Described as 'The best British novel about the Second World War' by The Guardian, the story was adapted into a 1987 film by Steven Spielberg.

While many of Ballard's stories are thematically and narratively unusual, he is perhaps best known for his relatively conventional war novel, Empire of the Sun (1984), a semi-autobiographical account of a young boy's experiences in Shanghai during the Second Sino-Japanese War as it came to be occupied by the Japanese Imperial Army. The story was later adapted into a film of the same name by Canadian director David Cronenberg. In 1973 the highly controversial novel Crash was published, a story about symphorophilia and car crash fetishism the protagonist becomes sexually aroused by staging and participating in real car crashes. In the late 1960s and early 1970s Ballard focused on an eclectic variety of short stories (or 'condensed novels') such as The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), which drew closer comparison with the work of postmodernist writers such as William S. Ballard came to be associated with the New Wave of science fiction early in his career with apocalyptic (or post-apocalyptic) novels such as The Drowned World (1962), The Burning World (1964), and The Crystal World (1966). G.' Ballard (15 November 1930 – 19 April 2009) was an English novelist, short story writer, and essayist. Travelling through this gilded land, the doctor tries to resist its strange allure, while a tribe of lepers search for Paradise… But some, dazzled and strangely entranced, remain to drift through this dreamworld forest.

Pythons with huge blind gemstone eyes rear in heraldic poses.įearing this transformation as a herald of the apocalypse, most flee the area in terror, afraid to face a catastrophe they cannot understand. Crocodiles encased in second glittering skins lurch down the river. Trees are metamorphosed into enormous jewels. Through a 'leaking' of time, the West African jungle starts to crystallize. Finding the roadways blocked, he takes to the river, and embarks on a frightening journey through a strange petrified forest whose area expands daily, affecting not only the physical environment but also its inhabitants. Ballard's fourth novel, which established his reputation as a writer of extraordinary talent and imaginative powers, tells the story of a physician specializing in the treatment of leprosy who is invited to a small outpost in the interior of Africa.

The atrocity exhibition book