"Fantastic fiction" .... that's actually a very apt way to describe Ballard's work.
His memoir presents a vivid but not fantastic view of his life in the suburbs of southeast England, like a British Cheever. I felt surprised but shouldn't have; many of the greats of science fiction or fantasy or fantastic fiction had harrowing experiences as youths and then led lives that seem "normal" while exercising their trauma through the written word. Vonnegut, Tolkien, Wolfe ...
I read this when it came out as a long time Ballard fan. It fleshed out a little more about his life I didn’t know, but becomes a weird read for the final third where the focus is on the co-author dying and the author switches to his wife, an originally unintended co-author. They certainly had a story of their own to tell, but it felt rather odd.
I’m okay with that. I’ve been a huge fan of Ballard and Priest for years, and got into Nina Allan’s work more recently and this book was a brilliant but heartbreaking read.
His memoir presents a vivid but not fantastic view of his life in the suburbs of southeast England, like a British Cheever. I felt surprised but shouldn't have; many of the greats of science fiction or fantasy or fantastic fiction had harrowing experiences as youths and then led lives that seem "normal" while exercising their trauma through the written word. Vonnegut, Tolkien, Wolfe ...
https://www.researchpubs.com/shop/p/research-89-jg-ballard-l...
But he also had a lot of rather experimental and even weird stories--some of which intersected SF to some degree and some of which really didn't.