J. G. Ballard is one of the most significant of those British novelists who have established themselves since 1960. Although he established his literary reputation as a science-fiction writer, he has come to believe that the present, rather than the future, is the period of greatest moral urgency for the writer, and that science fiction is central to the literary mainstream, to the extent that it concerns itself not with outer but “inner space.” In a 1975 interview, he commented:

I began writing in the mid-Fifties. Enormous changes were going on in England at that time, largely brought about by science and technology—the beginnings of television, package holidays, mass merchandising, the first supermarkets. . . . The only form of fiction which was trying to make head or tail of what was going on in our world was science-fiction. . . . I wanted a science-fiction of the present day. . . . I am not interested in...