Half asleep, he lay back thinking of the events of the past years that had culminated in their arrival at the central lagoons and launched him upon his neuronic odyssey, and of Strangman and his insane alligators, and, with a deep pang of regret and affection, holding her memory clearly before his mind as long as he could, of Beatrice and her quickening smile.
At last he tied the crutch to his leg again, and with the butt of the empty .45 scratched on the wall below the window, sure that no-one would ever read the message:
27th day.
Have rested and am moving south. All is well.
Kerans.
So he left the lagoon and entered the jungle again, within a few days was completely lost, following the lagoons southward through the increasing rain and heat, attacked by alligators and giant bats, a second Adam searching for the forgotten paradises of the reborn Sun.
James Graham Ballard was born on the 15 November 1930 in Shanghai, China.
J.G. Ballard used his own childhood in a Japanese prison camp as the basis for his 1984 novel Empire of the Sun.
As a young man he settled in Shepperton, England and, after studying medicine, began a career as a writer. Though Empire of the Sun is a fairly mainstream story, Ballard's other books are not easily classified; some call them science fiction, others simply creepy or disturbing. They generally combine sex, surgery and technology as part of a psychoanalytical depiction of the modern human condition.
Ballard also wrote The Drowned World (1962), Crash (1973), which was made into a 1996 movie starring Holly Hunter and James Spader. (Empire of the Sun had already been made into a movie in 1987, directed by Steven Spielberg and starring a young Christian Bale as the Ballard-like boy, Jim.) Ballard's other books include The Crystal World (1966), High-rise (1975), The Day of Creation (1987) and Cocaine Nights (1996).
He published an autobiography, Miracles of Life, in 2008; Ballard told The Times of London that he wrote the book after being diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer in 2006.
He died of the cancer on 9 April 2009.
