JG Ballard was an English writer who sadly passed in 2009. He wrote books, short stories, and essays and is one of my all-time favourite writers. His work is probably best described as ‘genre-bending’. It can be surreal, science fiction, modern-dystopian, controversial, or just weird. Or all of those things simultaneously.

Ballard’s work is so impressively distinctive it has even become an official adjective. The definition in Collins English Dictionary describes ‘Ballardian’ as work:

While certain themes, such as man-made dystopia, are prevalent in his work, the stories are incredibly different. Ballard was originally associated with the New Wave of science fiction, but that changed as he developed and tried new things.

Ballard simply described his writing as ‘specula…