I guess no one else thinks today should be a holiday. Ballard was known for a few novels by the mainstream press, Empire of the Sun was probably the most famous.
For me, he changed the way I think and look at the everyday world around me. I read three novels of his back-to-back-to-back and radically changed what I made as art and how I thought about art, sex and our political system. Those books were; High-Rise, Crash, and Concrete Island.
It wasn’t that these books were shocking in an accusatory way, it was that they were so matter of fact in a “this is how it’s going to be sort of way” – problem was, they were mostly dead on accurate.
Martin Amis wrote: “Ballard is quite unlike anyone else; indeed, he seems to address a different – a disused – part of the reader’s brain.” The trouble is, after reading and thinking about the work – those parts of the brain start to get used. To great effect, I have rarely met someone who has read Ballard and has not struck me as someone I should know better.
In Simulacra and Simulation, Jean Baudrillard hailed Crash as the first great novel of the universe of simulation. That praise alone should send you either running towards or running away from JG Ballards writing.