The son of an English businessman and a homemaker, James Graham Ballard was born in the Shanghai International Settlement in November 1930. Following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Ballard was transferred along with his parents and his younger sister to the Lunghua civil internment camp, where they spent the rest of World War II. He recorded his experiences in this locus terribilis in a moving novel by the name of Empire of the Sun, which Steven Spielberg adapted a few years later into a movie starring a young Christian Bale as the main character. Although less gruesome, his story shares some similarities with Roman Polanski’s; both spent a good deal of their childhoods confined in terrible places. (3.3.2)

The time he spent in the camp at Lunghua had a profound influence on Ballard’s work as a writer. A couple of years prior to his death he finished an interview with this remark:

I suppose one of the things I took from my wartime experiences was that reality was a stage set. The reality that you took from granted—the comfortable day-to-day life, school, the home where one lives, the familiar street and all the rest of it, the trips to the swimming pool and the cinema—was just a stage set. They could be dismantled overnight, which they literally were when the Japanese occupied Shanghai and turned our lives upside down. I think the experience left me with a very sceptical eye, which I’ve turned into something even as settled as English suburbia where I now live. Nothing is as secure as we think it is. One doesn’t have to think of Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans—this applies to everything. A large part of my fiction tries to analyse what is going on around us, and whether we are much different people from the civilised human beings we imagine ourselves to be.¹

Ballard understood that reality could turn from amoenus to em>terribilis in the blink of an eye. Most of his fictions take place in a menacing threshold occupied by “eros, thanatos, mass media and emergent technologies.” (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography). Unsurprisingly, Kafka’s influence is palpable throughout his work. In a short piece for the Sunday Times he wrote:

Kafka may be the most important writer of the twentieth century… He describes the fate of the isolated man who is surrounded by a vast and impenetrable bureaucracy, and begins to accept himself on the terms the bureaucracy imposes. Human beings today are in a very similar position. We are surrounded by huge institutions we can never penetrate: the City, the banking system, political and advertising conglomerates, vast entertainment empires. They’ve made themselves user-friendly, but they define the tastes to which we conform. They’re rather subtle, subservient tyrannies, but no less sinister for that.

Subservient as they may be, these tyrannies have created a new kind of world in which reality and fiction merge in unexpected and terrifying ways, a dandyfied world, so to speak (2.2, 2.5, 2.7)). From a 1991 Lynne Fox interview with Ballard for RE/Search magazine:

... after the Second World War, particularly as the media landscape developed enormously—thanks to television, mass advertising and the whole consumer goods landscape—the distinction between outer reality and inner fantasy began to crack down. In fact the outer world of of the environment is more full of fictional material now than the inside of our own heads.³

For Ballard the modern world was so strange and full of fantasy, so pregnant with possibilities, that the surrealist approach to the imagination was entirely meaningless.

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1. Interview with Travis Elborough “An Investigative Spirit,” included in The Atrocity Exhibition, 188. ↩︎
2. Becca Rothfeld, “J.G. Ballard’s Eerily Accurate Dystopias,” The New Republic, March 14, 2018. Available at: https://newrepublic.com/article/147456/jg-ballards-eerily-accurate-dystopias ↩︎
3. J.G. Ballard, Conversations, 165. It is worth highlighting that the notion of mass media as a “landscape” halfway between the direct and the artificial dates from 1922 when North American writer Walter Lippmann described it as a pseudo-environment “half-true, half-artificial, built from what we are told by others: stories, paintings, journalistic accounts and the like.” (From the introduction by Ronald Steel to Lippmann’s Public Opinion).