You say zero technical know how, but Ballard spent some of his formative years making his way in a Japanese prison camp in China. If you believe the novel (Empire of the Sun), part of his survival was attributed to combinations of a way with language, people, and youthful endurance. But the backdrop was very much technical know how - working to obtain increasingly scarce necessities, like shoes, and observing first hand the impacts of lack thereof. So while his engineering expertise may not have been elevated from a theoretical perspective, it certainly was deeply and personally grounded in urgent, first hand, experiential concern - and all of this across three languages or more - perhaps a perfect raw humanist basis for the exploration of technology through literature?