The Unlimited Dream Company (1979) by John Gray

To anyone who thinks of JG Ballard as a dystopian writer obsessed by images of catastrophe this book will come as a surprise. One of his least-known novels, it is also one of the most powerfully lyrical. Ballard's stories depict disaster zones: London drowned by the effects of climate change, an ultra-modern high-rise in which human beings struggle to survive, an American continent covered by desert and rainforest that a ragged band of explorers must cross. Yet the central thrust of his work is that disaster is not always an entirely negative experience. A seemingly destructive alteration in the outer world – geophysical or sociopolitical – may be the trigger for a process of psychological breakthrough. Instead of being destroyed, Ballard's characters are liberated by catastrophe. Far from being a type of dystopian prophecy – though at times it is that too – his work has at its core an experience of inner transformation and renewal.

John Gray. Photograph: Eamonn Mccabe for the Guardian

The Unlimited Dream Company is a succession of images held together by a single landscape, a succession more brilliant and more hallucinatory than anything else in Ballard's fiction. Surrealist painting is a pervasive influence in his work – more influential than that of any writer, he used to say – and he followed the surrealists in believing that the world could be remade by the human mind. The exotic landscapes he conjures are often as important as the characters who inhabit them. Where The Unlimited Dream Company differs from his other novels is in its strongly poetic quality. With its short chapters, some only a page or two long, it reads at times like modernist verse. Only Hello America (1981), where he pictures New York swathed in golden sand-dunes and Las Vegas as the jungle capital of an almost deserted country, is similar in style. But whereas Hello America is full of deadpan humour, the mood that pervades The Unlimited Dream Company is joyful and rhapsodic.

Early this year when the floods hit Shepperton, where Ballard lived from 1960 until his death in 2009, the town became for a time like one of his disaster areas. The Shepperton that appears in these pages is that same Thames suburb more magically transmuted. Hosts of brightly plumed birds – "flamingos and frigate-birds, falcons and deep-water albatross" – have flocked into the town, and when the narrator leans against a pillar box, trying to straighten his flying suit, an eagle "guarding these never-to-be-collected letters snaps at my hands, as if she has forgotten who I am and is curious to inspect this solitary pilot who has casually stepped off the wind into these deserted streets".

It is no accident that the narrator's name is Blake. In a letter the poet William Blake declared "to the eyes of the Man of the Imagination, Nature is Imagination itself". Everything that Ballard's character sees is seen through the eyes of the imagination. It is left open whether anything like the transformed Shepperton he describes exists or is no more than Blake's delusion. He may even be dead and dreaming the place into existence. Impulsive, shifty and at times apparently psychopathic, Blake cannot be expected to give any remotely reliable account of himself. "Rejected would-be mercenary pilot, failed Jesuit novice, unpublished writer of pornography … yet for all these failures I had a tenacious faith in myself, a messiah as yet without a message who would one day assemble a unique identity out of this defective jigsaw."

In the course of his life Ballard creatively deployed a remarkably wide range of different styles and genres, but nearly all of his novels and most of his short stories seem to me to explore a single theme. Whether the subject is an apocalyptic shift in the environment as in The Drowned World (1962) and The Drought (1964), mental breakdown and transgressive sex in The Atrocity Exhibition (1970) and Crash (1973), urban collapse in Concrete Island (1974) and High Rise (1975), the therapeutic functions of crime in Cocaine Nights (1996) and Super-Cannes (2000) or the black comedy of Millennium People (2003) and Kingdom Come (2006), Ballard is showing how the personal identity we construct for ourselves is a makeshift, that comes apart when the stability of society can no longer be taken for granted. Empire of the Sun (1984) – the autobiographical novel Steven Spielberg brought to a wider audience – explores the same theme: it is in extreme situations where our habit-formed identities break down that we learn what it really means to be human. A drastic shift in the familiar scene may be the entry point to a world that is closer to our true nature. The paradox that is pursued throughout Ballard's work is that the surreal worlds created by the unrestrained human imagination may be more real than everyday human life. According to Blake in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, "If the doors of perception were cleansed, every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern." The dishevelled pilot who appears at the start of The Unlimited Dream Company wants to escape the cavern completely. Blake's Shepperton is the world as it could be if the doors of perceptions were ripped from their hinges. The world Blake sees is shaped by unfettered human desire, a creation of the imagination in which the imperatives of society and morality count for nothing.



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For Ballard himself these surreal landscapes may have had a healing function. His traumatic childhood left him with the conviction – fully corroborated by events in the 20th and 21st centuries – that order in society has no more substance or solidity than a rackety stage set. Together with the scenes of cruelty he witnessed after he left the camp in Lunghau, China, where he had been interned with his parents during the second world war, the spectacle of desolation in the empty city of Shanghai must have left deep scars.

Ballard spent 20 years forgetting what he had seen during his childhood, he said more than once, and another 20 remembering. His fiction was a product of this process, an inner alchemy that turned the dross of senseless suffering into something beautiful and life-affirming.

The Atrocity Exhibition (1970) by Hari Kunzru

Hari Kunzru. Photograph: Murdo Macleod for the Guardian

In 1966, New Worlds, a British science fiction magazine edited by the writer Michael Moorcock, published a "condensed novel" by JG Ballard titled "The Assassination Weapon". Moorcock was, he remembers, "delighted" to receive Ballard's copy. "It was exactly what I'd been looking for and I demanded more. He complained I was making his eyes bleed, turning them out. For me it was exemplary, a flag to wave for authors and readers." Later that same year New Worlds published "The Atrocity Exhibition", which would become the title story of Ballard's most notorious book.

In 1970 the American publisher Doubleday agreed to print an edition of Ballard's condensed novels under that title. Marc Haefele, a young Doubleday editor at the time, remembers that a few weeks before publication, the company president was touring a warehouse in Virginia when the book was drawn to his attention. On the spot, he gave the order to pulp the entire print run. A British edition went ahead, but it wasn't until 1972 that an American edition was published, under the title Love and Napalm: Export USA.

Whatever the guardians of public morality found so hard to stomach about The Atrocity Exhibition, it was surely more than dirty words and lèse-majesté. The novel presents fragments or avatars of a traumatised man, variously named Travis, Travers, Traven, Talbot or Talbert, who is conducting some kind of spun-out scientific experiment, which also takes the form of a lecture or media spectacle. Traven is both a researcher and an experimental subject or patient in an institution where white-coated medical science has become contaminated by other things: pornography, celebrity, the imminence of violent disaster. He is observed by one Dr Nathan and has a highly fetishised sexual relationship with Karen Novotny or Catherine Austin or Coma, names for a blank, damaged woman who often seems to be constructed from fragments of female celebrities – Jackie Kennedy, Elizabeth Taylor, Marilyn Monroe.

The Atrocity Exhibition visits terrible violence on these female celebrity bodies, in the form of plane and car crashes, nuclear fallout, disasters of all kinds. Ronald Reagan and the car-safety campaigner Ralph Nader get the same treatment. The book's obscenity, the reason it still has the potential to shock, is a function of its objectivity. It is clinical when, for decency's sake, it ought to feign emotion. It looks on our sacred treasures, our culture's real sacred treasures – the imaginary bodies of famous people – and responds with all the violence and lust and revulsion that the healthy well-adjusted citizen suppresses. Decency is what separates rational economic actors, dutifully maximising their personal benefit, from the racaille, from scum. It is the source of order. Ballard's fictional refusal of it was – and remains – a threat.

JG Ballard at his home in Shepperton, Surrey. Photograph: John Lawerence/ Writer Pictures

Each section of The Atrocity Exhibition is a flight over the same apocalyptic landscape, a landscape that is also the human body, observed with a clinician's eye as it undergoes trauma, as it is anatomised, penetrated, cut and crushed and humiliated, scorched and fucked. This body-landscape is also an image of itself, a mass-media projection made up of Hollywood movies and pornography and news footage of the Vietnam war. Living in the shadow of disaster, Travers is an exemplary modern subject. The only difference between him and the average suburbanite is that he doesn't disguise his abjection. He is a burnt-out case, a celebrity stalker, a kind of psychological crash‑test dummy with a detached professional interest in the brick wall that's about to make contact with his skull. He may, of course, also be insane.

The Atrocity Exhibition is a melancholy book, fixated on something terrible that it can't let go. Its landscape is both dead and accelerating, a windblown desert strewn with the wreckage of modernity that is at the same time a place of unbearable speed and intensity. In 1964 Ballard's wife Mary died suddenly of pneumonia, leaving him to bring up their three children alone. In 2007, when he was already terminally ill, I interviewed him. "I was terribly wounded by my wife's death," he told me. "Leaving me with these very young children, I felt that a crime had been committed by nature against this young woman – and her children – and I was searching desperately for an explanation … To some extent The Atrocity Exhibition is an attempt to explain all the terrible violence that I saw around me in the early 60s. It wasn't just the Kennedy assassination … I think I was trying to look for a kind of new logic that would explain all these events."

The Crystal World (1966) by Robert Macfarlane

Robert MacFarlane. Photograph: Murdo Macleod for the Guardian

In his second novel JG Ballard drowned the Earth, in his third he burned it, and in his fourth he turned it to crystal. Between 1962 and 1966 he ruined the world three times – though he later made it clear that these works were not to be understood as "disaster stories", but as "transformation stories". "The geophysical changes that take place" in them, he said in 1975, "are all positive and good".

Ballard is not always to be trusted as his own best interpreter, nor do any of his extraordinary novels succumb to single readings, but it is true that one ends The Crystal World exhilarated by what has been witnessed. It is in two senses a dazzling work, which leaves the mind's eye scorched into strangeness. Deep in the central African jungle, time itself has begun to leak away, and the consequence of this temporal depletion is a super-saturation of space. Anything present within the "zone" of leakage begins to crystallise: to reiterate itself as pure structure. Orchids and ferns encase themselves in intricately outgrowing replicas. Water hardens into a white and glowing ice. Crocodiles acquire new skins of glassy silver scales.

Downstream of the zone, a man called Sanders arrives at a remote town called Port Matarre just before the equinox. He believes himself to be searching for his former lover, Suzanne, who is working at a leper clinic 50 miles further into the jungle. Self-analysing but also self-deluding, strongly driven but curiously aimless, Sanders is an early version of a character-type that recurs throughout Ballard's fiction. In Matarre an odd gaggle of other visitors gathers: Ventress, white-suited and hyperactive; Balthus, a black-frocked Jesuit priest; and Louise, a French journalist looking for a lost colleague and a scoop. All are drawn, for opaque reasons, deeper into the jungle and closer to the zone. What follows is a kind of "Baroquealypse Now", a river journey into the heart of lightness. All of the main characters eventually reach the ornate crystalline dream-forest of the "focal area", where gem-eyed pythons slither past, and the bodies of men lie embalmed in diamond armour.

It is the central paradox of catastrophe fiction that to destroy the world you must first summon it into being. The Crystal World is surely Ballard's most gorgeous calamity: apocalypse not as abolition but as transfiguration. The prose of the jungle scenes glitters with a dark and elaborate beauty, which feels far from the chrome-sleek sentences of Crash, published seven years later. This is a Byzantine Ballard, relishing the prismatic intricacies of the "jewelled twilight world" he has conjured. The crossing of the glacial river back to Mont Royal, the hunts through the radiant perils of the forest, the siege scene at Thorensen's mansion, the fate of Radek: to me these are among the most brilliant episodes of Ballard's fiction. They lustre on in the memory.

Kingdom Come (2006) by Deborah Levy



Deborah Levy Photograph: Sophia Evans

When I was a young writer in the 1980s, I read Ballard's luminous, erotic story collection The Day of Forever. It was so formally inventive that I would not have guessed it had been published in 1967. Nor did I know that the baffled conservative literary establishment of his generation had tried to see off his early work as science fiction. Ballard always insisted he was more interested in inner space than outer space.

When it came to anything by Ballard, genre really did not matter to me; his fiction could have been filed under "Tales of Alien Abduction" or "Marsh Plants" and I would have hunted it down. Despite our difference in generation, gender and literary purpose, it was clear to me that he and I were both working with some of the same aesthetic influences: film, surrealist art and poetry; Freud's avant-garde theories of the unconscious. I was just starting to write but Ballard made me feel less lonely. Perhaps more significantly we shared the dislocation of not being born in Britain. Home was the imagination. I too was attracted to the paintings of De Chirico and Delvaux, with their dreamplaces – empty, melancholy cities, abandoned temples, broken statues, shadows, exaggerated perspectives.

All these years later, I still marvel at the eerie poetry of Ballard's prose. It lingers like a strange perfume over his concise, matter-of-fact sentences, more heightened in the earlier novels and short stories, but the bottom notes (petrol, anguish, desire, nightmares) are still present in the first three lines of his final and most didactic novel, Kingdom Come: "The suburbs dream of violence. Asleep in their drowsy villas, sheltered by benevolent shopping malls, they wait patiently for the nightmares that will wake them into a more passionate world …"

Kingdom Come is an exuberant, crazed, maverick, 21st-century restaging of Freud's Civilisation and Its Discontents. We have our usual Ballardian narrator, a decent chap, former advertising executive Richard Pearson, who, while driving down the slow lane of the M25, is surprised to find the indicator ticking as if it has a mind of its own. Pearson obeys his car's invitation to turn down a slip road, which "I had somehow known was waiting for me." Ballard believed that our unconscious plans a number of assignments for us. The slip road leads to the small motorway town of Brookfields, near Heathrow. Pearson's father, a retired air pilot, has been killed by a deranged mental patient who opened fire, apparently at random, on the crowds shopping at the Metro-Centre, a massive mall in the middle of this town. Pearson suspects there is more to find out about his father's death and begins his investigations – with the oedipal help of the attractive female doctor who attended to his dying father, and who for some reason has sex with his son.

There are no space ships hovering above the Metro-Centre, with its "humid, microwave air", but the minds of the citizens who shop there have definitely been abducted by hyper-consumerism. Pearson starts to uncover the drives of the savage consumers of Middle England who lug home refrigerators, toasters, televisions, beat up Asian shopkeepers and lavish affection on the three giant teddy bears sitting in the atrium of the Metro-Centre.

Kingdom Come is a sort of fairytale in which "a more primitive world" is "biding its time". The blades of knives on display in the mall's hardware store menacingly form "a silver forest in the darkness". Ballard explores the nationalism that replaces politics, the mass spectacle of St George's flags waved at endless parades and sports matches. He often said that his literary aim was to find the hidden wiring in the fuse box of modernity. In the case of Kingdom Come, consumerism slips into "soft" fascism. As a former advertising man, Pearson knows that "all he is good at is warming the slippers of late capitalism" – and the future is "a cable TV programme going on forever", a barcode, CCTV camera and a parking space.

Cocaine Nights (1996) by James Lever

James Lever. Photograph: Martin Argles for the Guardian

"I could sum up the future in one word," JG Ballard said in 1994, during an interview collected in Extreme Metaphors, the indispensable anthology of Ballard's conversation, "and that word is boring. The future is going to be boring." The gated communities of the Costa del Sol that form the backdrop of Cocaine Nights are the most extreme visualisation in his whole body of work of what he elsewhere pictured as "the whole planet ... turning into a vast Switzerland". Here, in the "fortified enclaves" where "all space has been internalised", none of the holiday villas even look out to the sea, a hundred yards distant. "The residents of the Costa del Sol lived in an eventless world … a world beyond boredom, with no past, no future and a diminishing present … Nothing could ever happen in this affectless realm." They are "refugees from time … needing only that part of the external world that was distilled from the sky by their satellite dishes … already the ghosts of themselves." One of the great and disorienting pleasures of reading Ballard – and especially disorienting in an essentially realistic book such as Cocaine Nights – is finding oneself at a loss to identify exactly where the surreal or fantastical begins, or if indeed it even has. Passages that read like wild satirical exaggeration solidify, on second glance, into clear-eyed reportage.

Ballard might have dreamed up these deserted pueblos, "their architecture dedicated to the abolition of time", using the De Chiricos and Hoppers his imagination was stocked with, but in fact he knew the resorts of the Costas well. By the time he wrote Cocaine Nights, he'd been making trips to the Mediterranean for more than 30 years, taking annual family holidays in Marbella, and then, when the children had grown up, on the French Riviera with his partner Claire Walsh. "I'm always much happier in the south – Spain, Greece – than I am anywhere else," he remarked, Englishly. These holidays helped generate several precursors to Cocaine Nights, beginning with the abandoned Costa Brava of "Low-Flying Aircraft" (1975) and the Hitchcockianly erotic "The 60 Minute Zoom" (1976) – two little masterpieces – and then a pair of more closely related stories, "Having a Wonderful Time" (1978) and "The Largest Theme Park in the World" (1989).

Despite the multiple murders at its heart, Cocaine Nights is one of Ballard's most relaxed works, inaugurating what you might call his late period – that slight flattening of style and deceleration that mark his four last, and four longest, fictions. It is Ballard's beach read, designed to be picked up at an airport, consumed poolside and left, mottled with Ambre Solaire and disintegrating, its binding-glue long melted, on a shelf in the villa between the Dibdins and Rendells it is slyly constructed to resemble. For a novel about leisure – Ballard's only full-length work explicitly about this lifelong preoccupation – the subtly parodic chunky-thriller rhythms and unhurried mystery-story plotting are a perfect fit: it's a holiday book satirising the ritual of the holiday book.

Miracles of Life (2008) by China Miéville



China Miéville. Photograph: Murdo Macleod for the Guardian

This autobiography, Ballard's last work, retains the forensic poise of his fiction, the Ballardian restraint, through monstrosities of violence witnessed by a child; disconsolate urban debris; the drabness of a conservative country that does not know that its past is all it has (here England is a ghost story, while the US is science fiction); heartbreaking and abrupt personal tragedy. But Miracles of Life was written under the unique and poignant circumstances of a terminal illness. The book partakes of the elegiac long before, even, the wrenching and brief final chapter, which in that distinctive calm prose acknowledges pain, the death that is coming, the fears of that death, and the therapeutic nature of what we have just read. Overhanging this last book by the great diagnostician of modernity is his own diagnosis.

Startlingly plain reflections on the classic Ballardian tropes – birds, low-flying aircraft, pool after empty swimming pool – pepper the text. "I … felt that the ruined casino, like the city and the world beyond it, was more real and more meaningful than it had been when it was thronged." "I would see something strange and mysterious but treat it as normal." "The vast lazy planes that floated overhead were emissaries from another world." In the therapeutic reflection not a single person could begrudge him, might Ballard be banalising his own work? Might the cost of this, for the reader, outweigh the benefit?

It does not. Stand down. The book reveals secrets. It answers questions. But by a strange dialectic of exegesis and opacity, it and they remain oblique. "I think now," Ballard says, almost owlishly, "that the drained pool represented the unknown." And with that he gently, politely, glosses everything and nothing. He fills the empty pool with emptiness.

This superposition of introspection and austere secrecy, of simplicity and opacity, is not new. Miracles of Life is Ballard's second autobiography, not his first. In 1984, he published a piece no more than three or four pages long in the magazine Ambit. It is calm and melancholy and hopeful, a life story of a seemingly very different kind. Sometimes it is called "The Autobiography of JGB", sometimes the adjective "Secret" is added to "Autobiography".

In the piece, B wakes to discover first that Shepperton is empty of all other people. Then that London is. Then the world. B wanders and wonders.

The animals are gone too, but – of course – for the birds. The first day, B is anxious, but when he wakes again, "he was relieved to find that Shepperton was still deserted". The relief remains. There is no more horror in the solitude. B explores. Stocks up on food. The seasons pass. He feeds the birds. Until at last, in the piece's final line, "the year ended peacefully, and B was ready to begin his true work."

The story bears very little resemblance to the human trajectory in Miracles of Life, but the calm candid tone, the matter-of-fact surprise at the quotidian in Miracles of Life, is the same as B's sedate astonishment at the empty city. The city in the emptiness of which, at last, contentedly, B could begin his work.

This earlier shadow, this yearning and refracted autobiography, places Ballard at the heart of fiction of the unreal. It makes a kind of sense of all his writing, his strange, dense code full of secrets and revelations. "The Secret Autobiography" is a pre-echo of Miracles of Life. The empty apartment blocks and villages through which young Ballard walks in these pages are outliers of the empty city in which "JGB" begins his work.

The Kindness of Women (1991)by Michel Faber

Michel Faber. Photograph: Murdo Macleod for the Guardian

Like many men scarred by war, JG Ballard spent much of his life determined not to talk about it. Had he died in his early 50s (not such an improbable fate, given his intake of alcohol and tobacco) only one short story, "The Dead Time", would have existed to pay direct witness to his wartime experience. He preferred to divert the memories into more fantastical conceptions: drowned worlds, concrete islands, terminal beaches, atrocity exhibitions.

It wasn't until the 1980s that he commanded his fiction to shine a documentary torch into his own life, to illuminate, and perhaps to exorcise his Shanghai ghosts. He confronted them first in Empire of the Sun, tackled them again from another angle in The Kindness of Women, and finally – just before he died – offered a conventionally "truthful" account in his autobiography, Miracles of Life. The Kindness of Women, marketed as a "sequel" to Empire of the Sun, steered back towards the provocative style of Ballard's earlier work, exploring the psychic fallout of horror and violence. The scene where young Jim watches four somnolent Japanese soldiers slowly murder a Chinese prisoner with telephone wire is a masterpiece of understatement and baleful resonance: even as Jim negotiates his own escape, we know that, on a deeper level, there is no escaping from such a sight.

Seventeen novella-like chapters fictionalise the key phases of Ballard's life from 1937 to 1987, starting with his childhood in Shanghai where the rich, perpetually tipsy westerners play tennis, go shopping and sidestep the growing mound of refugee bodies felled by hunger, typhus and bombs. "To my child's eyes, which had seen nothing else, Shanghai was a waking dream where everything I could imagine had already been taken to its extreme." Those last 15 words serve as a manifesto for all of Ballard's novels.

If the strangeness of Shanghai is meant to foreshadow Auschwitz, Vietnam and the contextless chaos of modern media, Jim's medical studies in postwar England tell us a lot about Ballard's values as a prose-writer. When he begins to dissect a cadaver, a friend warns him: "You'll have to cut away all the fat before you reach the fascia." It's an appropriate metaphor for Ballard's clinical approach to narrative, an odd mixture of focus and nonchalance. While he liked to set himself apart from oh-so-literary avant-gardists by insisting that he was "an old-fashioned storyteller at heart", he was impatient with the conventions that had underpinned respectable mainstream fiction since the Victorians. Surrealism's emphasis on the inexplicable and SF's tolerance for haphazard characterisation and unnaturalistic dialogue suited his own inclinations, even if some readers might find these things alienating.

It is in the area of physicality – especially sex – that Ballard's style jars most with the conventions of British fiction. It's hard to imagine another English author who could come up with a sentence like: "Her small, detergent-chafed hands, with their smell of lipstick, semen and rectal mucus, ran across my forehead." Frequent references to penises, labia, pelvises and prostates underscore Jim's contention that "Gray's Anatomy is a far greater novel than Ulysses." Ballard is unashamedly fascinated by the flesh – every pore, blemish and scar of it. The scenes in The Kindness of Women where Jim dissects the woman's carcass inspire some of Ballard's most tender, most respectful, most reverent writing.

For all his modernity, however, Ballard was formed by the fashions of a previous age; he could never quite shake the values instilled in him by Biggles and Boy's Own. His ambivalent fascination with soldiers, his disdain for the defeatism of the British in Singapore, and his lifelong love affair with fighter planes, set him apart from the long-haired peaceniks of later generations. His relationship with the times was atypical. Indifferent to music, immune to the charms of psychedelia and bemused by the idealism of hippies, he felt less enamoured of the 1960s than many of his fellow experimenters. He approved of the shake-up of the class system, and celebrated the rise of the literary counterculture that promoted his work, but in The Kindness of Women he chooses to present the 60s as an era driven to psychosis by a steady diet of drugs, assassinations, war trauma and TV. "The demise of feeling and emotion, the death of affect, presided like a morbid sun over the playground of that ominous decade."



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Ballard was not an emotionless man and he did not write emotionless fiction. The coolness that many critics have characterised as archetypically "Ballardian" is not as chilly as it seems. In The Kindness of Women, warm feelings – of pity, of passion, of parental love, of fond friendship – course richly beneath the surface of the skin but, like veins that retreat or collapse when a hypodermic needle seeks to penetrate them, they elude the forensic approach of Ballard's pen. The Kindness of Women is a curious hybrid, combining – not always successfully – the merciless thematic rigour of his earlier, more fantastical work and a new humanity that dispelled the deviant cyborg of myth. Many years before, when Crash was rejected by a publisher whose editorial assistant had branded him "beyond psychiatric help", Ballard took the comment as encouraging proof that he'd hit a nerve. By 1991, he no longer revelled in such opprobrium.

In truth, Ballard's basic decency was always there, even in his most outrageous tales. It is a measure of how obtuse the guardians of public morality continue to be, that Ballard was ever accused of being a nihilistic pervert or a champion of orgasmic car crashes. Like all satirists, he assumed that humans should behave compassionately and morally. Grieved by their failure to do so, he expressed his alarm – not with earnest handwringing, but by ushering us straight to a dystopian fait accompli. In short, he shanghaied us.

• Over the course of this year, Fourth Estate will reissue JG Ballard's complete works. The first titles are out this month, the next in June; the pieces above are edited versions of the new introductions.