Simon Ings is a novelist, science writer and editor of Arc, New Scientist's magazine about the future. His latest novel, Wolves, explores an imagined future world where Augmented Reality reigns.

Here, he speaks to Vassili Christodoulou about science fiction, J.G. Ballard, and whether Google Glass will ever really take off.

Wolves is identified as a tribute to Ballard. What do you consider his influence on you as a writer and contemporary literature and science fiction as a whole?

It's much more an homage to John Wyndham than to Ballard. Wyndham lived near my home town and the house where my protagonist dispenses the body of his mother is actually the house where Wyndham lived. So there’s a bit of self-indulgent forelock tugging there. Obviously no writer of my generation or the generation previously is going to be without influence from Ballard, but I think what’s especially interesting is where Ballard is drawing his influences from, largely Joseph Conrad. That form of delivery, that very calm, almost hypnogogically lucid, form of delivery is something we’ve inherited with our mother’s milk if you like.

Ballard harnessed a particular British tradition of fantasy with an interest in apocalyptic adventure narratives derived from the American tradition, and then played a very clever game by saying that things which were already happening in the real world were now happening to middle-class white people. This is a perfectly legitimate thing to do and is salutary, as well as entertaining, for the middle-class white people who read his books.

Presumably because it’s not actually happening to them in quite the way he imagines? For example: we rarely see blocks of luxury flats descend into civil war in the real world.