One of totalfilm.com’s greatest literary heroes, JG Ballard, passed away yesterday.

Some of his dazzling stories have been adapted into films already. Some you’ll know – Empire Of The Sun (1987) and Crash (1996) – some you probably won’t – The Atrocity Exhibition (2000) and Low Flying Aircraft (2002).

But as you might expect from a chap who penned more than 40 million words during a 52-year career, there are many more tales that deserve to be brought into mainstream consciousness, via a stream of Hollywood adaptations.

Here are 9 we’d like to see as soon as possible...

The Drowned World (1962) / The Burning World (1964) / The Crystal World (1966)

The Star: Edward Norton

The Director: Darren Aronofsky

The Pitch: Ballard’s thematically connected first three books (not including his self-disowned The Wind From Nowhere) all concern global apocalypses resulting from environmental disasters.

The Drowned World sees the earth submerged after a bout of solar radiation melts the ice caps, which means that Ballard was warning us about global warming as far back as 1962.

The Burning World finds the planet turned into a desert after industrial waste is irresponsibly dumped, and The Crystal World has our hero, Edward Saunders, discovering a strange material that crystallises all life it encounters.

All three books contain different protagonists, but Aronofsky could connect them via a movie trilogy starring Norton as the lead in each.

The Drowned World in particular is so timely it feels like it contains passages lifted from an environmental blog uploaded last week, rather than a dusty book written 40 years ago, and would make the sort of flick that would force Roland Emmerich to fold away his director’s chair in shame.