SOURCE: “Petition, Repetition, and ‘Autobiography’: J. G. Ballard's Empire of the Sun and The Kindness of Women,” in Contemporary Literature, Vol. 35, No. 4, Winter, 1994, pp. 688–708.

In the following essay, Luckhurst examines the interrelationship between Ballard's fiction and autobiography, as evident in Empire of the Sun and The Kindness of Women. According to Luckhurst, the numerous retellings, inversions, and variations of key events in Ballard's fiction and autobiography further problematize interpretation of Ballard's oeuvre, rather than serving as a mechanism for “decoding” or “decrypting” his work.

The reception of J. G. Ballard's work has always bewilderingly bifurcated between pronouncements that Ballard is “our best novelist” (Kimberley 52) and dismissal of his clumsy, embarrassing, and possibly insane works. This divergence of evaluation can more than probably be attributed to Ballard's association with science fiction and the need for critics to distance themselves from the stereotypical portrait of the average “fan” as dysfunctional...