J. G. Ballard is one of the most significant of those British novelists who have established themselves since 1960. Although he established his literary reputation as a science-fiction writer, he has come to believe that the present, rather than the future, is the period of greatest moral urgency for the writer, and that science fiction is central to the literary mainstream, to the extent that it concerns itself not with outer but "inner space." In a 1975 interview, he commented:

I began writing in the mid-Fifties. Enormous changes were going on in England at that time, largely brought about by science and technology--the beginnings of television, package holidays, mass merchandising, the first supermarkets. . . . The only form of fiction which was trying to make head or tail of what was going on in our world was science-fiction. . . . I wanted a science-fiction of the present day. . . . I am not interested in imaginary alien planets.

Ballard's fiction has at times included many of the conventions of science fiction, but his writing is distinct from those genre examples that suggest a space western, with ray guns instead of six shooters. Perhaps partly because of this distinctiveness, Ballard has never had much success in the American science-fiction market, where his early books were published in paperback by Berkley; his reputation in Great Britain has grown over his career so that he has become something of a literary institution, published by such discriminating fiction houses as Jonathan Cape. His books have been well received in France, where his particular blend of erotic fantasy and surrealistic imagery seems less unfamiliar than it has in the English-speaking world.

His American recognition, however, has begun to change since the publication of his best-selling autobiographical novel, Empire of the Sun (1984), a work that helped to account for many of Ballard's familiar idiosyncrasies by showing their source in his childhood. James Graham Ballard was born on 15 November 1930 in Shanghai, China, into the privileged world of the British colonial class. His father ran a British textile plant there. Living in a home with nine servants and a chauffeur-driven Packard, young Ballard enjoyed the collage of eastern and western cultures of the city, which he later considered an introduction to his favorite artistic style--surrealism.

The fortunes of the Ballard family were almost completely reversed during World War II, when from 1942 to 1945 Ballard, his parents, and younger sister, Margaret, were interned in a Japanese prison camp. According to various interviews, autobiographical articles, and above all his novels Empire of the Sun and The Kindness of Women (1991), young Ballard partly enjoyed the experience despite the privations. From 1946 to 1949 he attended the Leys School, Cambridge, then studied medicine at King's College, Cambridge University. For a time Ballard considered becoming a psychiatrist, and although he abandoned his studies in the field after two years, his fiction generally reflects his ongoing interest...