In more than 20 novels and story collections, Mr. Ballard coupled his potent descriptive powers with an imagination attracted to catastrophic events and a melancholy view of the human soul as being enervated and corrupted by the modern world.

He is best known for Empire of the Sun, a somewhat autobiographical novel from 1984 about an English boy growing up in Shanghai, during the Japanese occupation in World War II. The book made the short list for the Man Booker Prize, Britain’s most prestigious literary award, and Steven Spielberg turned it into a 1987 film (with a screenplay by Tom Stoppard) starring Christian Bale and John Malkovich.

Although not a characteristic work — it was neither as fantastical nor as provocative as many of his other books — Empire revealed Mr. Ballard’s own childhood as the source of much of his surrealistic imagination. It is full of the images — emptied swimming pools, abandoned buildings — that came to symbolize his view of the world as “a bizarre external landscape propelled by large psychic forces,” as he said in an interview with The New York Times Magazine in 1990. (New York Times obituary).

I’ve been a reader of Ballard since his earlier works such as The Drowned World and The Wind from Nowhere. My devotion remained through The Atrocity Exhibition and Crash.