Empire of the Sun Read online

  The Drowned World

  In Ballard’s first full novel, inspired in part by his memories of Shanghai, London is a city inundated by a primeval swamp.

  The Drought

  Water. Man’s most precious commodity is a luxury of the past in this compelling early novel from Ballard. Radioactive waste from years of industrial dumping has caused the sea to form a protective skin strong enough to devastate the earth it once sustained. And while the remorseless sun beats down on Dr Charles Ransom and the remaining inhabitants of Mount Royal, civilization begins to crack…

  Collected Short Stories

  Ballard’s very first stories, ‘Prima Belladonna’ and ‘Escapement’, were published in Science Fantasy and New Worlds back in 1956. This volume offers an unparalleled chance to explore his complete shorter oeuvre and marvel at both his development as a writer and his mastery of the form.

  Crash

  Ballard’s controversial cult novel, subsequently made into an equally controversial film by David Cronenberg, was originally published in 1973 but it has lost none of its potency. Vaughan, a TV scientist turned nightmare angel of the highways, craves the ultimate erotic atrocity: a union of blood, semen and engine fluid in a head-on smash with Elizabeth Taylor.

  High Rise

  Within the concealing walls of an elegant forty-storey tower block, the affluent tenants are hell-bent on an orgy of destruction. Cocktail parties degenerate into marauding attacks on ‘enemy’ floors and the once-luxurious amenities become an arena for mayhem. In Ballard’s visionary novel, human society slips into violent reverse as the inhabitants of the high rise, driven by primal urges, recreate a world ruled by the laws of the jungle.

  Millennium People

  While searching for the truth behind the Heathrow bomb that killed his ex-wife, psychologist David Markham infiltrates a shadowy protest group based in the comfortable enclave of Chelsea Marina. He finds that these middle-class revolutionaries are intent on destroying everything they’ve worked so hard for: blowing up the National Film Theatre, no less, burning their books, defaulting on their maintenance charges and staging a great Bonfire of the Volvos. Part cultural analysis and part surreal social prediction, this gripping late novel finds Ballard still at the height of his creative powers.

  If You Loved This, You Might Like…

  The Singapore Grip

  J.G. Farrell

  The Railway Man

  Eric Lomax

  Wild Swans

  Jung Chang

  Bridge on the River Kwai

  Pierre Boulle

  The Cement Garden

  Ian McEwan

  Heaven’s Edge

  Romesh Gunesekera

  Lord of the Flies

  William Golding

  Find Out More

  WATCH

  Empire of the Sun

  With a screenplay by Tom Stoppard, and starring a young Christian Bale as Jim, Steven Spielberg’s 1987 adaptation has the grace and grandeur of a David Lean epic and, perhaps more importantly, the author’s wholehearted seal of approval.

  The Sun

  Described by Ballard himself as resembling ‘a dream-like newsreel filmed by a secret camera deep in the emperor’s bunker’ and as a film that ‘brilliantly sums up all the dilemmas that surround war and peace’ Alexander Sokurov’s film offers a remarkable portrait of the Japanese Emperor Hirohito and compellingly details the closing events of the war in Asia.

  SURF

  www.jgballard.com

  About the Author

  J.G. BALLARD was born in 1930 in Shanghai, China, where his father was a businessman. Following the attack on Pearl Harbor, Ballard and his family were placed in a civilian prison camp. They returned to England in 1946. After two years at Cambridge, where he read medicine, Ballard worked as a copywriter and Covent Garden porter before going to Canada with the RAF. He started writing short stories in the late 1950s, while working on a scientific journal. His first major novel, The Drowned World, was published in 1962. His acclaimed novels include The Crystal World, The Atrocity Exhibition, Crash (filmed by David Cronenberg), High-Rise, The Unlimited Dream Company, The Kindness of Women (the sequel to Empire of the Sun), Cocaine Nights, Super-Cannes and, most recently, Millennium People.

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  By the same author

  The Drowned World

  The Voices of Time

  The Terminal Beach

  The Drought

  The Crystal World

  The Day of Forever

  The Venus Hunters

  The Disaster Area

  The Atrocity Exhibition

  Vermilion Sands

  Crash

  Concrete Island

  High-Rise

  Low-Flying Aircraft

  The Unlimited Dream Company

  Hello America

  Myths of the Near Future

  Empire of the Sun

  The Day of Creation

  Running Wild

  War Fever

  The Kindness of Women

  Rushing to Paradise

  A User’s Guide to the Millennium (non-fiction)

  Cocaine Nights

  Super-Cannes

  The Complete Short Stories

  Millennium People

  Copyright

  Harper Perennial

  An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

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  London W6 8JB

  www.harperperennial.co.uk

  This edition published by Harper Perennial 2006

  EIGHTH EDITION

  Previously published in paperback by Flamingo 1994

  First published in Great Britain by Victor Gollancz Ltd 1984

  Copyright © J.G. Ballard 1984

  PS Section copyright © Travis Elborough 2006, except

  ‘The End of My War’ by J.G. Ballard © J.G. Ballard 1995

  PS™ is a trademark of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

  J.G. Ballard asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  EPub Edition © JUNE 2010 ISBN: 978-0-007-28313-2

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

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  Table of Contents

  Cover Page

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  Part I

  1 The Eve of Pearl Harbor

  2 Beggars and Acrobats

  3 The Abandoned Aerodrome

  4 The Attack on the Petrel

  5 Escape from the Hospital

  6 The Youth with the Knife

  7 The Drained Swimming-Pool

  8 Picnic Time

  9 An End to Kindness

  10 The Stranded Freighter

  11 Frank and Basie

  12 Dance Music

  13 The Open-Air Cinema

  14 American Aircraft

  15 On their Way to the Camps

  16 The Water Ration

  17 A Landscape of Airfields

  18 Vagrants

  19 The Runway

  Part II

  20 Lunghua Camp

  21 The Cubicle

  22 The University of Life

  23 The Air Raid

  24 The Hospital

  25 The Cemetery Garden

  26 The Lunghua Sophomores

  27 The Execution

  28 An Escape

  29 The March to Nantao

  30 The Olympic Stadium

  31 The Empire of the Sun

  Part III

  32 The Eurasian

  33 The Kamikaze Pilot

  34 The Refrigerator in the Sky

  35 Lieutenant Price

  36 The Flies

  37 A Reserved Room

  38 The Road to Shanghai

  39 The Bandits

  40 The Fallen Airmen

  41 Rescue Mission

  Part IV

  42 The Terrible City

  P.S.

  About the author

  An Investigative Spirit

  LIFE at a Glance

  A Writing Life

  TOP TEN BOOKS

  About the Book

  The End of My War

  Read on

  Have You Read?

  If You Loved This, You Might Like…

  Find Out More

  About the Author

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  Copyright

  About the Publisher