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The Bund, Shanghai, a location in Steven Spielberg’s movie of Empire of The Sun.

JG Ballard died two weeks ago. I don’t remember what I was doing that was so important that the news slipped by me but I don’t remember it at all, and I vividly remember Empire of the Sun. So vividly that I was convinced Ballard was separated from his parents when the Japanese invaded Shanghai in World War II, and spent the next few years in an internment camp. In fact he was never separated from his parents and sister, but the time in the camp made a huge mark on the writer. “I have – I won’t say happy – not unpleasant memories of the camp,” he said. “I remember a lot of the casual brutality and beatings-up that went on, but at the same time we children were playing a hundred and one games all the time!”

Martin Amis remembers JG Ballard.

Here is an uncollected Ballard short story from 1996, The Dying Fall.

Three years have passed since the collapse of the Tower of Pisa, but only now can I accept the crucial role that I played in the destruction of this unique landmark. Over twenty tourists died as the thousands of tons of marble lost their grasp on the air and collapsed to the ground. Among them was my wife Elaine, who had climbed to the topmost tier and was looking down at me when the first visible crack appeared in the tower’s base. Never were tragedy and triumph so intimately joined, as if Elaine’s pride in braving the worn and slippery stairs had been punished by the unseen forces that had sustained this unbalanced mass of masonry for so many centuries. . .

Continue reading in the Guardian.