J.G. Ballard

A nattily dressed father of three, British science-fiction and international "cult author" J.G. Ballard was the picture of suburban propriety. But the orderliness of his personal life allowed him to create a surreal, visionary fiction that was often frankly pathological.

As a result of his bleak youth in a Japanese prison camp, Ballard, who died on April 19 at 78, was convinced that 20th century life was a frail shell of pretense over strong, dark, violent impulses. His prose had a lucid, often clinical air, but his characters were weird iconic figures lost in their obsessions over sex, drugs, media, massive disasters, car crashes, dead pop stars, hydrogen bombs and fatal medical experiments.

Many were baffled or repelled by this unique sensibility--Ballard boasted for years that a publisher's reader had once described him as "beyond psychiatric help." Others were mesmerized. Critics came to rank him with Kafka, Italo Calvino, Stanislaw Lem, Jorge Luis Borges and William Burroughs.

Of course, there were cult movies, and Ballard became best known for those: Steven Spielberg's WW II epic Empire of the Sun and David Cronenberg's adaptation of Crash, the 1996 shock flick that caused a stunned moral panic in Britain 23 years after Ballard's novel was published.

Ballard met his late successes with a brisk, ironic air. His final book, a memoir, was full of warmth and kindness for the people around him, but this poet of the 20th century's dark side was a stoic figure; the visionary had his cult, but he had no equals.

Sterling is an American science-fiction writer and the author of the Mirrorshades anthology