Diary: Deborah Levy on J. G. Ballard

Ballard always insisted he was more interested in inner space than outer space.

J. G. Ballard, England’s greatest literary futurist, changed the coordinates of reality in British fiction and took his faithful readers on a wild intellectual ride. He never restored moral order to the proceedings in his fiction because he did not believe we really wanted it. Whatever it was that Ballard next imagined for us, however unfamiliar, we knew we were in safe hands because he understood “the need to construct a dramatically coherent narrative space.”

When I was a young writer in the 1980s, Ballard first came to my attention after I read his luminous, erotic story collection, The Day of Forever. It was so formally inventive that I would not have guessed it had been published in 1967. Nor did I know that the baffled conservative literary establishment of his generation had tried to see off his early work as science fiction. Ballard always insisted he was more interested in inner space than outer space.