By contrast, Empire of the Sun was a realist work, styled as fiction but based heavily on Ballard’s childhood experiences in World War II China, and his nearly four years of imprisonment in labour camps. In The Drowned World, he imagined a post-apocalyptic flood where survivors are forced to live in the top floors of tower blocks in Crash, he described a sub-culture of deeply damaged outsiders who re-stage celebrity car crashes for sexual gratification, re-shaping their bodies through repeated injury. Ballard’s literary work was primarily speculative fiction – a dislocated, often nightmarish imagining of then not-so-distant future and the chilling, often ultra-violent intersection of humans with technology. Why it’s a classic: Until Empire of the Sun was published in 1984, J. The novel ends with a teenaged Jim and his family leaving Shanghai by boat for England, a homeland he has never seen or known.

After several near-death experiences, he makes a long and dangerous journey to Shanghai, and is finally reunited with his parents. He is saved from starvation by air drops from American bombers. Jim escapes and takes shelter in an abandoned sports stadium, witnessing the white flash of the atom bomb dropping on Nagasaki. With American forces approaching, the remaining prisoners are forced on a death march to Nantao. As the Japanese military campaign collapses, food supplies run short and Jim nearly starves to death. When food supplies run out, Jim and Basie surrender to the Japanese army and are sent to an internment camp for three years. He becomes a vagrant, living in abandoned mansions and surviving on tinned food, befriending Basie, an American racketeer who attempts to sell him to the Japanese. After the bombing of Pearl Harbour in 1942, the Japanese invade Shanghai, and his parents are sent to an internment camp. Jim, a young English boy lives a life of luxury with his parents in the British expatriate settlement in Shanghai. Ballard’s 1984 autobiographical novel about growing up in Shanghai during World War II and being interned in a prisoner-of-war.

Jg ballard novel of the sun