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Biografia e opere di Ballard, parte seconda.

In October 2008, before his death,

Ballard's literary agent Margaret Hanbury

brought an outline for a book by Ballard

with the working title Conversations with

My Physician: The Meaning, if Any, of Life

 to the Frankfurt Book Fair.

The physician in question is oncologist 

Professor Jonathan Waxman of Imperial

College, London, who was treating Ballard

for prostate cancer.

While it was to be in part a book about

cancer, and Ballard's struggle with it, it

reportedly was to move on to broader themes.

In April 2009 The Guardian reported that 

HarperCollins announced that Ballard's 

Conversations with My Physiciancould not

be finished and plans to publish it were

abandoned.

 In 2013, a 17-page untitled typescript

listed as "Vermilion Sands short story in

draft" in the British Library catalogue and

edited into an 8,000-word text by Bernard

Sigaud appeared in a short-lived French

reissue of the collection under the title

"Le labyrinthe Hardoon" as the first story

of the cycle, tentatively dated "late 1955/

early 1956" by Sigaud and others.

Archive

In June 2010 the British Library acquired

Ballard's personal archives under the British

government's acceptance in lieuscheme for 

death duties.

The archive contains eighteen holograph 

manuscripts for Ballard's novels, including

the 840-page manuscript for Empire of the

Sun, plus correspondence, notebooks, and

photographs from throughout his life.

In addition, two typewritten manuscripts for 

The Unlimited Dream Company are held at

the Harry Ransom Center at the University

of Texas at Austin

Dystopian fiction

With the exception of his autobiographical

novels, Ballard most commonly wrote in the

post-apocalyptic dystopia genre.

His most celebrated novel in this regard is 

Crash, in which cars symbolise the mechanisation

of the world and man's capacity to destroy

himself with the technology he creates.

The characters (the protagonist, called Ballard,

included) become increasingly obsessed

with the violent psychosexuality of car

crashes in general, and celebrity car crashes

in particular.

Ballard's disturbing novel was turned into

a controversial-and likewise disturbing-cerebral

 film by David Cronenberg.

Particularly revered among Ballard's admirers

is his short story collection Vermilion Sands 

(1971), set in an eponymous desert resort

town inhabited by forgotten starlets, insane

heirs, very eccentric artists, and the merchants

and bizarre servants who provide for them.

Each story features peculiarly exotic technology

such as cloud-carving sculptors performing for

a party of eccentric onlookers, poetry-

composing computers, orchids with operatic

voices and egos to match, phototropicself-

painting canvases, etc. In keeping with Ballard's

central themes, most notably technologically-

mediated masochism, these tawdry and weird

technologies service the dark and hidden

desires and schemes of the human castaways

who occupy Vermilion Sands, typically with

psychologically grotesque and physically fatal

results.

In his introduction to Vermilion Sands, Ballard

cites this as his favourite collection.

In a similar vein, his collection Memories of the

Space Age explores many varieties of individual

and collective psychological fallout from-and

initial deep archetypal motivations for-the

American space exploration boom of the 1960s

and 1970s.

Commentators such as Will Self have described

much of his fiction as being concerned with

'idealised gated communities; the affluent, and

the ennui of affluence [where] the virtualised

world is concretised in the shape of these gated

developments.'

He added in these fictional settings 'there is no

real pleasure to be gained; sex is commodified

and devoid of feeling and there is no relationship

with the natural world.

These communities then implode into some form

of violence.

Budrys, however, mocked his fiction as "call[ing]

for people who don't think ... to be the protagonist

of a J. G. Ballard novel, or anything more than a

very minor character therein, you must have

cut yourself off from the entire body of scientific

education".[

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.

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.'

Television

On 13 December 1965, BBC Two screened an

adaptation of the short story "Thirteen to

Centaurus" directed by Peter Potter.

The one-hour drama formed part of the first

season of Out of the Unknown and starred 

Donald Houston as Dr. Francis and James

Hunter as Abel Granger. In 2003, Ballard's

short story "The Enormous Space" (first

published in the science fiction magazine 

Interzone in 1989, subsequently printed in

the collection of Ballard's short stories War

Fever) was adapted into an hour-long

television film for the BBC entitled Home by 

Richard Curson Smith, who also directed it.

The plot follows a middle class man who

chooses to abandon the outside world and

restrict himself to his house, becoming a hermit.

Influence

Ballard is cited as an important forebear of

the cyberpunk movement by Bruce Sterling

 in his introduction to the seminalMirrorshades 

anthology.

Ballard's parody of American politics, the

pamphlet "Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan",

which was subsequently included as a chapter

in his experimental novel The Atrocity Exhibition,

was photocopied and distributed by pranksters

at the 1980 Republican National Convention.

In the early 1970s, Bill Butler, a bookseller in 

Brighton, was prosecuted under UK obscenity

laws for selling the pamphlet.

In his 2002 book Straw Dogs, the philosopher 

John Gray acknowledges Ballard as a major

influence on his ideas. Ballard described the

book as a "clear-eyed assessment of human

nature and our almost unlimited gift for self-

delusion."

According to literary theorist Brian McHale, 

The Atrocity Exhibition is a "postmodernist 

text based on science fictiontopoi.

Lee Killough directly cites Ballard's seminal 

Vermilion Sands short stories as the inspiration

for her collection Aventine, also a backwater

resort for celebrities and eccentrics where

bizarre or frivolous novelty technology facilitates

the expression of dark intents and drives. 

Terry Dowling's milieu of Twilight Beach is also

influenced by the stories of Vermilion Sands 

and other Ballard works.

In Simulacra and Simulation, Jean Baudrillard 

hailed Crash as the "first great novel of the

universe of simulation."

Ballard also had an interest in the relationship

between various media. In the early 1970s,

he was one of the trustees of theInstitute for

Research in Art and Technology.

In popular music

Ballard has had a notable influence on popular

music, where his work has been used as a basis

for lyrical imagery, particularly amongst British 

post-punk and industrial groups.

Examples include albums such as Metamatic by 

John Foxx, various songs by Joy Division (most

famously "Atrocity Exhibition" from Closer),

"High Rise" by Hawkwind "Miss the Girl" by 

The Creatures (based on Crash), "Down in

the Park" by Gary Numan, "Chrome Injury"

by The Church, "Drowned World" by Madonna 

"Warm Leatherette" by The Normal and 

Atrocity Exhibition by Danny Brown.

 SongwritersTrevor Horn and Bruce Woolley

 credit Ballard's story "The Sound-Sweep"

with inspiring The Buggles' hit "Video Killed

the Radio Star",and the Buggles' second album

 included a song entitled "Vermillion Sands.

" The 1978 post-punk bandComsat Angels 

took their name from one of Ballard's short

stories.

An early instrumental track by British electronic

musicgroup The Human League "4JG" bears

Ballard's initials as a homage to the author

(intended as a response to "2HB" byRoxy Music).

The Manic Street Preachers include a sample

from an interview with Ballard in their song

"Mausoleum".Klaxons named their debut album 

Myths of the Near Future after one of Ballard's

short story collections. 

The Sound of Animals Fighting took the name

of the song "The Heraldic Beak of the Manufacturer's

Medallion" from Crash. The song "Terminal Beach"

by the American band Yacht is a tribute to his

short story collection that goes by the same

name.