Without intent, it seems I am only moved to make a journal entry when some luminary who has planted seeds in my mind garden dies, and so it is with J.G. Ballard, who lost his battle with prostate cancer recently. I was never what you would call a Ballardian, or even that well read in Ballard, having only managed to finish a few of his short stories in my time, while devouring Burroughs, Pynchon, PKD, RAW, and his fellow titan of the New Wave, Michael Moorcock. But something about Ballard always stuck with me, I guess you could say I came to adopt, consciously or not, a Ballardian lens to my reality scope. Sometimes depressing and often disturbing, Ballard's quasi-dystopian characters and settings challenged, and if you persevered, enlightened. His writing went beyond fiction, beyond philosophy - it was alchemy, a balm for the soul in a sick world. I can do no better than to quote Simon Sellars from [link]

"Ballard articulates clearly to me the implications of living in an age of total consumerism, of blanket surveillance, of enslavement designed as mass entertainment. But he also speaks to me of resistance through irony, immersion, ambivalence, imagination -- of remixing, recycling, remaking, remodelling.

His work embraces dystopian scenarios, including the archetypal non-space often characterised as a deadening feature of late capitalism. But this is not simply a call for nihilism. Ballard's characters are not disengaged from their world. Rather, they embody a sense of resistance that derives from full immersion, a therapeutic confrontation with the powers of darkness, whereby merging with dystopian alienation negates its power."

Godspeed, Mr. Ballard, and thanks for the roses in my mind garden.