page_title: J. G. Ballard
section_title: Shanghai
hierarchical_section_title: J. G. Ballard / Life / Shanghai
caption_attribution_description: English: Cover of Fantastic, October 1963
context_page_description: James Graham Ballard was an English novelist, short story writer, satirist, and essayist who first became associated with the New Wave of science fiction for his post-apocalyptic novels such as The Drowned World. In the late 1960s, he produced a variety of experimental short stories, such as those collected in the controversial The Atrocity Exhibition. In the mid 1970s, Ballard published several novels, among them the highly controversial Crash, a story about symphorophilia and car crash fetishism, and High-Rise, a depiction of a luxury apartment building's descent into violent chaos.
  While much of Ballard's fiction would prove thematically and stylistically provocative, he became best known for his relatively conventional war novel, Empire of the Sun, a semi-autobiographical account of a young British boy's experiences in Shanghai during Japanese occupation. Described by The Guardian as "the best British novel about the Second World War", the story was adapted into a 1987 film by Steven Spielberg starring Christian Bale. In the following decades until his death in 2009, Ballard's work shifted toward the form of the traditional crime novel.
context_section_description: Ballard's father, James (1901–1966), was a chemist at a Manchester-based textile firm, the Calico Printers' Association, and became chairman and managing director of its subsidiary in Shanghai, the China Printing and Finishing Company. His mother was Edna (1905–1998), née Johnstone. Ballard was born and raised in the Shanghai International Settlement, an area under foreign control where people "lived an American style of life". He was sent to the Cathedral School, the Anglican Holy Trinity Church near the Bund, Shanghai. After the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War, Ballard's family were forced to evacuate their suburban home temporarily and rent a house in central Shanghai to avoid the shells fired by Chinese and Japanese forces.
  After the Japanese attack on Hong Kong, the Japanese occupied the International Settlement in Shanghai. In early 1943, they began to intern Allied civilians, and Ballard was sent to the Lunghua Civilian Assembly Center with his parents and younger sister. He spent over two years, the remainder of World War II, in the internment camp. His family lived in a small area in G block, a two-storey residence for 40 families. He attended school in the camp, the teachers being camp inmates from a number of professions. As he explained later in his autobiography Miracles of Life, these experiences formed the basis of Empire of the Sun, although Ballard exercised considerable artistic licence in writing the book, such as the removal of his parents from the bulk of the story.
  It has been supposed that Ballard's exposure to the atrocities of war at an impressionable age explains the apocalyptic and violent nature of much of his fiction. Martin Amis wrote that Empire of the Sun "gives shape to what shaped him." However, Ballard's own account of the experience was more nuanced: "I don't think you can go through the experience of war without one's perceptions of the world being forever changed. The reassuring stage set that everyday reality in the suburban west presents to us is torn down; you see the ragged scaffolding, and then you see the truth beyond that, and it can be a frightening experience." But also: "I have—I won't say happy—not unpleasant memories of the camp. [...] I remember a lot of the casual brutality and beatings-up that went on—but at the same time we children were playing a hundred and one games all the time!" Ballard later became an atheist.
caption: Another Emshwiller cover illustrating the Vermilion Sands story "The Screen Game" (1963).
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