This is the first theoretically informed book on Ballard, reading his work not only within the science fiction genre, but also connecting it to issues of popular culture and legitimisation, postmodernism and the legacy of the avant-garde. Aiming where necessary to contextualise Ballard's fiction within the science fiction genre, Luckhurst's study also travels over many terrains more or less foreign to SF: existentialism, Surrealism, Pop Art, psychoanalysis, ethnologies of contemporary modernity, and the theory of autobiography.