Ballard, J.G. 1930–

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Ballard, J.G. 1930–

(James Graham Ballard)

PERSONAL: Born November 15, 1930, in Shanghai, China; son of James (a chemist and business executive) and Edna (Johnstone) Ballard; married Helen Mary Matthews, 1953 (died 1964); children: James, Fay, Beatrice. Education: Studied medicine at King's College, Cambridge, 1949–51.

ADDRESSES: Home—36 Old Charlton Rd., Shepper-ton, Middlesex, TW17 8AT, England. Agent—Margaret Hanbury, 27 Walcot Sq., London SE11 44B, England.

CAREER: Novelist and author of short fiction. Institute for Research in Art and Technology, trustee. Military service: Royal Air Force, 1954–57; became pilot.

AWARDS, HONORS: Guardian Fiction Prize, and nomination for Booker Prize, both 1984, and James Tait Black Memorial Prize, 1985, all for Empire of the Sun; European Science Fiction Society Award for short story writer, 1984.

WRITINGS:

NOVELS

The Wind from Nowhere (also see below), Berkley Publishing (New York, NY), 1962.

The Drowned World (also see below), Berkley Publishing (New York, NY), 1962.

The Burning World, Berkley Publishing (New York, NY), 1964, revised as The Drought, J. Cape (London, England), 1965.

The Drowned World [and] The Wind from Nowhere, Doubleday (New York, NY), 1965.

The Crystal World, Farrar, Straus & Giroux (New York, NY), 1966.

Crash, J. Cape (London, England), 1972, Farrar, Straus & Giroux (New York, NY), 1973, reprinted, 2000.

Concrete Island, Farrar, Straus & Giroux (New York, NY), 1974.

High-rise, J. Cape (London, England), 1975, Holt (New York, NY), 1977.

The Unlimited Dream Company, Holt (New York, NY), 1979.

Hello America, J. Cape (London, England), 1981.

Empire of the Sun, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 1984.

The Day of Creation, Gollancz (London, England), Farrar, Straus & Giroux (New York, NY), reprinted, Picador USA (New York, NY), 2001.

Running Wild, Hutchinson (London, England), 1989.

The Kindness of Women, Farrar, Straus & Giroux (New York, NY), 1991.

Rushing to Paradise, Picador USA (New York, NY), 1995.

Cocaine Nights, Counterpoint (Washington, DC), 1996.

Super-Cannes, Flamingo (London, England), 2000, Picador USA (New York, NY), 2001.

Millennium People, Flamingo (London, England), 2003.

STORY COLLECTIONS

The Voices of Time and Other Stories, Berkley Publishing (New York, NY), 1962.

Billenium and Other Stories, Berkley Publishing (New York, NY), 1962.

The Four-dimensional Nightmare, Gollancz (London, England), 1963, revised edition, 1974, published as The Voices of Time, Phoenix (London, England), 1998.

Passport to Eternity and Other Stories, Berkley Publishing (New York, NY), 1963.

Terminal Beach, Berkley Publishing (New York, NY), 1964, revised edition published as The Terminal Beach, Gollancz, 1964.

The Impossible Man and Other Stories, Berkley Publishing (New York, NY), 1966.

The Disaster Area, J. Cape (London, England), 1967.

By Day Fantastic Birds Flew through the Petrified Forests, Esographics for Firebird Visions, 1967.

The Day of Forever, Panther Books, 1967, revised edition, 1971.

The Overloaded Man, Panther Books, 1968.

The Atrocity Exhibition, J. Cape (London, England), 1970, published as Love and Napalm: Export U.S.A., Grove Press (New York, NY), 1972.

Vermilion Sands, Berkley Publishing (New York, NY), 1971.

Chronopolis and Other Stories, Putnam (New York, NY), 1971.

Low-flying Aircraft and Other Stories, J. Cape (London, England), 1976.

The Best of J.G. Ballard, Futura Publications, 1977, revised edition published as The Best Short Stories of J.G. Ballard, Holt (New York, NY), 1978.

The Venus Hunters, Granada, 1980.

Myths of the Near Future, J. Cape (London, England), 1982.

Memories of the Space Age, Arkham House (Sauk City, WI), 1988.

War Fever, Farrar, Straus & Giroux (New York, NY), 1990.

The Complete Short Stories, Flamingo (London, England), 2001.

OTHER

(Editor, with others) Best Science Fiction from "New Worlds," Medallion, 1968.

The Assassination Weapon (play; produced in London, England), 1969.

(Author of introduction) Salvador Dali, Ballantine (New York, NY), 1974.

(Author of introduction) Brian Ash, editor, The Visual Encyclopaedia of Science Fiction, Pan Books, 1977.

A User's Guide to the Millennium: Essays and Reviews, Picador (New York, NY), 1996.

Contributor to The Inner Landscape, Allison & Busby, 1969; and Re/Search: J.G. Ballard, edited by V. Vale and Andre Juno, Re/Search Publishing, 1984. Also contributor to publications, including New Worlds, Ambit, Guardian, Transatlantic Review, Triquarterly, Playboy, Encounter, and Evergreen Review.

ADAPTATIONS: Empire of the Sun was adapted as a film by Tom Stoppard and Menno Meyjes (uncredited), produced and directed by Steven Spielberg, Warner Bros., 1987; Crash was adapted as a film, written and directed by David Cronenberg, starring Holly Hunter and James Spader, Fine Line, 1996; "Low-flying Aircraft" was adapted by Swedish director Solveig Nord-lund into a Portuguese-language film; Running Wild and Super-Cannes have both been optioned for film.

SIDELIGHTS: J.G. Ballard uses the language and symbols of science fiction to "explore the collective unconscious, the externalized psyche, which is plainly visible around us and which belongs to us all," as David Prin-gle stated in his study Earth Is the Alien Planet: J.G. Ballard's Four-dimensional Nightmare. Ballard's obsessive characters, searching "for a reality beyond 'normal' life," as Douglas Winter described it in the Washington Post Book World, attempt to manifest their private visions in landscapes that reflect their own mental states. Whether he uses post-holocaust or electronic media landscapes, what characterizes this surreal fusion of environment and the unconscious, Ballard wrote in an essay for New Worlds, "is its redemptive and therapeutic power. To move through these landscapes is a journey of return to one's innermost being."

This idea is echoed by Joseph Lanz who, in Re/Search: J.G. Ballard, also pointed out the neurotic nature of Ballard's characters. Ballard's science fiction, Lanz wrote, "replaces the intergalactic journey with excursions into the convoluted psyche. In Ballard's realm, neurosis is an ultracivilized version of primitive ritual where object and subject meld into an alchemical union. The outside world is just a projection of private fetishes." Pringle claimed that Ballard's characters "are driven by obsessions" and often choose "to strand themselves in some bizarre terrain which reflects their states of mind." Ballard addressed this question in an interview with Douglas Reed in Books and Bookmen. "My psychological landscapes," he explained, "are the sort that might be perceived by people during major mental crises—not literally, of course, but they represent similar disturbed states of mind." Speaking with Thomas Frick for Paris Review, Ballard further explained his intentions: "I quite consciously rely on my obsessions in all my work…. I deliberately set up an obsessional state of mind."

This obsessional quality is reflected in Ballard's recurring use of a few powerful symbols—symbols that have become so closely associated with his work that some critics label them "Ballardian." Sand dunes, abandoned buildings, crashed automobiles, low-flying airplanes, drained swimming pools, and beaches are found in story after story. They are used, Charles Platt wrote in Dream Makers: The Uncommon People Who Write Science Fiction, "as signposts, keys to the meaning of technology, the structure of the unconscious, and the promise of the Future." Noting the repetitive use of these symbols, Galen Strawson observed in the Times Literary Supplement that "sometimes it seems as if Ballard's oeuvre is just the systematic extrapolation … of an initial fixed set of possibilities, obsessions, and palmary symbols."

Ballard's richly metaphoric prose and his emphasis on psychological and technological themes make him a unique and important figure on the contemporary literary scene. Malcolm Bradbury, writing in the New York Times Book Review, stressed the psychological insights in Ballard's work. Ballard is, Bradbury believed, "an explorer of the displacements produced in modern consciousness by the blank ecology of stark architecture, bare high-rises, dead super-highways, and featureless technology." In similar terms, Emma Tennant wrote in the New Statesman that "Ballard's talent … is to show us what we refuse to see—the extraordinary mixture of old ideas and modern architecture, the self-contradictory expectation of 'human' responses in a landscape constructed to submerge all traces of identity—and to prove that it is only by knowing ourselves that we can understand the technology we have created."

Ballard began his writing career in the 1950s, selling his short stories to science-fiction magazines in his native England and in the United States. Encouraged by E.J. Carnell, the editor of New Worlds, to follow his own inclinations, Ballard soon adopted a distinctive style and choice of subject matter. "By the late 1950s," Robert Silverberg wrote in Galactic Dreamers: Science Fiction as Visionary Literature, Ballard "was dazzling and perplexing science-fiction readers with his dark and hypnotic stories and novels, typified by intelligent though passive characters in the grips of inexplicable cosmic catastrophes."

The catastrophes and ruined landscapes of Ballard's fiction find their roots in his childhood, which was spent in Shanghai during World War II. The son of a British businessman, Ballard was a child when the war began and the Japanese conquered the city. After several months of separation from his parents, during which he wandered the city alone, he was reunited with his family in a prisoner-of-war camp. The startling inversions brought about by the war and occupation, the empty or ruined buildings, the sudden evacuations, and the societal instability are all echoed in his fiction. He told Platt that the abandoned buildings and drained swimming pools found in his fiction are based on Shanghai's luxury hotels, which were closed for the duration of the war. Ballard told Platt about going to visit a friend whose building had been evacuated during the night: "I remember going there and suddenly finding that the building was totally empty, and wandering around all those empty flats with the furniture still in place, total silence, just the odd window swinging in the wind." "Conventional life," he added, "places its own glaze over everything, a sort of varnish through which the reality is muffled. In Shanghai, what had been a conventional world for me was exposed as no more than a stage set whose cast could disappear overnight; so I saw the fragility of everything, the transience of everything, but also, in a way, the reality of everything."

In 1984's Empire of the Sun Ballard deals directly with his childhood experiences. "Perhaps," he mused to Frick, "I've always been trying to return to the Shanghai landscape, to some sort of truth that I glimpsed there." The semi-autobiographical novel of a young boy on his own in war-torn Shanghai, Empire of the Sun received high praise from reviewers, and made the British best-seller lists. Reviewing the novel for Newsweek, David Lehman and Donna Foote placed the book "on anyone's short list of outstanding novels inspired by the second world war … [It] combines the exactness of an autobiographical testament with the hallucinatory atmosphere of twilight-zone fiction." Although Empire of the Sun is more realistic than Ballard's other writings, John Gross in the New York Times was reluctant to describe it as a "conventional novel … because many of the scenes in it are so lurid and bizarre, so very nearly out of this world. Among other things, they help to explain why in his work up till now Mr. Ballard should have been repeatedly drawn to apocalyptic themes." Lehman and Foote wrote, "It's ironic that Empire of the Sun … has earned him accolades denied to his earlier 'disaster novels,' since it has more in common with them than immediately meets the eye. Like its predecessors, the book explores the zone of 'inner space' that Ballard sees as 'the true domain of science-fiction.'" Winter saw Empire of the Sun as something new for Ballard, "a union of apparent irreconcilables—autobiography, naturalistic storytelling, and surrealism. Ballard has not only transcended science fiction, he has pushed at the limits of fiction itself, producing a dream of his own life that is both self-critique and story, an entertainment that enriches our understanding of the fact and fantasy in all our lives."

The Kindness of Women, a sequel to Empire of the Sun, traces four decades of the author's life and times, beginning with his medical studies in the 1950s to the death of his wife in a freak accident and his relationships with the various women for whom the book is named. "The main thrust of Ballard's writing," wrote Nick Kimberley in New Statesman & Society, "is to weld us, his characters, to what we are not—the world we live in."

In his first four novels, Ballard depicts global catastrophes that destroy modern civilization: high winds in The Wind from Nowhere, melting ice caps in The Drowned World, drought in The Burning World, and a spreading, cancerous mutation in The Crystal World. These catastrophes alter the perceptions of Ballard's protagonists who, feeling a kinship with the destruction around them, respond by embracing it. Ballard's heroes, wrote Platt, are "solitary figures, courting the apocalypse and ultimately seduced by it. To them, a private, mystical union with a ruined world [is] more attractive than the pretense of a 'normal' lifestyle among organized bands of survivors."

Although some critics viewed these early novels as pessimistic because of their seemingly passive and self-destructive characters, Ballard disagrees. "I haven't got any sort of 'deathwish,'" he told Reed. "This aspect of my work parallels the self-destructive but curiously consistent logic of people enduring severe mental illness. There is a unique set of laws governing their actions, laws as constant as those controlling sane behavior but based on different criteria." Speaking to Platt on the same topic, Ballard claimed his work is not pessimistic. "It's a fiction of psychological fulfillment," he clarified. "The hero of The Drowned World, who goes south toward the sun and self-oblivion, is choosing a sensible course of action that will result in absolute psychological fulfillment for himself…. All my fiction describes the merging of the self in the ultimate metaphor, the ultimate image, and that's psychologically fulfilling." Graeme Revell, writing in Re/Search: J.G. Ballard, saw these books as "'transformation' rather than 'disaster' stories, involving not a material solution, but one of psychic fulfillment for the hero…. The hero is the only one who pursues a meaningful course of action—instead of escaping or trying to adapt to the material environment, he stays and comes to terms with the changes taking place within it and, by implication, within himself."

Ballard's early novels, particularly The Drowned World and The Crystal World, "helped make his name as a topographer of post-cataclysmic landscape," according to a reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement. This reputation changed in the late 1960s when Ballard became a leading spokesman for "New Wave" science fiction, a genre introducing experimental literary techniques and more sophisticated subject matter. In his fiction Ballard now began to explore the media landscape through a nonlinear writing style, entering his most experimental period. Many of his stories from this period are found in The Atrocity Exhibition. In this collection of related stories, Ballard explained to Reed, he writes of "a doctor who's had a mental break-down. He has been shocked and numbed by events like the deaths of the Kennedys and Marilyn Monroe. To make sense of the modern world he wants to immerse himself in its most destructive elements. He creates a series of psycho-dramas that produce grim paradoxes." As a critic for the Times Literary Supplement saw it, The Atrocity Exhibition "presents extreme examples of the private psyche being invaded by public events." In a preface to the U.S. edition of the book, William S. Burroughs called it "profound and disquieting…. The nonsexual roots of sexuality are explored with a surgeon's precision."

Because of objections to some of the book's content—in particular, the stories "Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan" and "The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race," as well as certain unflattering references to consumer activist Ralph Nader—two U.S. publishers accepted and then rejected the book before Grove Press released it in 1972. Called by Joseph W. Palmer of Library Journal an "ugly, nauseating, brilliant, and profound" book, The Atrocity Exhibition might well be considered "a long poem on metaphysical themes," Jerome Tarshis claimed in the Evergreen Review. "That is the difficult part; the horrifying part is that this philosophical investigation is conducted in terms of violent death and perverse sexuality." This opinion was echoed by Paul Theroux in the New York Times Book Review. The Atrocity Exhibition, Theroux wrote, "is a kind of toying with horror, a stylish anatomy of outrage…. It is not [Ballard's] choice of subject, but his celebration of it, that is monstrous."

The sex and violence of The Atrocity Exhibition are also found in three other Ballard novels—Crash, Concrete Island, and High-rise—each of which presents an urban disaster and deals with the perverse violence of modern society. Crash, an attempt to discover the "true significance of the automobile crash," as one character states, tells the story of crash victim James Ballard and photographer Vaughan, a man obsessed with the idea of dying in an auto crash with Elizabeth Taylor, the two of them receiving identical wounds to their genitalia. It is, wrote a Times Literary Supplement critic, "a fetishist's book…. Ballard's endless reiteration of crashes—of the famous, on acid, with dummies, on film—begins to seem like a frantic litany, grotesque mantras in a private meditation." John Fletcher of the Dictionary of Literary Biography called Crash "an unsentimental scrutiny of the dehumanized eroticism and the brutality [Ballard] … feels are inseparable from the new technologies."

Critical reaction to Crash was sometimes harsh. D. Keith Mano wrote in the New York Times Book Review that the novel is "the most repulsive book I've yet to come across…. Ballard choreographs a crazed, morbid roundelay of dismemberment and sexual perversion. Crash is well written: credit given where due. But I could not, in conscience, recommend it." A critic for the Times Literary Supplement believed that with The Atrocity Exhibition and Crash, Ballard has "produced a compendium of twentieth-century pathological imagery which earned him the disparaging reputation of being the intellectual of avant-garde science-fiction." Revell observed that The Atrocity Exhibition and Crash seemed to many critics to be "some kind of perverse aberration in the career of their author…. These new works developed previously latent ideas to a malignancy which burst out of the confines of science-fiction. The fiction seemed to have become real, too real, and there were dangerous questions: moral, existential, even political."

The idea for Crash originated in a scene from The Atrocity Exhibition. One of the psycho-dramas staged by Ballard's protagonist in that book is an art exhibit consisting of crashed cars. Before beginning Crash, Ballard also staged an exhibit of crashed cars at the New Arts Laboratory in London. "I had an opening party at the gallery," Studio International quoted Ballard as saying. "I'd never seen 100 people get drunk so quickly. Now, this had something to do with the cars on display. I also had a topless girl interviewing people on closed circuit TV, so that people could see themselves being interviewed around the crashed cars by this topless girl. This was clearly too much. I was the only sober person there. Wine was poured over the crashed cars, glasses were broken, the topless girl was nearly raped…. It was not so much an exhibition of sculpture as almost of experimental psychology using the medium of the fine art show. People were unnerved, you see. There was enormous hostility." Ironically, two weeks after completing Crash, Ballard was involved in a serious car accident in which his car rolled over and into the oncoming traffic lane. "This is," Ballard told James Goddard of Cypher, "an extreme case of nature imitating art."

Concrete Island again concerns a car crash. In this novel Robert Maitland has an accident on the freeway and is stranded on an isolated strip of land between the interweaving lanes of an interchange. Because of his injuries, Maitland cannot climb the embankment to get out. After a time he finds survival more important than escape and comes to accept his situation. Martin Levin in the New York Times Book Review noted that "Ballard plays two themes in this compact little book. The external theme is the Robinson Crusoe gambit…. The internal theme is the search-for-self motif." Concrete Island, wrote a Times Literary Supplement reviewer, "is a most intelligent and interesting book" in which Ballard "reveals undertones of savagery and desolation beneath a metaphor of apparent neutrality…. [Ballard is] our foremost iconographer of landscape."

Ballard's novel High-rise is set in a forty-story apartment block, the residents of which revert to tribal savagery after a power failure, transforming their building into a re-creation of man's prehistoric past. The apartments are ruled, Fletcher explained, "by the brutally simple law of the jungle: to survive one must prey on others and keep out of the way of those who would prey upon oneself." In a review for Listener, Neil Hepburn found the novel "well stocked with bizarre and imaginative strokes … but requiring such an effort for the suspension of disbelief as to become tiresome." Mel Watkins saw little merit in High-rise, claiming in his New York Times Book Review appraisal that it "exploits both technology and human emotion in a compulsively vulgar manner." According to Pringle, however, High-rise "makes the point that the high-rise building is not so much a machine for living in as a brutal playground full of essentially solitary children. It is a concrete den which encourages every anti-social impulse in its inhabitants rather than serving as a physical framework for a genuine social structure."

In the novel Rushing to Paradise Ballard reexamines the dark side of human nature. His main character—obsessive doctor Barbara Rafferty—becomes an ecological crusader and founder of an albatross sanctuary after losing her right to practice medicine. But the opportunistic doctor's intentions are far from selfless: she seeks to establish a utopian colony of women who will bear female children after being impregnated by disposable males. As a London Observer reviewer put it, "Rushing to Paradise is full of passive witnesses who will not admit the significance of the dramas unfolding in front of their eyes. This is a violent novel, but it also possesses an eerie calm, a glassy formality of texture which is as frightening as it is beautiful."

The violent underpinnings of seemingly placid communities is the focus of the novels Cocaine Nights and Super-Cannes. In Cocaine Nights Ballard posits a dystopian society deadened by leisure. Scores of retirement communities line the Costa del Sol in Spain, full of early-retired people with no purpose or will left in their lives. When his brother is charged with firebombing a house and killing five people in the sleepy town of Estrella de Mar, travel writer Charles Prentice goes down to investigate. In a story that is more of a detective novel than Ballard's previous disaster novels, Prentice uncovers a wide-ranging plot, masterminded by local tennis pro Bobby Crawford, to energize and mobilize the lazy retirees by introducing random violence into their lives.

Rex Roberts of Insight on the News called Cocaine Nights "one of the author's most accessible novels," even though its theme is the typically Ballardian one of "palpable evil lurking beneath [a] placid surface, a hidden world of drugs, illicit sex and violence." While Roberts claimed that "Ballard seems more moralist than nihilist," a reviewer for Publishers Weekly called Cocaine Nights "fairly mild," although he credited Ballard for painting a "bleak picture of trouble in paradise [that] has the ring of truth." A.O. Scott, writing in the New York Times Book Review, maintained that the book contains "a curious blend of deadpan detachment and almost comical self-consciousness." He quoted Bobby Crawford's explanation of why Estrella de Mar has more culture than the surrounding towns on the Costa del Sol: "Crime and creativity go together, and always have done. The greater the sense of crime, the greater the civic awareness and richer the civilization. Nothing else binds a community together." In the end, Smith said, Ballard overreaches with this idea: "Just as explaining a joke kills the humor, so does theorizing transgression blunt the thrill."

Super-Cannes also explores the sinister forces that wage violence on a supposedly utopian society. The setting is the high-tech office mecca of Eden-Olympia, a new development outside the French city of Cannes. Paul Sinclair, an airplane pilot who suffered injuries in a plane crash, moves to the soulless office park with his new wife, Jane, a doctor he met while convalescing. The former occupant of their house in Eden-Olympia was Dr. Greenwood, a seemingly benevolent figure who died after gunning down ten people and then shooting himself. He was also Jane's former lover. While Jane works long hours in Eden-Olympia's medical building, Paul obsesses about Greenwood and the reason for his killing spree. His investigations lead him to Wilder Penrose, Eden-Olympia's resident psychiatrist, who "believes that Eden-Olympia is a model for a future where leisure has been replaced by work and indulgence in premeditated violence is the surest way for members of the corporate elite to stay sane," according to a critic in the Economist. Paul uncovers a diabolical plot that indicates Penrose manipulated Greenwood into abusing the orphans in his care, and that Greenwood's murder spree was an attempt to rid Eden-Olympia of Penrose and other high-ranking administrators who had succumbed to his ideas.

John Gray, reviewing Super-Cannes for the New Statesman, commented that the book "presents a clairvoy-antly lucid vision of what the future will be like." Gray wrote that if the novel "has a lesson, it is that the hyper-capitalism that is emerging in Europe cannot function without manufacturing psychopathology. It needs to satisfy repressed needs for intimacy and excitement, and it will not shrink from trying to apply to that task the same efficiency that has worked so well in the rest of the economy." "Ballard quickly and effectively makes the point that corporatism has crushed our souls," observed Barbara Hoffert in Library Journal, adding that the novel's "final pages" are "persuasive and gripping."

"Cocaine Nights and Super-Cannes rely on an idea central to Ballard's fiction: that forbidden activity can provide extreme liberation," wrote Sam Gilpin in London Review of Books. Furthermore, Gilpin continued, "in both novels there is a manipulative figure who orchestrates the vice and justifies it intellectually." Speaking of Super-Cannes, Helen Brown wrote in Books Online that "the novel asks us if we can be programmed to meet the abstract targets of the multinationals without compromising our humanity. Can we protest against it without resorting to even greater violence and madness?"

Introducing Millennium People to readers as a "wonderfully warped new novel," an Economist contributor detailed the novel's plot: deranged pediatrician Richard Gould has inflamed the Volvo-driving, yuppie upscale masses to commit acts of gratuitous violence as a way of combating social unrest. When his wife dies in a senseless accident, psychologist David Markham is converted to Gould's mantra and, as the level of violence accelerates, ultimately helps fire-bomb England's National Film Theatre, joined in this act of violence by several well-dressed residents of an upscale gated community. "With its allusions to the 11 September attacks on the World Trade Center," the novel will hold meaning for some readers, maintained Spectator critic Steve King; however, "others will no doubt be appalled by its characters' insistence on the life-affirming delights of terrorism, though it's hard to say how seriously Ballard wants us to take all this." As the author himself explained to Bookseller interviewer Benedicte Page, "I am interested in whether there is something in the air we breathe that encourages a very small minority of people to carry out violent acts of terrorism, I won't say as a cry for help, but as an act of last resort—an act of desperation." Noting references to the writing of Joseph Conrad, New Statesman critic John Gray argued that Millennium People is "a mesmerising novel" that "could be read as a Conradian fable of loss and dereliction set on the banks of the Thames." Noting that the novel "dissects the perverse psychology that links terrorists with their innocent victims," Gray added: "This is news from the near future, another despatch from one of the supreme chroniclers of our time."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Aldiss, Brian, and Harry Harrison, editors, SF Horizons, two volumes, Arno Press, 1975.

Burns, Alan, and Charles Sugnet, editors, The Imagination on Trial: British and American Writers Discuss Their Working Methods, Allison & Busby, 1981.

Clareson, Thomas D., editor, SF: The Other Side of Realism—Essays on Modern Fantasy and Science-fiction, Bowling Green University (Louisville, KY), 1971.

Clareson, Thomas D., editor, Voices for the Future: Essays on Major Science-fiction Writers, Bowling Green University (Louisville, KY), Volume I, 1976, Volume II, 1979.

Contemporary Fiction in America and England, 1950–1970, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 1976.

Contemporary Literary Criticism, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), Volume 3, 1975, Volume 6, 1976, Volume 14, 1980, Volume 36, 1986.

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 14: British Novelists since 1960, two volumes, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 1983.

Goddard, James, and David Pringle, editors, J.G. Ballard: The First Twenty Years, Bran's Head Books, 1976.

James, Langdon, editor, The New Science-Fiction, Hutchinson, 1969.

Neilson, Keith, editor, Survey of Science-Fiction Literature, Salem Press, 1979.

Platt, Charles, Dream Makers: The Uncommon People Who Write Science Fiction, Berkley Publishing (New York, NY), 1980.

Pringle, David, Earth Is the Alien Planet: J.G. Ballard's Four-dimensional Nightmare, Borgo Press (San Bernardino, CA), 1979.

Pringle, David, J.G. Ballard: A Primary and Secondary Bibliography, G.K. Hall (Boston, MA), 1984.

Rose, Mark, Alien Encounters: Anatomy of Science Fiction, Harvard University Press (Cambridge, MA), 1981.

Ross, Lois, and Stephen Ross, The Shattered Ring: Science Fiction and the Quest for Meaning, John Knox Press, 1970.

Short Story Criticism, Volume 1, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 1988.

Silverberg, Robert, editor, The Mirror of Infinity, Harper (New York, NY), 1970.

Silverberg, Robert, editor, Galactic Dreamers: Science Fiction as Visionary Literature, Random House (New York, NY), 1977.

Vale, V., and Andrea Juno, editors, Re/Search: J.G. Ballard, Re/Search Publishing (San Francisco, CA), 1984.

PERIODICALS

Booklist, May 1, 1998, review of Cocaine Nights, p. 1500.

Books and Bookmen, April, 1971; March, 1977.

Bookseller, June 20, 2003, Benedicte Page, review of Millennium People, p. 27.

Chicago Tribune, December 11, 1987.

Cypher, October, 1973.

Economist (U.S.), October 14, 2000, review of Super-Cannes, p. 106; October 4, 2003, review of Millennium People, p. 92.

Evergreen Review, spring, 1973.

Foundation, November, 1975, Volume 9, "Some Words about Crash!" pp. 44-54; February, 1982.

Globe and Mail (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), November 7, 1987.

Guardian, September 11, 1970; September 13, 2000, Stephen Moss, "Mad about Ballard."

Hudson Review, winter, 1973–74.

Independent, November 10, 2001, Gareth Evans, "A Crash Course in the Future," p. 10.

Insight on the News, September 21, 1998, Rex Roberts, review of Cocaine Nights, p. 36.

Kirkus Reviews, March 15, 1996, p. 413; March 1, 1998, review of Cocaine Nights, p. 282.

Library Journal, July, 1970; June 15, 1996, p. 64; October 15, 2000, Barbara Hoffert, review of Super-Cannes, p. 105.

Listener, December 11, 1975, Neil Hepburn, review of High-Rise.

London Review of Books, February 2, 1989; November 16, 2000, Sam Gilpin, "Vaguely on the Run," p. 22.

Los Angeles Times, October 20, 1988.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, October 20, 1985; May 1, 1988; October 27, 1991, p. 3; May 19, 1996, p. 11.

Magazine Litteraire, April, 1974.

Magazine of Fantasy and Science-fiction, September, 1976.

New Review, May, 1974.

New Statesman, May 10, 1974; November 15, 1975; December 20, 1999, Martin Amis, review of High-Rise, p. 126; September 11, 2000, John Gray, review of Super-Cannes, p. 53; November 19, 2001, Sebastian Shakespeare, review of The Complete Short Stories, p. 55; September 8, 2003, John Gray, review of Millennium People, p. 50.

New Statesman & Society, September 27, 1991, Nick Kimberley, "The Sage of Shepperton," p. 52.

Newsweek, January 28, 1985, David Lehman and Donna Foote, review of Empire of the Sun.

New Worlds, November, 1959; May, 1962; July, 1966; October, 1966.

New York Review of Books, January 25, 1979.

New York Times, May 11, 1977; October 13, 1984, John Gross, "A Survivor's Narrative," p. 18; April 5, 1988, John Gross, "Fable of Man as a River-borne Creator-Destroyer," p. C17.

New York Times Book Review, September 23, 1973; December 1, 1974; December 9, 1979; November 11, 1984, John Calvin Batchelor, "A Boy Saved by the Bomb," p. 11; May 15, 1988; October 16, 1988, Gregory Benford, "Buicks and Madmen," p. 22; December 17, 1989; November 10, 1991, David R. Slavitt, "The Monster He Became," p. 22; November 5, 1995, p. 26; May 26, 1996, p. 14; July 12, 1998, A.O. Scott, "Pinter on the Beach," p. 16; March 7, 1999, review of War Fever and The Day of Creation, p. 28; November 25, 2001, Geoff Nicholson, review of Super-Cannes, p. 29.

Observer (London, England), September 4, 1994, p. 16.

Paris Review, winter, 1984, Thomas Frick, interview with Ballard, pp. 133-160.

Penthouse, September, 1970; April, 1979.

Publishers Weekly, March 11, 1988; July 25, 1991; February 26, 1996, p. 90; April 13, 1998, review of Cocaine Nights, p. 54; September 3, 2001, review of Super-Cannes, p. 58.

Rolling Stone, November 19, 1987.

Science-Fiction Studies, July, 1976, Charles Nicol, "J.G. Ballard and the Limits of Mainstream SF," pp. 150-157.

Search and Destroy, number 10, 1978.

Spectator, September 17, 1994, p. 38; September 13, 2003, Steve King, review of Millennium People, p. 60.

Studio International, October, 1971.

Thrust, winter, 1980.

Time, November 13, 1989.

Times (London, England), September 20, 1984; September 10, 1987; November 3, 1988; November 8, 1990; November 8, 2001, Giles Whittell, "Terrorism, the British Psyche, and the M25" (interview), p. S5.

Times Literary Supplement, July 9, 1970; November 30, 1973; April 26, 1974; December 5, 1975; November 30, 1979; June 12, 1981; September 14, 1984; September 11, 1987; January 13, 1989; November 23, 1990; March 17, 1995, p. 22; April 12, 1996, p. 32; January 2, 1998, review of The Voices of Time, p. 20; December 13, 2001, Christopher Taylor, review of The Complete Short Stories, p. 20; September 7, 2003, Bharat Tandon, review of Millennium People, pp. 6-7.

Transatlantic Review, spring, 1971.

Tribune Books (Chicago, IL), April 10, 1988; December 22, 1991, p. 5; June 4, 1995, p. 3.

Vector, January, 1980.

Washington Post, February 21, 1989.

Washington Post Book World, November 25, 1979; October 28, 1984; July 26, 1987; April 17, 1988; June 12, 1988; May 21, 1995, p. 2; August 2, 1998, review of Cocaine Nights, p. 5; February 27, 1999, review of War Fever and The Day of Creation, p. 6.

Writer, June, 1973.

ONLINE

Books Online, http://www.booksonline.co.uk/ (September 10, 2000), Helen Brown, "Sex as a Means of Sedation."

Fine Line Features Web site, http://www.flf.com/ (January 30, 2002), interview with Ballard.

J.G. Ballard Web site, http://www.jgballard.com/ (March 14, 2001).

Spike Online, http://www.spikemagazine.com/ (August 31, 2001), David B. Livingstone, "Prophet with Honor"; (August 31, 2001) Chris Hall, "Flight and Imagination" (interview with Ballard).