The Times has a list of the Greatest British Writers Since 1945.
Ballard’s in there at no.25 no. 27, where he is appraised like so:
With Empire of the Sun (1984), the fictionalised account of his adolescence in a Second World War Japanese prison camp, Ballard found the wide readership denied to his earlier novels. In the Ballard canon, Empire feels like a sobering glass of water next to a row of hallucinogenic drug cocktails, yet it shares one theme with his second most famous book, Crash, filmed by David Kronenberg [sic] in 1996: the sexualised fetishisation of technology. Literary circles view his blend of dystopian science fiction and modern sociology with suspicion, but Ballard’s impact on wider culture has been immense: The Atrocity Exhibition influenced Joy Division’s album Closer, and Radiohead and Klaxxons [sic] have championed his work. The French philosopher Jean Baudrillard, enthused by more than just the likeness of their names, hailed Crash as the first great postmodern novel.
One to read: Crash (1973)
Aside from the misspelling of ‘Cronenberg’ and ‘Klaxons’, one thing baffles me: Where exactly does Empire of the Sun deal with ‘the sexualised fetishisation of technology’?
