He has been publishing his own idiosyncratic brand of science fiction for
thirty years now. He was a central figure--arguably the central figure--
of the New Wave of the 1960s. He is acknowledged as a seminal
influence by the Cyberpunks of the 1980s. He was short-listed for the
Booker Prize. He had a number one best-seller in Britain. He is a major
literary figure in France. He has been talked about for the Nobel. He was
major motion picture.

He has never won a Hugo. He has never won a Nebula. His books
have never really sold well in the United States, and truth be told, at
times he has had difficulty placing them with American publishers at all.
His collection, The Atrocity Exhibition, was bought, scheduled, and
announced, and then its publication was cancelled by two American
publishers before it finally appeared as Love and Napalm: Export USA.
Empire of the Sun, the aforementioned Booker Prize nominee and
number one British best-seller, flopped as a hardcover in the United
States and didn't even have a real mass-market edition before the
Spielberg film.

J.G. Ballard began publishing in 1956, and his early stories ap-
peared in conventional SF publications. Over the next few years, stories
like "Prima Belladonna," "Billennium," and "The Voices of Time"
earned him a reputation as a unique and powerful voice in science fiction
on both sides of the Atlantic.

1962 saw the publication of his first novel, The Wind from Nowhere,
the first of a series of disaster novels, the others being The Drowned
World, The Burning World, and The Crystal World, in which civilization
is destroyed by wind, flood, drought, and crystallization, respectively.

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