J. G. Ballard is perhaps the most important figure to emerge from the British New Wave of science-fiction writers, whose works brought a new degree of literary sophistication and critical respectability to the genre beginning in the late 1950s. To an extent Ballard's fiction is all part of a single project to catalogue the contents of what he calls "inner space"--a psychological domain that represents an inversion of the frequent preoccupation of science-fiction writers with extraterrestrial travel. Within Ballardian inner space the dearest icons of consumer society--automobiles, movie stars, concrete buildings, and motorways--mingle with the symbolic unconscious, and their true significance is revealed. At once exotic and familiar, inner space owes more to the painters of the Surrealist movement, to whom Ballard makes frequent reference, than to his literary predecessors in the fantasy or science-fiction genres.

For Ballard, who was born in Shanghai, China, and spent part of his childhood in a civilian internment camp during World War II, the results of twentieth-century invention have proved to be highly ambiguous. In his early stories and novels he subjects the world to a series of catastrophes that science is unable to understand, let alone avert. Most disconcerting, perhaps, is that Ballard's protagonists rarely make an effort to avert disaster; rather, they are drawn to it on a deeper level. Although Ballard's disaster fantasies can be seen as part of a tradition in British literature that extends back at least as far as Mary Shelley's The Last Man (1826), critics James Goddard and David Pringle have noted that "they were written as parodies of this sub-genre of SF, and that they should in fact be regarded as psychological novels--stories of success when viewed from the particular perspectives of the protagonists."

In Ballard's subsequent fiction, consumer culture takes on the role of a global plague, and his heroes continue to respond with their usual creative ambivalence. These works, most notably the story collection The Atrocity Exhibition (1970) and the novel Crash (1973), were condemned by some at the time of their publication for their oblique style and graphic sexual depictions. The first American edition of The Atrocity Exhibition, in fact, was destroyed in the middle of its print run when publisher Nelson Doubleday Jr., while touring his printing department, was outraged by the contents page he saw rushing past him.

The paradoxical quality of inner space, with its combination of the familiar and the alien, has its roots in Ballard's unusual childhood. He was born James Graham Ballard on 15 November 1930 to James and Edna Johnstone Ballard. Ballard's father was a chemist who managed the Shanghai office of a British textile manufacturer. In a 1976 interview with David Pringle, Ballard referred to Shanghai as an "American zone of influence": his earliest memories are of American cars, movies, music, and radio shows. He attended a cathedral school in Shanghai, run by an English clergyman. The specter of war loomed over Ballard's childhood. That threat became a...