ISBN 83-91144-86-0

Warsaw 2005

Introduction 7

Part I – J.G. Ballard, John Wyndham and the Disaster Story Tradition in England 9

The British Disaster Story  10

John Wyndham’s cosy catastrophes 15

Ballard’s early disaster stories 28

The inner space disaster  35

The televised disaster  46

Part II – J.G. Ballard and the British „New Wave”  55

The British „The Wave”  56

Entropy  61

Disaster  71

The Present Tense  80

Conclusion 86

Part III – J.G. Ballard’s Short Fiction  87

Early psychological stories  90

Sociological fiction  95

Quasi-history  103

The future of the West  114

Part IV – J.G. Ballard’s „The Atrocity Exhibition” as a Contemporary Disaster Novel 121

Disaster Novel  121

The Exhibits  124

The Visions of Disaster  133

The Structure  137

Dr Nathan, the Analyst  146

Catastrophe is here and now  150

Freudian fiction  157

Introduction - J.G. Ballard is now one of the major English literature writers and his popularity is constantly growing. Since the great artistic and commercial success of his 1984 novel, Empire of the Sun he has entered the canon of the 20th century most prominent novelists and the number of critical essays and monographs devoted to his oeuvre is increasing. It is worth noticing that Ballard’s career began as early as the 1950s and that before becoming a distinguished mainstream author of classics his style went through numerous metamorphoses. He was in turn a science fiction writer, a member of an avant-garde literary group ‘New Wave’, and a postmodernist Pynchon-like experimenter.