Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #45289 in Books
• Published on: 1994-09-12
• Binding: Paperback
• 352 pages

Synopsis
A novel of war, of starvation and survival, of internment camps and death marches, which blends honesty with a vision of a world thrown utterly out of joint. It is rooted in the author's own experience of war in our time. The novel won "The Guardian" Fiction Prize.

About the Author
* #17 in the Millennium SF Masterworks series, a library of the finest science fiction ever written * 'One of the brightest stars in post-war fiction' -- Kingsley Amis * 'There are those (I am among them) who would back Ballard as Britain's number one living novelist' -- John Sutherland, Sunday Times * 'This novel, with its brilliant descriptions of an inundated London and an ecology reverting to the Triassic, gained Ballard acceptance as a major author' -- Encyclopedia of Science Fiction

Customer Reviews

empire of the sun
A shocking but brilliant account of the Pacific War in China and the miseries endured by a young British schoolboy as a prisoner
of the Japanese. It is not only a story of war and its hopeless
brutalities, but also a work of history and of prophecy. The passages toward the end of the book contain images that are a prophetic vision of a future world blasted from the twin suns
of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. When Ballard talks of the last battles
at the mouths of the great rivers of Asia ending WWIII and deciding the future of the planet, he has seen the future of China as the last battleground of the great conflict between the West and Asia that began with Japan's emergence as a modern industrial power in Asia. The great battle today, that Ballard has foreseen, rages on in China as the colossal spurt of industrialisation and modernisation grips this land and propels it into the 21st Century: the great battle between the past and the future, between poverty and prosperity, between war and peace
in Asia's most populous country. The last battle in a war on poverty, despair, exploitation and the concept of war itself, made imperative by the twin suns of Japan's atomic horror. Asia must never again descend into war, as the consequences in this age would make the horrors experienced by the figures that inhabit Ballard's great vision seem trifling. This is the breathtaking achievement that is The Empire of the Sun and I continue to live in awe of it's greatness.

A breathtaking masterpiece
Although everything I have read by Ballard is excellent, I would recommend this book as a starting point. The author weaves autobiography with fiction in a compelling way; in some places the novel hints at the dream-like sequences that he has deployed in other works, but the story is firmly grounded in reality. The most apparent theme is that of survival, but I don't think Ballard wrote this with any kind of agenda; perhaps that's what's so refreshing about it.
One of his greatest talents as a writer is finding moments of beauty in what, for lesser writers, would be mires of ugliness. Ballard's voice is thoroughly modern throughout, despite the book's retrospective narrative: you can instantly tell this is the author of 'The Concrete Island' or 'High Rise', despite how remote those novels are from the second world war.
Those who have seen Spielberg's film will be thoroughly shocked: there is little sentimentality here, and the story is quite different in its later stages. Not that the film is a poor adaptation - rather, it's a seperate entity. Always read the book first!
It's wonderful that an author can use his past as a starting point for fiction, rather than being either grounded in it or evading it. It's hard to tell what is fact from what isn't, and surely that's a good thing.
Finally, I must stress that this is a book which not only survives several repeated reads but seems to require it.

Justifiably the best book ever written about WW2
To put it simply, Empire of the Sun is my favourite novel of all time. It is a moving, incredibly emotional journey from the safe ground of upper class Shangai, to the uncertain, horrific arena of Lunghua camp and the paddy fields of occupied China. Ballard uses a intense descriptive technique that not only forces the reader to take note of the devious acts of our past, but physically flinch at the prospect that any human being being could be treated in such a neglected, evil way. This novel is not just a semi-autobiographical account of chinese WW2, but a tribute to the great hope and the survival of humanity.