The novelist JG Ballard, who conjured up a bleak vision of modern life in a series of powerful novels and short stories published over more than 50 years, died today after a long battle with cancer.

His agent, Margaret Hanbury, said tonight that it was "with great sadness" that the 78-year-old author passed away yesterday morning after years of ill health.

Hanbury, who worked with Ballard for more than 25 years, said he was a "brilliant, powerful" novelist. "JG Ballard has been a giant on the world literary scene for more than 50 years. Following his early novels of the 60s and 70s, his work then reached a wider audience with the publication of Empire of the Sun in 1984 which won several prizes and was made in to a film by Steven Spielberg.

"His acute and visionary observation of contemporary life was distilled into a number of brilliant, powerful novels which have been published all over the world and saw Ballard gain cult status."

Inspired by the popular science fiction magazines he came across while stationed in Canada with the RAF, Ballard began publishing short stories evoking fractured landscapes full of wrecked machinery, deserted beaches and desolate buildings.

Novels of disaster and experimentation, including 1962's The Drowned World and 1973's Crash, later made into a film by David Cronenberg, garnered him a growing reputation as an anti-establishment avant garde writer. Crash, in which a couple become sexually aroused through car crashes, was written as a motorway extension was being built past the end of his street in Shepperton, west London.

In 1984, Ballard reached a new level of public recognition with Empire of the Sun, a straightforwardly realist novelisation of his detention as a teenager in a Japanese camp for civilians in Shanghai.

It had taken him 40 years to prepare himself to tackle this formative period of his life – "20 years to forget, and then 20 years to remember," as he later put it. The novel follows a young English boy who, like many of Ballard's narrators, shares the author's name, during the Japanese occupation of Shanghai. Separated from his parents, Jim at first survives on abandoned packets of food in the deserted mansions of the international settlement, before being picked up by the Japanese and interned in the Lunghua Civilian Assembly Centre, where he relishes his unaccustomed freedom amid hunger, disease and death.

Ballard said of his childhood: "I have – I won't say happy – not unpleasant memories of the camp. 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!"

Born in Shanghai in 1930, Ballard came to England with his parents after the war, where he became a boarder at the Leys school in Cambridge; stepping, as he put it, "out of one institution, into another." After studying medicine at Cambridge, which he dismissed as an "academic theme park", he studied English at the University of London, before taking on a succession of jobs and writing short fiction in his spare time.

His first published story, a tale of singing plants called Prima Belladonna, appeared in the magazine Science Fantasy in 1956, the same year as an exhibition at the Whitechapel gallery which marked the birth of pop art. In this and the work of the surrealists such as Max Ernst, René Magritte, Salvador Dali and Paul Delvaux he found the inspiration for what he later called a "fiction for the present day".

The young science fiction author "wasn't interested in the far future, spaceships and all that", he explained; rather he was interested in "the evolving world, the world of hidden persuaders, of the communications landscape developing, of mass tourism, of the vast conformist suburbs dominated by television – that was a form of science fiction, and it was already here".

The sudden death of his wife, Mary, while on holiday in 1964 left him to bring up three children single-handedly, but the domesticity of his life in Shepperton let Ballard's imagination break free, with his work moving towards an unsettling experimental realism which pushed at the boundaries of 1960s Britain.

His later work continued to subject modern life to its own extremes, with a sinister corporate dystopia in 2000's Super Cannes, a middle-class revolution in 2003's Millennium People and a descent into consumerist fascism in 2006's Kingdom Come. But the label of science fiction writer still stuck, much to Ballard's irritation, partly as a way of "defusing the threat". "By calling a novel like Crash science fiction, you isolate the book and you don't think about what it is," he explained.

He kept the literary world at arm's length, and refused a CBE in 2003, pouring scorn on the honours system as a "Ruritanian charade that helps to prop up our top-heavy monarchy".

He is survived by his partner Claire Walsh and three children, James, Fay and Beatrice.

CHECK OUT EMPIRE OF THE SUN. HE PERFECTLY DESCRIBES THE YELLOW PERIL:
N.B. READ THE BOOK NOT THE STUPID MOVIE. IT WILL TRULY CHILL YOU TO THE BONE.

It shows up kwanism as a deluded myth.

also all the hardcore adult characters are american. The bris, japs and chinese are all shown up a cowards. It just shows what americans were made off pre-1960's

[ame="http://www.amazon.com/Empire-Sun-J-G-Ballard/dp/0743265238/ref=pd_bbs_sr_5?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1240238076&sr=8-5"]Amazon.com: Empire of the Sun: J. G. Ballard: Books[/ame]

[ame] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empire_of_the_sun [/ame]

The novel recounts the story of a young English boy, Jim Graham (Ballard's first and middle names are James Graham), who lives with his parents in Shanghai. After the Pearl Harbor attack, the Japanese occupy the Shanghai International Settlement, and in the following chaos Jim becomes separated from his parents.

He spends some time in abandoned mansions, living on remnants of packaged food, but is soon picked up by the Japanese and interned in the Lunghua Civilian Assembly Center.

Although the Japanese are "officially" the enemies, Jim identifies partly with them, both because he adores the pilots with their splendid machines and because he feels that Lunghua is still a comparatively safe place for him in these times.

Towards the end of the war, with the Japanese army collapsing, the food supply runs short. Jim barely survives, with people around him starving to death.
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Ballard's father was a chemist at a Manchester-headquartered textile firm, the Calico Printers Association, and became chairman and managing director of its subsidiary in Shanghai, the China Printing and Finishing Company. Ballard was born and raised in the Shanghai International Settlement, an area under foreign control and dominated by American cultural influences. He was sent to the Cathedral School in Shanghai. After the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War, Ballard's family were forced to temporarily evacuate their suburban home and rent a house in downtown Shanghai to avoid the shells fired by Chinese and Japanese forces.

After the Pearl Harbor attack, the Japanese occupied the International Settlement. In early 1943 they began interning Allied civilians, and Ballard was sent to the Lunghua Civilian Assembly Center with his parents and younger sister. He spent over two years, the remainder of World War II, in the internment camp. His family lived in a small area in G block, a two-story residence for 40 families. He attended school in the camp, the teachers being inmates from a number of professions. These experiences formed the basis of Empire of the Sun, although Ballard exercised considerable artistic licence in writing the book (notably removing his parents from the bulk of the story).[4][5]

It is often supposed that Ballard's exposure to the atrocities of war at an impressionable age explains the apocalyptic and violent nature of much of his fiction.[6][7][8] Martin Amis wrote that Empire of the Sun "gives shape to what shaped him."[7] However, Ballard's own account of the experience is more nuanced: "I don't think you can go through the experience of war without one's perceptions of the world being forever changed. The reassuring stage set that everyday reality in the suburban west presents to us is torn down; you see the ragged scaffolding, and then you see the truth beyond that, and it can be a frightening experience."[9] But also: "I have — I won't say happy — not unpleasant memories of the camp. [...] I remember a lot of the casual brutality and beatings-up that went on — but at the same we children were playing a hundred and one games all the time!"[10]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._G._Ballard