I've read most of what he ever wrote, from The Crystal World whose images still live with me now, to his last book, A Miracle of Life, a sort of autobiography in which, right at the end, he casually announces that he's dying.

A fantastic range of work that made you wonder where that inspiration sprung from but which was partly answered by his semi-fictional account in The Empire of the Sun of his astonishingly surreal childood experiences of Shanghai under Japanese occupation in WWII.

I always eagerly anticipated the next Ballard but, sadly, they'll be no more.

I'm sorry to hear of Ballard's death, and am reminded to pull out a few volumes from the shelf for a re-read. Empire of the Sun has been one of those books that I've gone back and read several times in my life, but nothing Ballard ever did has surpassed his fantastic short sci-fi. The Voices of Time and Other Stories, The Four Dimensional Nightmare, The Atrocity Exhibition. The story The Voices of Time particulary causes me to feel a kind of haunted unease every time I read it.

Ballard's ideas were interesting but at best his prose style was workmanlike, at worst it was awful.

Most of his work is set in the near future, yet it has dated horribly. As a prophet and visionary his only value was that he was always wrong about the future, which is a case for optimism.

No surprise then that his most successful book is his most conventional. The excellent "Empire of Sun" is a thinly disguised memoir of three horrific years in a Japanese prisoner of war camp in the 1940s.

By all accounts he was a kind and decent man, but he wasn't a good writer, let alone a great one.

Can the haters at least wait 'til the body's cold before they start to piss on it?

Ballard's prose was not "workmanlike," as a previous commentator slurs; his style was clinically precise. The film of Crash was one of those very rare instances of a novelist's work landing in the lap of a filmmaker with a complementary sense of vision. Like Ballard, Cronenberg's work is deceptively simple and clear.

It's hard to imagine how Ballard's work could be "wrong" about the future when it was never really about the future to begin with. His apocalyptic novels (THE DROWNED WORLD; THE CRYSTAL WORLD; THE BURNED WORLD) weren't proscriptive, plotting out realistic endings to our world: they were surreal meditations. And his triptych of alienated and alienating novels of the early '70s (CRASH, CONCRETE ISLAND, HIGH RISE) were bold reimaginings of the meaning and purpose of "speculative fiction." He posited the existence of radically futuristic ideas like automobiles, freeways, and high rise apartment buildings; it didn't matter so much that they already existed because Ballard rebuilt them in his imaginal space, pushing their dehumanizing aspects to their outer limits. Transformed, they stood revealed as aspects of the naked surreality of the then-present, crystallizing a hidden death wish lurking beneath the sheen of every car commercial, the cold contempt for the messiness of human emotion evident in every city planner's sterile, depopulated scale model.

I enjoyed all his work and was fascinated. His influence is well known and deep. I'm sorry to hear of his death.

You nailed it.

Ballard wrote beautifully. His works float in the science fiction category, but they're not anchored to it.

The Most Overrated Writer of His Generation -- English_roG

Though not the quite the same generation (about eight or nine years difference) Norman Mailer was easily the most overrated of the famous who have recently passed on. Furthermore, Ballard was never all that popular and never lionized to the degree a number of other "important" writers have been.

You write:

Can the haters at least wait 'til the body's cold before they start to piss on it?

The people you're lashing out against aren't "haters," just people who disagree with other people's assessment of Ballard's writing. You (and O'Hehir) think Ballard was a fine writer, and you have the right to your opinion. Others disagree, and they have a right to their opinions as well. The idea that when any public figure dies, there should be a mourning period in which the inevitable lionization passes unchallenged is absurd.

The issue is that when a public figure, specifically an artist dies, it seems to be the time to celebrate their life's work. This is just simple human decency. What happens often here, on Salon, at least (and some comments about Ingmar Bergman come to mind), is that some people feel this is their moment to assert some sort of superiority by saying, "you think he was good, but I, who am more intelligent, know better..."

This statement by English_roG "he wasn't a good writer..." what does that mean? Explain, man. Back it up! Give me an example! Say his prose was workmanlike, does this discount the value of his ideas? The scope of his influence?

Many of us read Ballard and are enthralled by his ideas, by his stories, by his nightmare visions of the present (not really the future,) are we all stupid?

When I read Ballard, I am reading someone who was one of the first writers to consider our dying planet, the effects of media on how we live our lives and the obsessions it creates in us, our relationship to technology and how it alters out consciousness and our biology and redefines transgression and pathology. I'm reading about the twentieth century.

"Oswald was the starter.

From his window above the track he opened the race by firing the starting gun. It is believed that the first shot was not properly heard by all the drivers. In the following confusion Oswald fired the gun two more times, but the race was already under way.

Kennedy got off to a bad start. "

- J.G. Ballard, from The Assassination of JFK Considered as a Downhill Race

..especially Empire of the Sun. Whenever I want to feel like committing suicide, he's my go-to guy.

And for someone like me, it's hard not to like someone who said that science fiction was the 20th century's preeminent literature, and "… if it were possible to scrap the whole of existing literature, [...] all writers would find themselves inevitably producing something very close to science fiction..."

Also, his JFK piece was based on Alfred Jarry's "The Crucifixion Considered as an Uphill Bicycle Race" which is equally brilliant. It's really no surprise to me that he should admire and emulate that most absurd of absurdists.