HarperCollins has canceled the publication of J. G. Ballard’s last book following the author’s death on Sunday, April 19. Conversations, formerly slated for release in September, was to have recounted discussions between Ballard and his doctor, Jonathan Waxman of Imperial College, London. The project stalled after Ballard, who was diagnosed with terminal prostate cancer in 2006, became too ill to work.
“He was such a strong presence that it’s hard to think of him as being gone,” editor Claire Reihill, who worked on what is now Ballard’s last book, the memoir Miracles of Life (Fourth Estate, 2008), told The Bookseller.
Born in Shanghai in 1930, Ballard was best known for the semi-autobiographical Empire of the Sun (Simon & Schuster, 1984), which drew upon his childhood experiences in a Japanese internment camp. The book was adapted for film by Steven Spielberg in 1987. Strongly influenced by psychoanalysis, much of Ballard’s writing explored themes of dystopia and transgression, including the controversial Crash (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973) and The Atrocity Exhibition (Grove Press, 1972), which became the subject of an obscenity trial. Reihill, who also edited Kingdom Come (HarperCollins, 2006), the last of Ballard’s fifteen novels, said the author took it upon himself “to stand at the bend in the road with a sign saying ‘Danger Ahead.’”
While most of Ballard’s oeuvre remains out of print in the United States, Norton has plans to publish the country’s first complete collection of his short fiction. The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard is due for release in September.
