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 house of detention in which he spent the remainder of World War II. These lives were described in the semi-autobiographical Empire of the Sun (which was adapted for film by Steven Spielberg). When a war's prevent he returned to England. He was foremost educated at a the Ley's School, Cambridge, then read Medicine at King's College, Cambridge (which he abandoned after two years) and later English Literature at the University of London. He likewise worked as a copywriter and then was stationed with a RAF in Canada. Ballard write on these & late cases in another semi-autobiographical novel The Kindness of Women.

People world health organization understand Ballard from either his autobiographical novels might non exist when steel onself for the subject matter that Ballard virtually all normally pursues, as his usual genre is dystopia. His virtually all celebrated early novel is Crash, in which cars symbolise a mechanisation of the globe & human's capacity to kill himself by owning a technology he creates; & a characters (a protagonist, known as Ballard, exposed) turn into involved inside a violent obsession by owning the psychosexuality of car crashes. Ballard's worrying novel was off into the controversial, & likewise worrisome, film by David Cronenberg.

Many of Ballard's earliest works treat sustaining scenarios of 'natural disaster', for example a novels The Wind From Nowhere, The Drowned World and The Drought.

Additionally to his novels, Ballard has mass produced extensive apply of the short story form. Numerous of his earliest published works in the 1950s and 1960s were short stories.

Ballard's fiction is sophisticated, typically outlandish, & the constant challenge to the cognitive & esthetic preconceptions of his readers. When 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 sequentially to enlighten a children, Ballard doesn't enjoy the big mass market when a result, however he is recognized by critics as one of the U.K.'s virtually all large writers. He hwhen been influential beyond his mass market profits; he is cited as mayhap a first forbear of the cyberpunk movement by Bruce Sterling in his introduction to the seminal "Mirrorshades" anthology. Too, his parody (or even depth psychology) of U.s. politics, a pamphlet How come We Obviously Fuck Ronald Reagan (later on involved as a chapter within his experimental novel The Atrocity Exhibition), was photocopied and distributed by cut-up at a 1976 Republican convention. The bookseller around Brighton had been prosecuted for selling this pamphlet in the early 1970s, under UK obscenity legislation.

Ballard has besides experienced the noticeable influence in popular music, in which his function has been utilized as a basis for lyrical imaging, particularly amoungst British post-punk groups. Examples include albums like Metamatic by John Foxx, various songs by Joy Divison, and Caring Leatherette by The Normal.

Around 2003, a short darkly funny story of his was adapted into an hour-long television film for the BBC entitled Home by Richard Curson Smith, who too directed it. the plot follows a middle class man who chooses to abandon the outside globe & limit himself to his home, becoming a hermit.

Bibliography
Novels
The Wind From Nowhere (1961) The Drowned World (1962) The Burning World (1964) (also The Drought) (1965) The Crystal World (1966) The Atrocity Exhibition (1969) (also Love and Napalm: Export USA)) (1972) 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 around the Japanese internment camp in Shanghai) The Day of Creation (1987) Running Wild (1988) The Kindness of Women (1991, follow as much as 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) Vermilion Sands (1971) Chronopolis and Other Stories (1971) 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
''A User's Guide to the Millennium: Essays and Reviews'' (1996)