Empire of the Sun. John Lanchester

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      J. G. BALLARD

      Empire of the Sun

      Fourth Estate

      An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 77–85 Fulham Palace Road London W6 8JB 4thestate.co.uk

      This edition published by Fourth Estate in 2014

      Previously published in paperback by Harper Perennial 2006,

      Flamingo 2001 and (as a Modern Classic) 1993

      First published in Great Britain by Victor Gollancz in 1984

      Copyright © J. G. Ballard 1984

      The right of J. G. Ballard to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988.

      Introduction © John Lanchester 2014

      Interview © Travis Elborough 2006

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

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

      This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

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      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.

      HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this e-book has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication.

      Cover by Stanley Donwood

      Photograph of atomic bombing of Nagasaki on August 9, 1945, taken by Charles Levy © Corbis. Background colours from strontium and caesium/methanol combustion carried out by Dr Roy Lowry at Plymouth University, and photographed by Anna Walker.

      Ebook Edition © JUNE 2012 ISBN: 9780007283132

      Version: 2014-08-15

      Contents

       Title Page

       Copyright

      Introduction

       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

       An Investigative Spirit

       The End of My War

       About the Author

       By the same author

       About the Publisher

       Introduction

      BY John Lanchester

      When Empire of the Sun was published in 1984, it had a huge and double impact. The first part of this consisted of the effect on its author’s reputation. J. G. Ballard turned fifty-four that year, and had published nine novels and more than a dozen short-story collections. He was regarded as a known quantity: an admired writer, and also the kind of writer who has fans. That implies a passionate, but perhaps rather narrow readership. He was seen as a writer of science fiction – an unhelpfully broad term, and one which perhaps puts off more people than it puts on. When I interviewed Ballard at his home in Shepperton in 1987, en route to writing about his novel The Day of Creation, he specifically asked me not to describe it as a work of science fiction, because that