SOURCE: Stephenson, Gregory. “‘Trapped Aircraft’: The Later Short Fiction.” In Out of the Night and Into the Dream: A Thematic Study of the Fiction of J. G. Ballard, pp. 85-116. New York: Greenwood Press, 1991.

In the following essay, Stephenson analyzes Ballard's thematic employment of illusion.

A dominant theme in Ballard's short fiction of the period 1966 to 1989 is that of illusion: the misapprehensions we are content to accept and the self-deceptions we practice with regard to the nature of reality and of our own identity, and the deliberate limitations and restrictions imposed upon our awareness and our consciousness from without for purposes of manipulation and control. The dangerous and even fatal consequences of illusion, and the ways we can attain release from the constraints and restraints of illusion are central concerns of the author throughout these later stories.

In the story “Tomorrow is a Million Years”¹ Ballard depicts the...