Following JG Ballard's death, writers pay tribute

Michael Moorcock

JG Ballard was one of my closest friends for 50 years. Together with Barry Bayley, who died last year, we "plotted" the revolution in science fiction which led to the so-called New Wave and he was a regular contributor to New Worlds, which spearheaded that movement. He was exceptionally brave and cheerful to the end. He was a loyal and generous friend and a great influence on the generation of writers who followed him.

Iain Sinclair

He was very influential on me, particularly his sense of space and the edgelands. When I was working on London Orbital I felt his presence. No other English writers were interested in those kinds of places. The places he was interested in were where he was. In Shepperton he looked around and conjured a whole world from that. Everyone else was writing about places like Notting Hill - he wasn't interested in social satire but on things like the effects of advertising on the world, buildings that no one knew what they were being used for and the world of surveillance cameras. He believed one could conjure up subjects which had only been covered in scientific reportage and use it in the realm of imaginary literature. He was very charming, very English and rather upper middle class.

Toby Litt

He opened up subjects that seemed peripheral or uninteresting - urban spaces, motorways, airports, high rises. He showed what can happen there; that they were charged sites of human activity, if unliterary. He saw that if you looked at the edges of vision - the places often treated with a kind of snobbery - they were where new things were happening, not in the avant garde.