J. G. Ballard

This biocritical study of J. G. Ballard is the first book to account for the entire life and work of the eccentric, prolific SF author. Ballard began his career publishing short stories in SF magazines. Rather than explore outer space, his fiction explores “inner space,” drawing on the aesthetics of Surrealism and Freudian psychoanalysis. In the 1960s, he became associated with the New Wave movement in SF, which eschewed the principles of pulp SF in favor of literary modernism. Ballard’s oeuvre maps the unfolding of the mediapocalypse from the dawn of the Space Age into the 21st century; pathologized by the technology of electronic media, his characters are chronically harrowed by an implosion of real and cinematic landscapes as they struggle to find agency from the “death of affect” incited by the forces of late capitalism. Some scholarship has tried to remove Ballard from SF, arguing that he abandoned the genre halfway through his career, especially after publishing the fictional autobiography Empire of the Sun. As this book avows, however, Ballard began as, and always remained, a SF writer.