This Is The Way, Step Inside. This Is The Way, Step Inside.

Today we lost JG Ballard.

Beyond the obvious debt we owe - and lets face it, he pretty much perfected the patchwork novel with The Atrocity Exhibition and Vermillion Sands, without either of which it's doubtful that Doubtless Wonder would ever have took the turns it has - he gave us so much more.

As a wee slip of a lad reading old New Worlds paperbacks, I found this strange brand of SF which seemed to really speak to me. None of the red-hating rocket-shippery of the yanks' sci-fi, this was English through and through; Cold, clear and brutal as ice. What few happy endings there were came as a real surprise, and you felt almost cheated when someone made it past the final paragraph in one piece. Moorcock and Aldiss created worlds and characters that will stay with me forever, but in The Drowned World, Ballard gave me the most beautiful vision of the apocalypse I've ever encountered. Even now, with every newspaper mention of melting ice caps and rising sea levels, my inner 12-year-old flashes back to The Drowned World and remembers that actually, that sounds pretty damn cool...

The apocalypse, Ballard style, is an extremely attractive proposition, like a bizarre collision between Heart Of Darness and The Kraken Wakes. The Crystal World adds in crystallization and leprosy, while the smaller-scale endings of Empire Of The Sun and Crash (World War II and fatal car crashes, respectively) are if anything even more exciting, liberating and arousing. Possibly too arousing, but what the hell... The man gave us President Charles Manson for christ's sake! Even if it wasn't the real Manson and we had to go through complete economic meltdown and ecological disaster to get there (I'm pretty sure it was fiction...), it would be worth it to see that.

On top of all that (and Cocaine Nights, Super-Cannes, Concrete Island and the rest), Ballard lent titles to Joy Division, Klaxons, Hawkwind and, erm, Buggles. He inspired Video Killed The Radio Star.

Video. Killed. The. Radio. Star.

Oh yes.

And finally, in a one-two Ballard/Cronenberg titanic tag team match, he sent your favourite authors all the way to Wigan. There was no other option as there were no other cinemas willing to show the film adaptation of Crash. We've got Liverpool at one end of the road, Manchester at the other, and we had to go all the way to Wigan to see James Spader dry humping a leg wound. Last time I saw the film, it was on Channel 4, not long after the watershed and not one newspaper took the time to denounce it on the front page. Oh brave new world...

So anyway, today we lost JG Ballard. The apocalypse is a step closer, but it won't be half as attractive without him there.

Karl