In addition to his novels, Ballard made extensive use of the short story form. Many of his earliest published works in the 1950s and 1960s were short stories, including influential works like Chronopolis. [60] In an essay on Ballard, Will Wiles notes how his short stories "have a lingering fascination with the domestic interior, with furnishing and appliances", adding, "it's a landscape that he distorts until it shrieks with anxiety". He concludes that "what Ballard saw, and what he expressed in his novels, was nothing less than the effect that the technological world, including our built environment, was having upon our minds and bodies." [61]

In 1984, 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; [4] three years later, the American film director Steven Spielberg adapted the novel into a film of the same name. Biographically, the novelist's journey from youth to mid-age is chronicled, with fictional inflections, in The Kindness of Women (1991), and in the autobiography Miracles of Life (2008). Some of Ballard's early novels have been cinematically adapted, such as Crash (1996), directed by David Cronenberg, and High-Rise (2015), directed by Ben Wheatley, an adaptation of the novel High-Rise (1975). The great impact the book had upon publication must be due to the novelty of the idea and the presentation. Interestingly, Ben Wheatley’s movie version of Ballard’s 1975 novel High-Rise, about the psychopathology of living in a tall building (a cousin to Crash), sees it more as a period piece, a surreal twist on 70s design that is very strange, very Sanderson. Maybe that is how any new adaptation of Crash would have to work. But Cronenberg’s film still has a metal-crunching impact.Braced on his left elbow, he continued to work himself against the girl's hand, as if taking part in a dance of severely stylised postures that celebrated the design and electronics, speed and direction of an advanced kind of automobile. In 1996, David Cronenberg’s movie Crash, now rereleased in 4K digital, became the subject of the last great “banning” controversy for a new film in Britain. His vision of the erotic car crash got brimstone denunciations from the Evening Standard and the Daily Mail. This delayed its BBFC certificate, and Westminster council issued a solemn edict forbidding it in West End cinemas.

Ballard continued to write until the end of his life, and also contributed occasional journalism and criticism to the British press. Of his later novels, Super-Cannes (2000) was well received, [43] winning the regional Commonwealth Writers' Prize. [44] These later novels often marked a move away from science fiction, instead engaging with elements of a traditional crime novel. [45] Ballard was offered a CBE in 2003, but refused, calling it "a Ruritanian charade that helps to prop up our top-heavy monarchy". [46] [47] In June 2006, he was diagnosed with terminal prostate cancer, which metastasised to his spine and ribs. The last of his books published in his lifetime was the autobiography Miracles of Life, written after his diagnosis. [48] His final published short story, "The Dying Fall", appeared in the 1996 issue 106 of Interzone, a British sci-fi magazine. It was reproduced in The Guardian on 25 April 2009. [49] He was buried in Kensal Green Cemetery. In the 1970's, J G Ballard focused on controversial themes of sex, excess, and nightmarish scenes that disturbs the reader four decades or more later. From "High Rise", (1975); to "The Atrocity Exhibition", (1972). "Crash', is about Ballard, who is turned on by car crashes, as he meets various people: Vaughn, (a man who fuses technology is sex), while the characters over-indulge in behaviour that makes it an uncomfortable read. It is world's away from "The Drowned World", (1962), Ballard's science-fiction novel, to the well-known autobiographical "Empire of the Sun", (1984), (filmed by Steven Spielberg in 1987). J. G. Ballard was born to Edna Johnstone (1905–1998) [6] and James Graham Ballard (1901–1966), who was a chemist at the Calico Printers' Association, a textile company in the city of Manchester, and later became the chairman and managing director of the China Printing and Finishing Company, the Association's subsidiary company in Shanghai. [6] The China in which Ballard was born featured the Shanghai International Settlement, where Western foreigners "lived an American style of life". [7] At school age, Ballard attended the Cathedral School of the Holy Trinity Church, Shanghai. [8] Upon the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945), the Ballard family abandoned their suburban house, and moved to a house in the city centre of Shanghai to avoid the warfare between the Chinese defenders and the Japanese invaders. Crash is a novel by English author J. G. Ballard, first published in 1973 with cover designed by Bill Botten. It follows a group of car-crash fetishists who become sexually aroused by staging and participating in car accidents, inspired by the famous crashes of celebrities.From the distinct nature of the literary fiction of J. G. Ballard arose the adjective Ballardian, defined as: "resembling or suggestive of the conditions described in J. G. Ballard's novels and stories, especially dystopian modernity, bleak man-made landscapes, and the psychological effects of technological, social or environmental developments". [5] The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography describes the novelist Ballard as preoccupied with " Eros, Thanatos, mass media and emergent technologies". [6] Life [ edit ] Shanghai [ edit ] Barker, Martin; Arthurs, Jane; Harindranath, Ramaswami (2001). The Crash Controversy: Censorship Campaigns and Film Reception. Wallflower Press. ISBN 978-1-903364-15-4 . Retrieved 15 September 2009. Note, however, that there is a lot of sex, and it is emphatically pornographic, so potential readers be warned. What exactly is he trying to sell?': J.G. Ballard's Adventures in Advertising, part 1". Ballardian.com. 4 May 2009. Archived from the original on 22 April 2018 . Retrieved 21 May 2018.