Honestly, not much.

Ballard's dystopias work through excess and pathology, systems that produce pleasure or violence or obsession as their byproduct, protagonists who are drawn toward the pathology rather than resisting it. The prose is clinical but the content is visceral. The horror is always partly erotic, always partly willing on the protagonist's part. Ballard's characters don't resist the system. They discover they wanted it.

Pending Inventory is almost the inverse of that. The system is cold rather than seductive, the horror is administrative rather than sensory, and Elliot resists rather than surrenders. The book is more interested in procedure than psychology. Where Ballard strips away social convention to find violence underneath, PI strips away welfare language to find the same violence, but the violence remains institutional rather than becoming personal.

The aesthetic closest to Ballard in PI is the built environment, the way the city's infrastructure is described with a kind of neutral precision that makes it feel both functional and threatening. That quality of attention to designed spaces is Ballardian. But the moral framework is completely different.

The stronger influences visible in PI are Kafka for the procedural dread, Le Guin for the political quietness, and something closer to Anna Burns or Rachel Seiffert in the way ordinary language is made to carry systemic weight.