Posted on 04/19/2009 1:09:57 PM PDT by Borges
British author JG Ballard, famed for novels such as Crash and Empire of the Sun, has died at age 78.
The writer had been ill "for several years" according to his agent Margaret Hanbury and passed away on Sunday. He had been battling prostate cancer since 2006.
Both of his most famous novels were made into movies.
Crash, about car accident sex fetishists, was adapted to the screen by Canadian director David Cronenberg in 1996, while the autobiographical Empire of the Sun, starring a young Christian Bale, became a 1987 Steven Spielberg movie.
Often regarded as a science fiction writer with a dystopian view of the world, Ballard insisted that his works were ways of "picturing the psychology of the future."
Born in 1930 in the International Settlement of Shanghai, China, Ballard's three years at an internment camp run by the Japanese during the Second World War would form the basis of Empire of the Sun, a fictionalized account of his time there.
"I have — I won't say happy — not unpleasant memories of the camp," recalled Ballard in one interview.
"I remember a lot of the casual brutality and beatings-up that went on, but at the same time we children were playing a hundred and one games all the time!"
Became RAF pilot and trained in Moose Jaw He later moved to Britain in 1949 and studied medicine at Cambridge, intending to become a psychiatrist.
In 1951, his short story The Violent Noon won a crime story competition and was published in the student newspaper Varsity.
He abandoned medical studies in 1952 and switched to English Literature at the University of London.
Ballard joined the RAF in 1953 and was sent to the RCAF flight-training base in Moose Jaw, Sask. It was around that time that he also wrote his first science fiction story, Passport to Eternity.
Ballard left the RAF in 1954 and returned to England, working for awhile as an assistant editor on the scientific journal Chemistry and Industry and then becoming a full-time writer in the 1960s.
Ballard would go on to write 15 novels and scores of short stories.
Empire Of The Sun is one of my favorite movies, and was overlooked for the most part when it came out in 1987.
What’s a ‘Crash Writer?’
I started that book - it was the absolute worst book I ever remember reading.
I’m sorry to hear it. I liked his early novels especially. I once taught an SF course and sometimes included “Empire of the Sun” in the reading list.
I also enjoyed “The Drowned World,” “The Crystal World,” and “Unlimited Dream Company.” To tell the truth, I wasn’t that fond of “Crash.”
Crash was awful. I think he intended it as a joke. Or as a conceptual experiment.
“Empire of the Sun” was one of a handful of good Spielberg movies. His first attempt at a “serious” movie, it received mixed reviews.
But I agree with you. I like the movie very much... stunning sets, a dramatic story, excellent performances, and a very moving score.
Speilberg exhibited remarkable restraint on this movie, and as a result less became more.
Unfortunately, I don’t think any of his later “serious” movies have lived up to the standard he set with “Empire of the Sun”.
‘The Color Purple’ was before EOTS. And that whole ‘serious’ tag never made any sense. The Sugarland Express, Close Encounters and E.T. were serious. Schindler’s List was a lot more restrained than Empire...
I always thought of his stuff as verging on psychedelic fantasy. And that one went over the edge. Too much acid is my guess.
Oops on The Color Purple...easy to forget about that!
Sugarland Express...I guess its serious, as serious as you can be with Goldie Hawn, fresh off of Laugh-In. Didn’t Badlands come out right before it?
Perhaps defining EOTS as Spielberg’s first “art” film would have been more appropriate.
As far as “restrained” is concerned, I was referring to Speilberg’s bad habit of over-moralizing and beating the viewer senseless with whatever thematic construct has caught his fancy. I apologize for not clarifying my position.
Just because Schindler’s List is in B&W doesn’t make it restrained. Look at another WWII effort, Saving Private Ryan: simplistic, bombastic overkill.
I consider the possibility of alien life to be serious subject matter, but E.T. and Close Encounters are more in line with entertaining sci-fi lite...certainly not 2001 or Tarkovsky’s Solaris.
Overall Spielberg is not my cup of tea.
Some say Spielberg has a special connection to the child’s mind.
I generally dislike Spielberg because he is overly informed by emotions that ultimately suffocate the linear or logical aspects of the storyline.
Kubrick was supposedly one of his major influences...I don’t see that manifested in any Spielberg film ( Please don’t mention A.I.).
Spielberg’s work, outside of his technical prowess, just seems to be slightly immature.
I have three of his books, which I read in the seventies, and which to my amazement survived several moves, a marriage, and other potential sources of getting lost.
Realized I had not read them since, so I pulled "The Wind from Nowhere," read it, and found it quite good, once again.
People will do anything for a potato.
Anyone who thought that Amon Goetz was sympathetic, just because he wasn't a complete caricature, isn't playing with a full deck.
He was certainly charismatic and had flashes of sympathy as portrayed by Ralph Fiennes. There were certain misguided souls who thought the very idea of making film about the Holocaust which was centered around Nazi characters was offensive. I don’t agree obviously.
Seeing that Spielberg is Jewish they didn’t think it through!
RIP.
R.I.P.
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