sodas in his study, found an unlikely appeal among pop musicians - many of whom liked to invoke a bit of Ballard in their work. JOY DIVISION The 1980 album Closer - the band
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