The American critic Nicholas Zurbrugg has interpreted the intellectual honesty and emotional credibility which pervades Ballard's autobiographical novels as a sign of his recovery from ‘his erstwhile panic mentality’. By making ‘a clean break with the earlier, more pessimistic … stories’, he writes, ‘The Kindness of Women suggests that Ballard is now best described as one of the great contemporary ex-dystopians’. Zurbrugg's analysis is typical of an all too common tendency to settle for an understanding of Ballard's recent fiction as a breakaway from the lurid and tormented psychopathological paradigms of The Atrocity Exhibition in favour of a redeeming ‘catharsis’. There are a number of things wrong with this claim. The first is that it reduces Ballard's career to a process of gradual enlightenment in which the author allegedly grows out of his radical and sensationalist prose into a more affirmative, and one supposes more ‘responsible’ and ‘mature’, approach to contemporary culture. Such an interpretation appears all the more questionable since the aesthetic and political premises of Ballard's early fiction have continued to run through the later novels in away that allows the reader to retroactively ‘revisit’ and reinvent them in the light of subsequent formal and thematic modulations. The second, and more important, objection that can be raised against Zurbrugg's argument is that Ballard's fiction was never in the least characterized by a ‘panic mentality’. On the contrary, even Ballard's most apocalyptic stories convey a peaceful sense of acceptance of the individual's devolutionary descent into a state of timeless, inorganic stasis that is anything but desperate. As for that most sensational dystopian speculation known as the ‘death of affect’, its main consequence is precisely to prevent Ballard's characters from experiencing anything remotely associated with such feelings as fear or anxiety.

Ballard's thirteenth novel, Rushing to Paradise (1994), suggests, if need be, that his interest in extremisms of all kinds has not yet begun to falter. The motif of the marooned individual suddenly severed from civilization and capable of reverting to various forms of primitive savagery once again provides the focal point for Ballard's novel, which is concerned with the latent and manifest motives of Dr Barbara Rafferty, the charismatic leader of a community of radical environmentalists overrunning the deserted Pacific atoll of Saint-Esprit.