Ballard can't be blamed for the sentimental treatment his book got in Spielberg's ham fists. The book is as bleak and visually charged as his earlier fiction, and offers no answers or easy psychological revelations. The later book Rushing to Paradise is also a knockout: a politically incorrect fable of what happens when a fanatic liberal activist suddenly has infinite funding for research on a Pacific island (hint: she becomes another Pol Pot).

In my view Empire of the Sun is as 'Ballardian' as anything else he wrote.

It might be a more conventional narrative but it still has that sense of dislocation and the disturbing mix of the everyday and the bizarre.

It's a little odd not to mention Ballard's influence on the cyberpunks . . . their cityscapes (and the delineation of cyberspace itself) are all indebted to his vision.

Empire of the Sun presents the observations of a distrurbingly detached young boy who is buffered by wealth but is nonetheless aware that the world around him is going to hell. Ballard writes in the third person because the events were so strange and traumatic that he had processed them as if they happened to someone else. There's one moment where he describes his chauffeur running over the foot of a begger with such cold, bleak detail that is sent chills down my spine. A fantastic book, bearing no resemblance to the maudlin (albeit excellent) adaptation by Steven Spielberg.

I read some Ballard (High Rise, Crash, Concrete Island) in my college years and picked up "Empire of the Sun" and "The Kindness of Women" from the library last week. Meanwhile my dad reports from his cruise to Japan that the Japanese have invaded the ship for fingerprinting, searched all cabins, cut off communication from the outside world (payback for US TSA processes). After 7 days dad writes that the situation among the passengers is tense, a homemade sign saying "fuck the japs" hangs on a wall on one deck. It's "High Rise" on the horizontal. Maybe they'll be fighting in the stairwells before docking in LA.

If you're a reader, Ballard is not to be missed if only for what it can still portend.

However, I am more than happy to check out this author's other books.

If anyone wants "Crash" for the cost of mailing, just let me know. It's in "Just like new" condition.

durianjoe@hotmail.com

Simon, I'll second Tom Moody's suggestion to read Empire of the Sun.

In some sense, Ballard's experiences "explain" his later writings, but that's like saying that Bill Burrough's experiences with heroin "explain" Naked Lunch. They do, and they don't.

Regardless, Empire is a moving, disturbing, and quintessentially Ballardian novel.

She named a song and tour "Drowned World", which I guess came from Ballard's SF novel.

I wonder what influences she got from Ballard.