Dystopian novelist JG Ballard, 1930-2009

JG Ballard, who has died aged 78, was one of the few writers to achieve the distinction of earning his own adjective, said the Times. According to the Collins English Dictionary, something is 'Ballardian' if it evokes "dystopian modernity, bleak man-made landscapes and the psychological effects of technological or environmental developments".

For these were the lifelong obsessions of Ballard's fiction, from early novels such as The Drowned World - which imagined, with striking prescience, the planet submerged after the melting of the ice cap - to mid-period shockers such as Crash, which explored the eroticism (as the author saw it) of car accidents. Yet by an odd twist of fate, Ballard will be remembered by the general public for a more conventional offering, his moving semifictionalised memoir of growing up in war-torn China, Empire of the Sun.

The success of this book, and its film adaptation by Steven Spielberg, made Ballard a rich man, yet he saw no reason to leave his modest home in the London suburb of Shepperton. He enjoyed watching the area deteriorating over time, he told bemused interviewers, and found a "perverse beauty" in the nearby motorway and the sprawl of Heathrow Airport.

James Graham Ballard was born in Shanghai in 1930, the son of a textile factory director. When he was 11, the occupying Japanese shut him and his parents, along with 2,000 others, in the Lunghua internment camp outside the city. Although Ballard always claimed to have "thoroughly enjoyed" his time there, the trauma of this sudden interruption to his life, and subsequent experience of beatings and near-starvation, informed his books, which dwelt on the fragility of civilisation.

At the end of the war, he was sent to a public school in England (endurable, he said, after the privations of the camp), from which he went up to Cambridge to study medicine. He left without a degree, however, realising his true ambition lay in writing. For several years he supported himself - and later his wife, Mary, and their children - with jobs ranging from advertising copywriter to encyclopaedia salesman. The publication of his second novel, The Drowned World, in 1962, gave him the confidence to write full-time.

After dropping the children at school, Ballard would pour himself a whisky

Then disaster struck. Mary caught pneumonia while the family was on holiday in Spain, and died. Yet although grief-stricken, Ballard continued to write, publishing a book almost every year, while raising his children at their home in Shepperton. ("Daddy sacrificed everything to bring us up," his daughter Fay later recalled. "We had a lady who came in to change and wash the sheets every Friday, but apart from that he did everything, and he did it brilliantly.")

The impact of his wife's loss is impossible to overestimate, said the Daily Telegraph. Every morning, as soon as he had dropped the children off at school, Ballard would pour himself his
first whisky and soda, and then have another on the hour, every hour, for the rest of the day.

His writing, meanwhile, became increasingly perverse - and, some felt, perverted (the title of the short story Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan rather speaks for itself). Friends describe the author at that time as "generous and jovial" but also as "jolly peculiar". In the late Sixties he used to surprise fellow dinner party guests by producing photographs of his girlfriend's car-crash injuries; when she was there herself, he would urge her to show them her scars.

This weird obsession achieved literary form in the novel Crash (1973), in which lonely characters find erotic fulfilment in "the mysterious eroticism of wounds; the perverse logic of bloodsoaked instrument panels, seat-belts smeared with excrement, sun visors lined with brain tissue". The publisher's assistant who first read the manuscript remarked that its author was "beyond psychiatric help" - a verdict Ballard took as a compliment. For all his idiosyncracies, however, there was something samey about Ballard's plots, said Salon.com.

JG Ballard’s writing became increasingly perverse, and perverted

In Concrete Island (1974), as in High Rise (1975), a neurotic protagonist finds himself isolated by modernity, but also oddly solaced. Which was why Empire of the Sun (1984) came as such a surprise to readers, said the Guardian. An atypically straightforward account of his childhood, the memoir made £500,000 in book sales. Yet with the exception of a 'quasisequel', The Kindness of Women (1991), Ballard chose not to develop this conventional style.

If his early novels and short-story collections may be filed under the category of sci-fi, his later publications are surreal crime stories, more obviously humorous than his previous work. In Millennium People (2003), the middle classes rise up against a dehumanising government using Molotov cocktails made from vintage Burgundy bottles and stoppered with regimental ties.

Ballard's last book, an account of his final years and struggle with prostate cancer, was critically acclaimed. Its title, Miracles of Life, refers to his three children. They all survive him, as does his long-term partner, Claire. ·