RIP JG Ballard

When I first read JG Ballard, he was considered a science fiction writer, at least in this country. And since I read science fiction, I read his work. To say I was baffled would be an understatement. After reading Asimov's and Heinlein's space operas, a story in which a man falls in love with an opera singer who has the body of a beautiful woman but whose head is an orchid was not exactly, shall we say, what I was expecting. But the strange thing, in retrospect, was that I kept reading. It was obvious that there was something going on that I couldn't figure out, and I could not get the stories out of my head.

Later I learned enough to get a better understanding of his work. The word "surrealism" gets thrown around a lot, but authentic, grounded, hard-core Surrealism was a key element of his work. But there was more. It wasn't until Empire of the Sun was published, as a quasi-fictional memoir of his childhood as a Japanese prisoner of war, that the roots of his view of the universe as a place simultaneously grim, beautiful, and shockingly incoherent came into focus.

His most famous title, it is usually said, was for the short story "Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan." The fact that that story was published in 1970, ten years before Reagan became president, suggests a kind of prescience that Ballard would have disowned. He was not a mystic. He was rooted in reality. He just thought that reality was a lot stranger than most people were willing to admit, and that the best way to show that was to show something that was, in a way, above reality. Which etymologically, is the core meaning of the word "surreal."

Here's the Guardian's obituary.