J.G. Ballard

I haven't read enough of him to offer a comprehensive opinion, but what I have read by J.G. Ballard (mainly short stories from the 60s and 70s), I liked. I've had a few of his audiobooks lingering on my computer for months, and I still haven't gotten around to seeing Crash (the 1996 Cronenberg one based on Ballard's novel, not the recent and more famous film that's completely unrelated), but now I feel I suddenly have incentive.

His voice and energy influenced the entire ethos of punk literature, informing and infecting the possibilities of speculative fiction. His dissection of narrative, his bizarre mind, will be missed. What has come down to us from writers like Michael Moorcock, Harlan Ellison, William Burroughs, Grant Morrison, Alan Moore and others would surely be different without Ballard.