At least three J. G. Ballards have so far been championed in critical studies and literary histories: the science fiction writer, famous for his disaster novels and stories of entropic dissolution; the admirer of William S. Burroughs and author of scandalous tales remarkable for their sexual frankness and eccentric violence; and the Booker Prize nominee, whose account of a boy's life in Japanese-occupied wartime Shanghai in Empire of the Sun was published to great acclaim in 1984. The first of these has been abundantly described and publicized as one of the leading representatives of the New Wave school of British science fiction. During the 1960s, he became one of the leading contributors to Michael Moorcock's seminal magazine, New Worlds, which advocated a wider range of subject matter and the use of experimental forms and techniques in order to endow the genre with ‘literary’ value. By 1966, Ballard had already published four novels and more than fifty short stories which succeeded in raising the genre to a high literary standard, at a time when it was dismissed as adolescent, escapist and, ultimately, second-rate art.

Ballard's first four science fiction novels, The Wind from Nowhere, The Drowned World, The Drought and The Crystal World, are now recognized as superlative work even outside the circles of SF aficionados. His second phase began in the early 1970s, when he was turned into a cult figure of the ‘underground’ scene as the author of The Atrocity Exhibition and the ‘precyberpunk’ novel Crash. A few years later, he became interested in the more regenerative landscapes of the dream-allegory (The Unlimited Dream Company). To make things even more complicated, Empire of the Sun – Ballard's more recent swerve away from both SF and avant-garde fiction towards the more familiar realms of the semi-autobiographical novel – established his reputation as a ‘mainstream’ author.

Ballard's reputation as a novelist has increased steadily over the years and has now outgrown his initial achievements as a ‘genre’ writer. However, it was not until the publication of Empire of the Sun – which won the Guardian Fiction Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize – that he began to be recognized as a major contemporary English novelist by the critical establishment.