In the late 1930s, James Graham Ballard (1930–2009) was prone to go traipsing around Shanghai without his parents’ permission and was proud to be identified as “the biggest heathen” in his class by his scripture teacher. As punishment for one infraction, whose details have now been lost, Ballard was required to copy pages out of Charles Kingsley’s Westward Ho!, a fairly common penalty at his school. Ballard decided that the chore would be more interesting if he made up the story as he went along, and he wrote a swashbuckling adventure about pirates instead. The following day in class his teacher called him out, saying, “Next time Ballard, don’t copy your lines from some trashy novel.” This was the renowned science-fiction writer’s first review.
Despite this early start, Ballard’s rise to success didn’t happen quickly or easily. In the first American printing of Miracles of Life, Ballard’s autobiography, the author explains his struggles, living in a Japanese internment camp, working numerous dead-end jobs, losing a wife to a sudden infection, and being rejected by fellow sci-fi writers.
Growing up in the modernizing metropolis of Shanghai, Ballard quickly became aware of the surreal nature of the city in which he lived. Western immigrants built houses in the style of their respective homelands, eschewing Chinese architectural offerings. Wealthy foreigners would play tennis, attend dinner parties, and celebrate nightclub openings while countless Chinese peasants died of poverty and disease. Soldiers and gangsters, tourists and beggars, businessmen and prostitutes
