Boing Boing / Google Gemini

When JG Ballard submitted Crash to Jonathan Cape in the early 1970s, a senior reader reportedly wrote on the manuscript: "This man is beyond psychiatric help. Do not publish." Cape published it anyway, and Ballard went on to write The Atrocity Exhibition , The Drowned World , and Empire of the Sun — a body of work so magnificent that "Ballardian" is now a real word in the language. When Princess Diana died in a car crash in a Paris tunnel, people called it a Ballardian moment.

The Illuminated Man , a new biography by Christopher Priest and Nina Allan, covers all of this and more. Priest — the novelist behind The Prestige and The Adjacent — had written roughly 65,000 words, about half the book, when he was diagnosed with terminal cancer. His partner Allan completed it.…