by Michael Dirda on washingtonpost.com

J.G. Ballard, who died earlier this year at the age of 78, was once acclaimed by the novelist Kingsley Amis as “the most imaginative of H.G. Wells’s successors.” Not a bad encomium for a British science-fiction writer. On the other hand, Martin Amis goes his father one better by suggesting that Ballard might well be “the most original English writer of the last century.” In particular, Amis fils praises “the marvelous creaminess” of Ballard’s prose and “the weird and sudden expansions of his imagery.” Ballard is, in truth, a literary surrealist, and his dreamlike narratives reveal a psychoanalytic intensity reminiscent of Kafka’s more somber fables, Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness,” George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four” and both William Golding’s “Lord of the Flies” and William Burroughs’s “Naked Lunch.”

As Ballard once said, “The only truly alien planet is Earth,” and so his sui generis science fiction relentlessly explores the darker reaches of what he once dubbed “inner space.” There are no ray guns and bug-eyed monsters in the nearly 1,200 pages of “The Complete Stories of J.G. Ballard.” Instead, Ballard’s stories are, in his own words, “mental explorations, evocative journeys in the mind.” Little wonder that the sf author he most resembles is our own homegrown chronicler of paranoia Philip K. Dick.

Usually, Ballard’s stories open with a striking sentence, then plunge the reader directly into some hallucinatory environment and eventually conclude with an ambiguous and enigmatic epiphany. Eerie and melancholy, they unsettle like a Dalí painting or a Helmut Newton photograph.

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Do you know and like James Graham Ballard? Have you read any of his books?