SOURCE: Luckhurst, Roger. “The Atrocity Exhibition and the Problematic of the Avant-Garde.” In ‘The Angle Between Two Walls’: The Fiction of J. G. Ballard, pp. 73-117. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1997.

In the following essay, Luckhurst discusses both the modernist and postmodernist characteristics of Ballard's work.

How is one to approach this object, this text or texts? The fifteen sections that make up The Atrocity Exhibition¹ appeared singly, across a wide range of journals, both science fiction and non-science fiction; are these short stories, then, separable as such? James Blish sensed a design: ‘pieces of a mosaic, the central subject of which is not yet visible … these fragments … are going somewhere, by the most unusual method of trying to surround it, or work into it from the edges of a frame’ (127). The assumption here is that the sequence will coalesce. Blish's statement, that ‘the plain, blunt fact is that...