Novelist JG Ballard dies at 78

The British author JG Ballard, who died on Sunday at 78 after battling cancer for several years, did not like being called a science fiction writer. "By calling a novel like Crash science fiction, you isolate the book and you don't think about what it is," he said. Ballard preferred to think of his work as "picturing the psychology of the future".

Yet the novel for which he was best known, after it was made into a film by Steven Spielberg, had nothing to do with predicting the future: it was Empire of the Sun, based on his childhood in China.

Ballard was born and brought up in the suburbs of Shanghai where his father, a chemist at a textiles firm, was posted. After Pearl Harbour, the 12-year-old Ballard was interned in a prison camp run by the Japanese.

It was 40 years before he felt able to write about the period ­ "20 years to forget, and then 20 years to remember," as he later put it. The novel follows a young English boy, Jim (his lead characters invariably share his name), who gets separated from his parents. He survives on food he finds in the deserted homes of the expat community before he gets picked up by the Japanese.

Ballard once said: "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!"

More typical of his writing was his earlier novel Crash, about a man who gets involved in a road accident and then discovers a sub-culture of people who get a sexual charge out of car crashes. It was filmed by David Cronenberg and became controversial for its sex scenes between James Spader and actresses Deborah Kara Unger and Holly Hunter.

The Daily Mail even led a campaign to have the film banned in Britain: interestingly, there is no mention of that in the paper's respectful write-up of Ballard's life today. (Indeed, it throws readers off the scent by reporting simply that Crash was made into a film starring Jeremy Irons, which it didn't.)

Ballard wrote 15 novels in total and many short stories. As the Times reports today, "His dark, often shocking fiction predicted the melting of the ice caps, the rise of Ronald Reagan, terrorism against tourists and the alienation of a society obsessed with new technology."

As a result, he was one of the few novelists distinctive enough that their name becomes an adjective. 'Ballardian' is defined in the Collins English Dictionary as "resembling or suggestive of the conditions described in Ballard's novels and stories, esp dystopian modernity, bleak man-made landscapes and the psychological effects of technological, social or environmental developments."