Word: ballards
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...subtitle suggests, the first half of Miracles of Life deals with Ballard's extraordinary childhood in war-torn Shanghai; the second is spent at the typewriter in the leafy west London suburb where the author has lived for the last 47 years. The journey from one to the other has been central to his life and his fiction. Readers of his 1984 novel Empire of the Sun - and the millions more who saw Steven Spielberg's film version of it - will recognize Ballard's descriptions of the deprivations he suffered at the Lunghua detention camp after the Japanese army overran...
...Ballard's tenuous relationship with his parents explains why he excluded them from Empire of the Sun. His father, who left England in 1929 to run a cotton factory, along with his wife and hundreds of other Brits, had a high old time of it in Shanghai's free-trade, hard-boozing International Settlement. For the young Ballard, life before the war was giddy and privileged, too - a succession of gymkhanas, parties and inexhaustible supplies of American comics. But it was all colored by a guilt-edged curiosity at the poverty and brutality he saw on his frequent bike rides...
Docking at Southampton in 1946, Ballard found England just as classbound and uptight, and also bombed out and exhausted. He studied medicine at Cambridge, but was impatient for the future already signposted by Freud, the Surrealists and American science fiction. With his wife, Mary - and, in quick succession, three children - Ballard immersed himself in the hands-on family life he craved. After the publication of The Drowned World in 1962, he could afford to stay home, writing more postapocalyptic tales. Then, the following year, Mary died of pneumonia. This loss struck Ballard as a bitter and unexplained crime of nature...
...death did, however, untether Ballard's writing from the outer space of conventional science fiction. Instead, he began to explore the "inner space" of everyday culture that was being shaped by consumerism, T.V., sex and celebrity - most of it American. The psychotic hero of his provocative, experimental novel The Atrocity Exhibition (1969) stumbles through chapters like Love and Napalm: Export U.S.A. and You: Coma: Marilyn Monroe. The character's own sense of reality seems to crumble along with the last vestiges of novelistic realism...
...Ballard liked to think of his books as radical, "a desperate attempt to prove ... that two and two made five in the moral arithmetic of the 1960s." Many critics preferred old-fashioned math, though, and by the time of Crash, his 1973 tale of erotic pleasures amid the carnage of car wrecks, even his own publisher's view was that "this author is beyond psychiatric help." As if to prove that a new moral compass was at work in inner space, Ballard's book attracted little controversy until 23 years later, when the shock-horror director David Cronenberg brought Crash...