J.G. Ballard is dead

J.G. Ballard has died of cancer.

This happened a few days ago and I just found out about it now. I don’t watch television news and only sporadically check CNN’s website, so most of the news I hear is through other people. But Ballard, despite all of his writing, is still probably not mainstream enough to have his death widely reported. I might not have heard about it for months if I hadn’t randomly looked at his Wikipedia page a few minutes ago.

I’m surprised there hasn’t been a thread about this already. There seem to be several fans of his here.

Apparently he had been very ill for several years, with prostate cancer which spread all over his body. (I have to wonder what Ballard himself thought about all of this happening to him, since his own writing seems so pre-occupied with the destruction of the human body.)

One of my favorite authors. I met him in the 80s, when I was working in a bookstore, and he was quiet, stately, gentlemanly; you’d never guess at the darkness in his writing from meeting him. Very, very sad.