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 Do not publish."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. The result is, as The Guardian puts it, "a brave and moving book" — unconventional in form partly because it had to be.…