“A visionary in both style and substance . . .The literary equivalent of Salvador Dali or Max Ernst.” —The Washington Post Book World

“A writer of enormous inventive powers. Ballard has, like Calvino, a remarkable gift for filling the empty, deprived spaces of modern life with the invisible cities and the wonder worlds of the imagination.” —Malcolm Bradbury, The New York Times Book Review

“Complex, obsessive, frequently poetic, and always disquieting chronicles of nature rebelling against humans, of the survival of barbarism in a world of mechanical efficieny, of entropy, anomie, breakdown, ruin . . . The blasted landscapes that his characters inhabit are both external settings and states of mind.” —Luc Sante