J.G. Ballard’s final short story in The New Yorker

[UPDATE: This story has been corrected to note the previous publications of Ballard's story.]

The New Yorker has published a short story by science-fiction icon J.G. Ballard, who passed away on April 19. Originally published in French for Etoile Mecanique in 1981 and later in English for Ambit (1984) and Interzone (1996), the piece entitled “The Autobiography of J.G.B.” tells the story of a man named “B” who wakes up one morning to find that the people of England, France, and possibly the whole world, have disappeared without a trace. Carolyn Kellogg on the L.A. Times book blog notes how the story seems somewhat incomplete:

It feels to me like he got up in the middle of the story and never came back to finish it. But then again, Ballard was always messing with readers’ expectations – maybe that’s exactly what he wanted.

Although the story’s ending is rather abrupt, the captivating quality of this short piece shows how Ballard could create a realistic fantasy world and leave readers asking for more. Read the story here.

HarperCollins cancels Ballard memoir

In 1996, Harold Brodkey published This Wild Darkness, a slim volume describing, in often painful detail, his physical deterioration from AIDS. Portions of his journal from this period remain online, and provide starkly honest insights into the combined pity and terror elicited by living with a terminal illness:

Being ill like this combines shock – this time I will die – with a pain and agony that are unfamiliar, that wrench me out of myself. It is like visiting one’s funeral, like visiting loss in its purest and most monumental form, this wild darkness, which is not only unknown but which one cannot enter as oneself. Now one belongs entirely to nature, to time: identity was a game. It isn’t cruel what happens next, it is merely a form of being caught. Memory, so complete and clear or so evasive, has to be ended, has to be put aside, as if one were leaving a chapel and bringing the prayer to an end in one’s head. It is death that goes down to the center of the earth, the great burial church the earth is, and then to the curved ends of the universe, as light is said to do.

It now appears that J.G. Ballard’s own memoir of his struggles with mortality will never see print. Ballard, who died of cancer on April 19, was in negotiations to publish a book entitled Conversations with My Physician: The Meaning, if Any, of Life. The book was to have consisted of Ballard’s recapitulations of his discussions with his oncologist.

However, the author became too ill to complete the book, and now HarperCollins has cancelled the title. From The Guardian:

“We had agreed [to] the terms but Jim became too ill last winter to start any work on it,” said his editor Clare Reihill. “He had written a wonderful, quite detailed proposal – the book was laid out, he knew exactly what he was going to do, but sadly he became too ill to do any more, so unfortunately it won’t happen.”

Quillblog is dismayed this title will never be published: Ballard was a notoriously unsentimental writer, and his memoir, like Brodkey’s, would likely have provided an illuminating glimpse into one of life’s most troublesome rites of passage.