SOURCE: Stephenson, Gregory. Introduction to Out of the Night and Into the Dream: A Thematic Study of the Fiction of J. G. Ballard, pp. 1-12. New York: Greenwood Press, 1991.

In the following essay, Stephenson delineates how Ballard consistently subverts basic assumptions about the nature of reality and identity in his fiction, and provides an overview of Ballard's career and critical discussion of his works.

The work of J. G. Ballard represents a sustained act of subversion. It is, moreover, subversion of an ultimate character, directed against nothing so trivial as the governmental or economic systems, but aimed instead at overturning the most fundamental assumptions of our culture regarding the nature of reality and of our own identities. Ballard's writing is, as we shall discover, subversive in the most precise sense of the word—whose original meaning is to turn from beneath—in that his fiction upholds the work...