A Forgotten Literary Prophet

A retrospective on British visionary author JG Ballard

The modernist design of London’s Barbican Estate is said to have inspired J.G. Ballard’s 1975 novel High Rise. Photo by Charlie Egan on Unsplash

They called J.G. Ballard ‘The Seer of Shepperton’, from the suburban English town he lived in for much of his adult life: a tribute to both the prophetic quality and the suburban setting of much of his fiction output. His work paved the way for the New Wave of Science Fiction, a countercultural current of science fiction that revolutionized the genre in the 1960s.

It would be no great stretch to hail Ballard as the founder of cli-fi (climate fiction). His groundbreaking post-apocalyptic novels spelled out with acute foresight the dangers of man-made pollution, envisaging societies swept by extreme climatic events, including drought-induced desertification and mass flooding caused by the melting of the ice-caps, before the consensus behind climate change had formed.

But his work went well beyond science-fiction. Ballard the writer changed and evolved over the years as only a perceptive artist can. His stories, though, remained instantly recognizable, even deserving their own adjective: Ballardian. According to Collins English Dictionary, the definition of Ballardian is:

“adjective. resembling or suggestive of the conditions described in the works of J. G. Ballard, esp dystopian modernity, bleak artificial landscapes, and the…