I find Ballard kind of mesmerizing but frustrating. Crash I quite enjoyed, but other short stories I often felt his concerns and subjects quite alien. I join just about everyone else in saying read him, but I would never say he was prescient, as some do. He was chasing after something that feels kinda foreign to me. Too English for me maybe?
His prescience isn't what makes him interesting. In many ways he is writing about the past and the present.
He is unique for his tone. "Ballardian" conveys something immediately recognisable to anyone that's read more than a handful of his short stories and it conveys something that is fairly unique.
The recent craze for "liminal spaces" captures some of the flavour. But it's also intrinsically British and very much a 70s thing. Maybe it's just my memory of Britain in the 70s but the movie of Crash failed to capture the right mood, whereas High Rise did remarkably well.
He was also stupendously influential in post-punk music - not for the music (Ballard had zero interest in music) but for the lyrics. He supplied the imagery for the subgenre. I wrote about it a bit here: https://rocknerd.co.uk/2016/10/25/j-g-ballard-and-music-how-...
Without looking and off the top of my head - Joy Division, John Foxx-era Ultravox, Gary Numan (probably by way of John Foxx... Erm. There are others. Can I peek now?
Yes, his fiction feels more of the past other authors writing in the same period.
I grabbed a volume of his stories just now, and it starts off with a story that I would say feels very, uh, mid century, The Concentration City. Then Manhole 69, which captures some of that liminal space thing you mention. And then Chronopolis, which seems very mid century to me again.
