SOURCE: Luckhurst, Roger. “The Signature of J. G. Ballard.” In ‘The Angle Between Two Walls’: The Fiction of J. G. Ballard, pp. 151-81. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1997.

In the following essay, Luckhurst explores stylistic and thematic aspects of Ballard's writing.

This book [‘The Angle Between Two Walls’: The Fiction of J. G. Ballard] has been concerned with frames and borders throughout, and the strange lapsus in their operations that Ballard's texts produce. Being between science fiction and the ‘mainstream’, modernism and postmodernism, avant-garde (‘high’ texts in advance) and après-garde (‘low’ texts dragging behind), have been positions carefully examined, as have Ballard's explicit thematization of permeability, invagination, the peculiar space between catastrophe and catastrophe, and the uncanny protrusions into the empty spaces of supermodernity, those zones of transit that lie between elsewheres.

Every critic would desire (for wouldn't every reader demand this?) to capture the essence of their...