SOURCE: “Repetition and Unreadability: J. G. Ballard's Vermilion Sands,” in Extrapolation, Vol. 36, No. 4, Winter, 1995, pp. 292–304.

In the following essay, Luckhurst analyses Ballard's “signature” style, as exemplified in the stories of Vermilion Sands. According to Luckhurst, Ballard “seduces” the reader with his distinct idiom, his use of incongruous similes, and textual repetitions which, taken together, comprise the indefinable essence of his work.

I will begin with a narrative of seduction. Martin Amis, in his long career of reviewing Ballard, began by condemning the “vicious nonsense” of Crash and has always sniped at Ballard's sham portentousness. In a television discussion, he dismissed Ballard's claim that science fiction is the literature of the twentieth century by pointing out that SF, for all its self-promotion, has remained “a minority pursuit—like train-spotting” (a very English insult). By the time he reviewed The Day of Creation, however, this dismissal had modulated: “Ballard's novel...