Ballard was a brilliant observer and fluid writer, it's very sad to think there won't be any more of his books. ( )

A lovely interesting autobiography. I felt the final third a bit less interesting (though there is a kicker) but the beginning sections, from his childhood in Shanghai and in the Japanese war camp, through his return to England and school, through the death of his wife, are all absorbing, whether or not the reader is familiar with Ballard's fiction. The reader of Ballard's fiction might be surprised by the simplicity and calm of this tale (though that isn't true of the elements of the tale) but will spot the origins of many of the tropes, images and themes of Ballard's fiction.

Modest and sparing, I found this telling of his remarkable life even more powerful and moving than his fictionalised accounts – Empire of the Sun and The Kindness of Women. A great deal of the material is already familiar from those novels, but one of the fascinating aspects of this book is his willingness to discuss his inspiration and techniques for writing.

His training as a doctor at Cambridge (where he was fascinated by dissection), his early working life selling encyclopedias, training in the RAF and as deputy editor at Chemistry & Industry along with his interest in psychoanalysis all led him to create a unique genre of writing in which the characters 'inner-spaces' are the focus instead of science fiction's usual preoccupations at that time.

I loved his delightful inversion of Cyril Connolly's quote – "my greatest ally was the pram in the hall" – and his belief in the importance of providing a happy and stable childhood for his family after his wife died suddenly in 1964. It is quite a leap of imagination to go from writing books like The Atrocity Exhibition during the day to picking the kids up from school, watching Blue Peter and preparing dinner. As he admits himself 'my children brought me up, perhaps as an incidental activity to rearing themselves', but also rightly points out he was incredibly lucky to be able to observe the process of his children growing from infancy into fully formed human beings so closely and how often fathers miss out on this. His joy in being a parent, the time spent as the sole parent of young children and the 'miracles of life' that he observed all added much to my understanding of him and his books.

It saddened me greatly to learn in the final chapter that he is suffering from advanced prostate cancer and that this may be the last thing he writes. It would be sad if this is the case, but when you look at the life he has led and the work he will leave behind I can't help but feeling that there isn't really any need to say anything else. ( )

This book tells the life story of the author of "Empire of the Sun". JG Ballard now has cancer of the prostate and does not have much time left.

This is an interesting, well-written and thoughtful autobiography starting with Ballard’s life in Shanghai (he was born there in 1930), through his experience in the Japanese internment camp (outside Shanghai at Lunghua….at least, outside 1943-1945, but now well within the city of Shanghai) with his parents, sister and other foreigners (the Shanghai experiences recounted in his novel Empire of the Sun), through to his return to a post-war England that he could never quite grasp with its strata of haves and have-nots (more important, in his view than any “class” distinctions), worn out from the war but with too many trying to hang on to faded and exhausted glories of the British empire, through his brief stint as a medical student, his early efforts as a writer, trying to find his voice and his genre, his brief experience in Canada as an RAF pilot in training, his return to England and the beginnings of a writing career always on the edge of “mainstream” literature with his own particular type of science fiction.

The book is interesting for Ballard’s views on society, for his thoughts on literature and what is important in writing, and what led him to develop his writing in the field of science fiction. In the latter, he was greatly influenced by psychoanalysis (particularly Freud) and surrealism: “I strongly felt, and still do, that psychoanalysis and surrealism were the key to the truth about existence and human personality, and also a key to myself”. His search for a new style and content of ficiton was very much driven by a desire to explore these “truths” through writing. As he says: “…surrealism and psychoanalysis offered an escape route, a secret corridor into a more real and more meaningful world, where shifting psychological roles are more important than the ‘character’ so admired by English school-masters and literary critics, and where the deep revolutions of the psyche matter more than the social dramas of everyday life, as trivial as a tempest in a tea cosy.”

Ballard’s experiences in Shanghai strongly shaped his life and approach to his writing, or what he considered should be important and explored in writing. He describes wandering through a deserted casino in the late 1930s when Shanghai was under Japanese occupation:

“Everywhere gold glimmered in the half-light, transforming this derelict casino into a magical cavern from the Arabian Nights tales. But it held a deeper meaning for me, the sense that reality itself was a stage set that could be dismantled at any moment, and that no matter how magnificent anything appeared, it could be swept aside into the debris of the past.
I also felt that the ruined casino, like the city and the world beyond it, was more real and more meaningful than it had been when it was thronged with gambles and dancers. Abandoned houses and office buildings held a special magic and on my way home from school I often paused outside an empty apartment block. Seeing everything displaced and rearranged in a haphazard way gave me my first taste of the surrealism of everyday life, hough Shanghai was already surrealist enough.”

I think this sums up nicely Ballard’s approaches in his novels, his eye for extrapolating from the ordinary into the extraordinary and even the horrific, inventiveness firmly rooted in elements of present social and economic “realities” as we understand them, everyday connections that seem commonplace until they are explored or stood on their heads, and with social commentaries and criticisms swathed in the extreme. The quote above about the ruined casino resonates perfectly with his description of the mad world of an artificially maintained Las Vegas in the midst of an abandoned USA in Hello America ( )