I first became acquainted with the stories of J.G. Ballard in the early 1970s during my first infatuation with science fiction, specifically with the cutting-edge literary work referred to as the New Wave. Back then, his shorter works appeared mainly in British publications such as New Worlds magazine, but they also showed up in award and best-of-the-year anthologies, which is where I found them. Although at the time he was not as well known as other American New Wave writers such as Ursula Le Guin, Harlan Ellison, Roger Zelazny, and Samuel Delaney, he was well-respected for the erudite quality of his work, especially after the stories in his surrealistic experimental novel The Atrocity Exhibition began to appear. He became internationally famous, though, when his autobiographical novel Empire of the Sun was published in the mid-eighties and soon afterwards Spielberg made a movie out of it.

Part One of Miracles of Life, which takes up almost half the book, is about Ballard’s early years in China. He was born in Shanghai in 1930 and raised in an elite, vibrant, and wealthy expatriate community. As he matured, he had a great deal of independence, cycling around Shanghai on his own and meeting all sorts of idiosyncratic characters. However, as World War II approached, Japan invaded China. For a time the expats were left alone, but they were eventually rounded up and placed in an internment camp called the Lunghua Civilian Assembly Center. Ballard, his parents, and his sister lived all together in a tiny dorm room in a compound surrounded by barbed wire fencing. In the beginning, security was loose, and Ballard would take off for the city from time to time to see what he could see. Despite being a refugee in a world war, Ballard describes his time at the camp as mainly joyful; he made many friends and had many adventures. After the Americans intervened in the war, and especially after the atomic bombing of the Japanese mainland, the Japanese left, and Ballard and his mother and sister relocated to England.

Part Two concerns Ballard’s college years, his marriage, and of course his growth as a writer. Ballard says that he began writing as a child, “perhaps as a response to the greater tension I sensed among the adults around me.” “I was always a keen storyteller, and enjoyed school essays when there was a free choice and I could describe some important event, real or imaginary.” Later, when he moved to England, he became fascinated with surrealism and psychoanalysis, interests that heavily influenced his writing.

His wife died of pneumonia in 1964, and afterwards Ballard raised his three children as a single father. I am fully in agreement with him as he states that “the years I spent as the parent of my young children were the richest and happiest I have ever known.” And “my children were at the center of my life, circled at a distance by my writing.” So it was with me as well when my kids were young.

One thing I would like to have seen Ballard explore more in depth is his experiences as a writer: how he formulated ideas for his books, the process of writing them, and the aftermath. These topics are touched on but only briefly and not in depth. He does mention Doubleday’s pulping of the entire first printing of The Atrocity Exhibition after the publisher happened to come across one of its more radical stories, and the controversy surrounding his novel Crash and the subsequent film. His big break, of course, was when Empire of the Sun became an international best seller and Spielberg’s film became a hit.

The last chapter of the autobiography, which is only a single page long, offers a clue as to why the second half of the book does not have the depth of detail of the first half. Ballard explains that he was diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer and he was receiving treatment for it. Only after the cancer diagnosis did he begin working on the autobiography. It seems that in the end he ran short of time.

Ballard’s patient, kind, magnanimous, intelligent, expressive voice makes Miracles of Life a joy to read. He was a profoundly influential writer. Indeed, the word “Ballardian” has entered the lexicon. The Wiktionary defines this as “of or pertaining to the fictional milieu of J.G. Ballard; typically, focusing on surreal violence as inherent in modernity.”

*     *     *

I had never seen the film Empire of the Sun, and I decided that it would provide fitting closure to watch it. In Miracles of Life, Ballard explains that he decided to fictionalize his experience in China and to take his parents out of the equation so that he could focus on the boy, his younger self, and his reactions to the war and occupation. The tone of the movie is much darker than Ballard’s autobiography; in the book, as I mentioned above, the young Ballard is joyful much of the time despite his circumstances, while in the film, lost and alone, he faces one crisis after another. It must be said, though, that the movie is superbly produced and directed, and twelve-year-old Christian Bale as Ballard, who is in virtually every scene, is amazing.