Cats, whisky and modernity: the J.G. Ballard I knew

That cinema is having another Ballardian moment will surprise few fans. J.G. Ballard, who died of cancer in 2009 at the age of 78, was one of the darkest, most unsettling of post-war British novelists. In a career that spanned half a century from his debut as a science-fiction writer in the mid-1950s, his surreal imagination confronted such subjects as nuclear catastrophe and planetary drought. His discomfiting novel Crash (1973) attributed a deviant sexuality to the road accident. Ballard had a taste for ‘automobile pornography’, according to his biographer John Baxter, and fantasised about having sex with Margaret Thatcher in the back of the prime-ministerial Daimler V8.

In 1991, I called on Ballard at his home in Shepperton off the M3, where he had lived for 30 years. Shepperton had been attacked by Martians in The War of the Worlds, and in his fiction Ballard often tried to complete the task that H.G.