J. G. Ballard is "perhaps the most important figure to emerge from the British New Wave of science-fiction writers, whose works brought a new degree of literary sophistication and critical respectability to the genre beginning in the late 1950s," according to Charles Brower, writing in the Dictionary of Literary Biography. Ballard uses the language and symbols of science fiction to "explore the collective unconscious, the externalized psyche, which is plainly visible around us and which belongs to us all," as David Pringle stated in his Earth Is the Alien Planet: J. G. Ballard's Four-dimensional Nightmare. Ballard's obsessive characters, searching "for a reality beyond 'normal' life," as Douglas Winter described it in the Washington Post Book World, manifest their private visions in landscapes that reflect their own mental states. Ballard's work ranges from "tender, thoughtful books," according to Mary Wakefield in the Spectator, such as Empire of the Sun...