Prophetic short stories and apocalyptic novels like The Crystal World made J. G. Ballard a foundational figure in the British New Wave. Rejecting the science fiction of rockets and aliens, he explored an inner space of humanity informed by psychiatry and biology and shaped by surrealism. Later in his career, Ballard's combustible plots and violent imagery spurred controversy—even legal action—while his autobiographical 1984 war novel Empire of the Sun brought him fame.

D. Harlan Wilson offers the first career-spanning analysis of an author who helped steer SF in new, if startling, directions. Here was a writer committed to moral ambiguity, one who drowned the world and erected a London high-rise doomed to descend into savagery—and coolly picked apart the characters trapped within each story. Wilson also examines Ballard's methods, his influence on cyberpunk, and the ways his fiction operates within the sphere of our larger culture and within SF itself.

| Cover Title page Copyright Contents Acknowledgments Introduction Chapter 1. J. G. Ballard, a.k.a. Shanghai Jim Chapter 2. This Way to Inner Space: Short Fiction and Nonfiction Chapter 3. Disaster Areas: The Natural Disaster Quartet Chapter 4. Psychopathologies of Everyday Life: The Atrocity Exhibition and the Cultural Disaster Trilogy Chapter 5. Empires of the Self: Autobiographical Novels Chapter 6. The Road to Culture: Later Novels Conclusion A J. G. Ballard Bibliography Notes Bibliography of Secondary Sources Index | Locus Recommended Reading List, 2017 — Locus
|D. Harlan Wilson is a professor of English at Wright State University–Lake Campus. He is the author of Cultographies: They Live, Technologized Desire: Selfhood and the Body in Postcapitalist Science Fiction, and over twenty novels and fiction collections.