Word: ballards
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...best place to look for most of J.G. Ballard's 20-odd books is still in the paperback racks displaying science fiction, somewhere between Asimov and Bradbury. But the popular success of Ballard's Empire of the Sun (1984), an autobiographical novel about an English boy's coming of age in Shanghai during the World War II Japanese occupation, was followed last year by Steven Spielberg's acclaimed screen adaptation. Thanks to this double-barreled triumph, Ballard has been transformed from a well-kept cult secret into something resembling a household name, with the luxury and burden of knowing that...
...will agree on what they are enjoying. Ballard is a master of hard- edged hallucinations, of improbable scenes so vivid that they enter the subconscious without checking in first at the front desk of reason. Reading him seems like dreaming, and interpretations of meaning tend to be resented as invasions of privacy. So it is here. There is an old-fashioned adventure tale going on, along with a peculiar love story, a mythic quest, a laborious fertility rite and a perilous journey of psychological discovery. And that is only for openers...
...author maintains the same work schedule he has followed for a quarter-century: "I set targets, at least 800 words a day." The Day of Creation proved especially challenging and exhausting: "For a year and a half that river was roaring through my head." Ballard believes the novel flowed naturally out of Empire of the Sun, from his memories of the "huge riverine world of Shanghai," where he grew up as the son of a chemist employed by a British textile company. Writing about that period in his life "opened a lot of interior doors and windows. I remember Shanghai...
...Indeed, Ballard's vivid, eventful youth accounts for much of the eerie power of his books. He has never considered himself a writer of science fiction but rather an explorer of "inner space." Surface reality interests him chiefly as a starting point for the mind: "I believe in the power of the imagination to remake the world." That power needs to be pitted against Shepperton and its calm environs: "The wave of the future breaks here in the suburbs. This and all places like it are becoming a geography of concrete and credit cards. My fear is that the exercise...
...young man, Ballard was drawn to surrealist art and its realistic images of fantasies. He retains this enthusiasm. Using money he earned from Empire of the Sun, he commissioned an artist to re-create two paintings by the Belgian Paul Delvaux that had been destroyed in London during the Blitz. One of these large canvases sits in Ballard's front parlor, and the other presides over his workroom, an unsettling tableau of dream maidens and bare breasts in an otherwise comfortable setting. "Sadly," Ballard says, "the only surrealists around these days are psychopaths. But we all need to fight...