"The Violent Noon" [Ballard's first published story] is a story about terrorism and military reprisals, set in Malaya during the Emergency. Although it is not SF, it prefigures many of the concerns of Ballard's writing, with its jungle setting, its element of violence, and, above all, a plot which hinges on a psychological paradox…. Ballard needed science fiction: the pressure of his imagination demanded a freer outlet than could be provided by conventional short stories in the mode of Conrad or Somerset Maugham. (p. 5)

Yet the main influences on Ballard's writing were to come from outside the SF field. Romanticism, Symbolism, Surrealism, and the whole "modern movement" in literature and the visual arts have left their marks on Ballard. (p. 6)

[Ballard is] one of the few contemporary writers (in or out of the limited field of science fiction) who has a voice authentically his own. Ballard is an...