Miracles of Life: Shanghai to Shepperton, An Autobiography
Empire of the Sun (1984) outsold all my previous books put together, Ballard says. The story of a boy growing from child to teenager in a WWII alien internment camp in Shanghai, the novel is based on personal experience, from which Ballard strips the alterations of fiction in the more engaging first part of this autobiography written in the shadow of his imminent death from cancer. Part 2, not much longer than the first, accounts for the rest of Ballard’s 79 years perfunctorily and even scrappily; it’s full of provocative but undeveloped sentiments about literature, in particular. Since Ballard’s most commonly thought of as an sf writer, it’s remarkable that he has so little to say about the genre, apart from his strong preference for setting his sf in the present and in psychological, rather than outer, space. He likens his preferred fictional space to the aura of film noir, but there is no question that his memoir’s part 1 is set in it, and that there it is brilliantly and beautifully illuminated. --Ray Olson