Aside from Charles Dickens or Franz Kafka, not many novelists get their own adjective. But there is Ballardian, in Collins English Dictionary: "Resembling or suggestive of the conditions described in J.G. Ballard's novels and stories, especially dystopian modernity, bleak man-made landscapes

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nginx/1.14.0 (Ubuntu) and the psychological effects of technological, social or environmental developments."

A mouthful, but Ballard has earned every word of it. In 20 novels and 20 story collections over his half-century as a writer, he has created an anti-utopian gulag of ostensibly placid communities — island resorts, luxury apartment towers, high-tech research parks — where civility deteriorates and darkness rises. In Kingdom Come, his latest and perhaps most unsettling work yet, Ballard exposes a particularly nasty cesspool of social pathology: the shopping mall.

First, a clarification. Confusingly, Ballard is perhaps best known for Empire of the Sun, a surprisingly sunny best seller based on his World War II boyhood in a Japanese internment camp in Shanghai — and the inspiration for Steven Spielberg's 1987 feel-good movie of that name, starring Christian Bale. But Ballard is also famous for a more sinister novel, Crash, about car-wreck aficionados in outer London, which David Cronenberg made into that notoriously creepy 1996 film, set in Los Angeles.

Even typical Ballard tales, like Cocaine Nights (1996) or Super-Cannes (2000), are not exactly walks in the high-tech research park. Those two hot-selling thrillers were set in, respectively, a Spanish resort community and a leafy French office campus. In both, a clueless visitor tries to unravel a shocking crime, eventually discovering that the stress and boredom of these ostensible Edens have driven their denizens to violent excess. Ballard has seen the enemy and he is us, at our worst. As a slightly less pessimistic British writer, Martin Amis, has observed: "Ballard is quite unlike anyone else. Indeed, he seems to address a different — a disused — part of the reader's brain."

Kingdom Come addresses the shopping lobe. Richard Pearson, a newly jobless advertising executive, visits the Brooklands Metro-Centre, an enclosed shopping mall of gigantic proportions — 20 supermarkets, 30 pharmacies, two hotels — along the M25 motorway near London's Heathrow airport. Two weeks earlier his father, a retired airline pilot, was killed there along with other shoppers when a deranged gunman opened fire. But Pearson soon finds out that the shooting wasn't so random, and that the mall provides far more than loyalty cards and a climate-controlled shopping environment.

The Metro-Centre has its own sports stadium, its own soccer, rugby and ice hockey teams. Armies of their supporters wearing St. George's crosses — England's national flag — surge from mall to match to trashing immigrant neighborhoods. "Whenever sport plays a big part in people's lives," says an overworked doctor in the local casualty ward, "you can be sure they're bored witless and just waiting to break up the furniture." Similar observations pile up — about the links between shopping and boredom, shopping and politics (the talk-show host acquires a political following). An incipient fascism sweeps the English motorways from one deracinated mall-town to another. If Kingdom Come has a flaw, it's dialogue that sounds like a lecture on social theory. To liven things up, Ballard marches his shoppers to the brink of armed apocalypse, and he displays an attention to detail that can lull you into suspending disbelief. Especially if you have traveled the new English landscape of soccer thugs, superstores and paved-over villages where, as Pearson says of Brooklands, "it was impossible to borrow a book, attend a concert, say a prayer, consult a parish record or give to charity."

What kind of mind frolics in a landscape like this? One whose proprietor, at age 75, is also bursting with charm and ideas. James Graham Ballard was born in Shanghai, where his father worked for a British textile company. After the family's wartime internment, Ballard studied medicine at Cambridge, trained as a pilot in the Royal Air Force and worked at a scientific journal. He started writing for science-fiction magazines and became a leading figure in sci-fi's New Wave, which eschewed outer space for the more immediate world. "I haven't written any science fiction since the 1960s," Ballard says from his home in the London exurb of Shepperton, where he has lived for 45 years. "I just write what I see happening. I'm a weatherman, trying to forecast what's ahead."

In the case of Kingdom Come, Ballard had to look no farther than Shepperton, hard by the M25 and Heathrow. "I've seen the southeast of England transformed from a realm of Georgian restorations, Gothic quadrangles and village greens into a world of motorways, surveillance cameras, business parks and vast retail operations. I've seen the proliferation of St. George's flags, as the white middle class retribalizes itself. It's not racist, yet. But we've had waves of immigration in recent years, and the whites are now saying, 'Remember us?' Politics has become a public utility, like sewerage or gas. The monarchy is completely discredited. Holding things together is consumerism. It imposes the only values we have."

Ballard's values were shaped by Shanghai. "It was an enormous influence on me," he says of his three years in Japanese custody. "After Pearl Harbor, my secure and settled life was just swept away. It taught me that conventional reality can't be trusted, that human beings are not always governed by reason. They can be very cruel." Ballard's wife, Mary, died of pneumonia in 1964, leaving him to raise their three children alone. For nearly 40 years, he has had the help and companionship of Claire Churchill Walsh, a magazine editor.

For a writer of his talent and durability, Ballard has won oddly few honors. (A republican, he declined a Commander of the British Empire award in 2003.) Australian author and academic Germaine Greer once called him "a great writer who hasn't written a great novel." Fans would disagree, though Ballard has few pretensions. "I detest the literary novel," he says. "It's about social relationships, and, by definition, it requires a static society where all those little arabesques can be analyzed. But society is not static at all." Nor is Ballard eager to analyze himself. "I've thought about writing a memoir, but I'm not sure I could," he says. "Various people have approached me about a biography. But that would require hundreds of hours of interviews about my parents and the like, which I don't necessarily want to consider. I might discover all sorts of horrible things about myself."

On the other hand, it might provide all sorts of suitably horrible material for another novel. What fresh hell will he invent next? "I haven't decided yet," says the bard of Shepperton. "I'm waiting for the next shift in the weather. I spend a lot of time looking at the sky."

• DONALD MORRISON
• J.G. Ballard's work has become a synonym for postindustrial desolation — and great fodder for films. His latest novel takes on the dehumanizing force of the megamall