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With Empire of the Sun (1984), the fictionalised account of his adolescence in a Second World War Japanese prison camp, Ballard found the wide readership denied to his earlier novels. In the Ballard canon, Empire feels like a sobering glass of water next to a row of hallucinogenic drug cocktails, yet it shares one theme with his second most famous book, Crash, filmed by David Kronenberg in 1996: the sexualised fetishisation of technology. Literary circles view his blend of dystopian science fiction and modern sociology with suspicion, but Ballard’s impact on wider culture has been immense: The Atrocity Exhibition influenced Joy Division’s album Closer, and Radiohead and Klaxxons have championed his work. The French philosopher Jean Baudrillard, enthused by more than just the likeness of their names, hailed Crash as the first great postmodern novel.
One to read: Crash (1973)
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