Arguably the strangest writer to be included in this series, since he is not especially celebrated even amongst dedicated fans of his work, is J. G. Ballard. He is sometimes described, though his work hardly fits into that genre, as a writer of science fiction (which may explain the fervor and at the same time the diffidence of his fans, since that genre commands strong loyalties that are somehow held apart from literary discourse in general). In fact, his best known book, The Empire of the Sun, is a traditional novel, based on a seminal episode in his own life, when he spent a couple of years in a Japanese internment camp. This was in Shanghai, where his parents had been working before the Second World War.

It has been argued that the oppression Ballard experienced as a child during this period – he was 13 in 1943, when the Japanese took over the International Settlement in Shanghai, which had hitherto thought it was sacrosanct – contributed to the violence that is endemic to his work. He himself, however, said that, though there was brutality, the children also had fun. Certainly, that book seems to me the least dark of the novels of Ballard that I have read.

In presenting the whole experience emphatically through the eyes of a child, and indeed removing his parents from the action for most of it, Ballard conveys also a sense of the innocence that governs responses to the violence and suffering that have to be endured.