The author JG Ballard has died at the age of 78.

Although most famous for the autobiographical Empire of the Sun and the controversial Crash, Ballard also embraced technology, science and the environment as subjects for his writing and worked as an assistant editor on the Chemistry and Industry magazine.

Iain Sinclair, an author and friend of Ballard, said “He was one of the first to take up the whole idea of ecological catastrophe. He was fascinated by celebrity early on, the cult of the star and suicides of cars, motorways, edgelands of cities. All of these things he was one of the first to create almost a philosophy of.” (Daily Telegraph.)

The Guardian notes that his first published story was a science fiction piece about singing plants:

The young science fiction author “wasn’t interested in the far future, spaceships and all that”, he explained; rather he was interested in “the evolving world, the world of hidden persuaders, of the communications landscape developing, of mass tourism, of the vast conformist suburbs dominated by television – that was a form of science fiction, and it was already here”.

Ballard sometimes objected to the SF label and said it was a method of “defusing the threat” of a book. “By calling a novel like Crash science fiction, you isolate the book and you don’t think about what it is,” he said (Guardian).

The BBC notes that Ballard said his books were not science fiction but were “picturing the psychology of the future”.