Most of Ballard's readers would probably agree that his fiction as a whole, despite its apparently antithetical directions, is a coherent and consistent literary achievement; one in which the same obsessions recur over and over again under different forms and in different contexts. The Kindness of Women (1991) – Ballard's brilliant, and largely underestimated, sequel to Empire of the Sun – appears in many ways as a kind of link between the different ‘parallel careers’ which make up his oeuvre. His retrospective account of the ‘craze years’ of the 1960s, in particular, contains a number of semi-autobiographical keys to the interpretation of the major themes and motifs of his work and to what he himself calls his ‘library of extreme metaphors’. Describing the ‘unique alchemy of the imagination’ taking place in the 1960s, Ballard sees the new media landscape then emerging as ‘a laboratory designed specifically to cure [him] of all [his] obsessions’. ‘The brutalizing newsreels of civil wars and assassinations, the stylization of televised violence into an anthology of design statements’, he goes on, ‘were matched by a pornography of science that took its material, not from nature, but from the deviant curiosity of the scientist’ (KW 185).

Such were the specific methodological premises of The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), Ballard's first foray into the kind of avant-gardist experimentalism which earned him a cult-reputation as a ‘far-out’ writer. The volume contains fifteen ‘chapters’ or ‘condensed novels’ ranging from four to fifteen pages. Each of them contains a series of interrelated vignettes gravitating around the psychopathological states of a central figure, that of a psychiatrist suffering from a nervous breakdown, variously named Travis, Talbot, Traven, Tallis, Trabert, Talbert, and Travers. As Ballard himself comments, the protagonist of the collection is a kind of portmanteau entity ‘appear[ing] in a succession of roles, ranging across a spectrum of possibilities available to each of us in our interior lives’ (AE 91).

An important aspect of the British New Wave school (which also characterized, for instance, Michael Moorcock's famous Jerry Cornelius stories), the exploded structure of the episodes is reminiscent of the famous ‘cut-up’ writing technique of William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin.