SOURCE: Brigg, Peter. Introduction to J. G. Ballard, pp. 11-18. Mercer Island, WA: Starmont House Inc., 1985.

In the following essay, Brigg analyzes Ballard's expressive and intensely symbolic writing style in his short stories.

The planes of their lives interlocked at oblique angles, fragments of personal myths fusing with the deities of the commercial cosmologies.

—J. G. Ballard, 1966

The landscapes of the imaginations of writers flowering since the twin catastrophes of Hiroshima and television are cluttered with pictorial images of death, violence, sex, and gross materialism. The critical moments of contemporary Western European and American history are a commonly held visual possession: the mushroom cloud, the dying Kennedys, the massed marchers, and mutilated dead of a hundred causes. Besides history's pictures stand the cultural images: Marilyn Monroe, Charles Manson, the Apollo astronauts, Mick Jagger, the mini-skirt, the fins of a 1956 Chrysler New Yorker. The broad mainstream of fictional creation...