For half a century, James Graham Ballard lived in the tranquil riverside village of Shepperton off the M3. The Thames Valley suburb was almost destroyed by Martians in The War of the Worlds, and in his fiction Ballard often tried to complete the task that H G Wells began. His dystopian fantasies of tower-block madness and urban dereliction – The Atrocity Exhibition, Concrete Island, High-Rise – were set amid motorway intersections and the purlieus of Heathrow close by. The books radiate a fierce beauty and disquiet. In 1991, I called on Ballard at his home in Shepperton. I remember the peeling paintwork and the Space Age aluminium palm trees that blocked the hallway. Immensely courteous, Ballard spoke in cut-glass tones of his abiding love of Surrealist art: ‘In another life I’d liked to have been a painter.’ We got on. In The Telegraph, to my delight, Ballard reviewed a book I wrote on Haiti and helped with the research for my biography of Primo Levi. (Levi, a chemist, wrote for the trade journal Chemistry and Industry, which Ballard subedited in the 1950s.) He was kind and generous to many other people, too. 

Ballard died in 2009 at the age of seventy-­eight. His standing in the literary hereafter is secure. No postwar British writer did more to release science fiction from the scaly stranglehold of interstellar travel and the green humanoids of American pulp magazines. ‘The only truly alien planet is Earth,’ Ballard liked to say. His imaginary landscapes with their drained swimming pools and disused runways gave the term ‘Ballardian’ to the English language. His two most famous novels have the power to disconcert. Crash (1973) was a rhapsody to the aberrant eroticism (as Ballard conceived it) of the automobile accident; Empire of the Sun (1984) told of Ballard’s childhood detention by the Japanese in occupied Shanghai during the Second World War. Steven Spielberg’s film of the book helped bring Ballard a personal fortune in excess of £4 million. He chose to stay put in his Shepperton semi-detached.

Ballard’s violent imagination had some connection to personal trauma. In 1964, his wife, Mary, died of pneumonia while on holiday with the family in Spain; Ballard brought up his three children on his own. The hurt went so deep that for a decade he was a near-addicted Scotch drinker. A first, unofficial biography, The Inner Man (2011), by the fellow SF novelist and acquaintance John Baxter, spoke of more troubling matters. Baxter claimed that Claire Walsh, Ballard’s partner of forty years, turned up at parties with bruises to her face concealed behind sunglasses. Allegedly, Ballard had tried to push her out of a moving car following an argument. Walsh (who wisely declined to cooperate with Baxter – as did Ballard’s children) described these claims as ‘bizarre’.

Now we have a new biographical study, The Illuminated Man, cowritten by the late Christopher Priest and his wife, Nina Allan, both of them SF writers. Like Baxter before them, the authors hint that Ballard’s relationship with his son and two daughters was not as idyllic as he made out