That's the book that woke me up.
Generally -- and, I'd argue, incorrectly -- described as being a break from, or out of character with Ballard's more traditionally formed science fiction (such as, The Drowned World) Empire of the Sun hit me with what art critic Robert Hughes once called "the shock of the new".
For those who aren't familiar, here's an excerpt from the Wikipedia article on the book:
The novel recounts the story of a young English boy, Jim Graham (Ballard's first and middle names are James Graham), who lives with his parents in Shanghai. After the Pearl Harbor attack, the Japanese occupy the Shanghai International Settlement, and in the following chaos Jim becomes separated from his parents.
He spends some time in abandoned mansions, living on remnants of packaged food, but is soon picked up by the Japanese and interned in the Lunghua Civilian Assembly Center.
Although the Japanese are "officially" the enemies, Jim identifies partly with them, both because he adores the pilots with their splendid machines and because he feels that Lunghua is still a comparatively safe place for him in these times.
Towards the end of the war, with the Japanese army collapsing, the food supply runs short. Jim barely survives, with people around him starving to death.
[...]
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empire_of_the_sun>
A grim story.
The world is full of grim stories.
Being black, and growing up among politically active, historically minded people, I was surrounded with grim stories of the past, present and even darkly anticipated future. Stories of the Middle Passage and chattel slavery and Jim Crow and crazy ass white folks doing crazy ass, violent, almost relentlessly suspect things.
A long ribbon made of grim stories, sinuously curving towards the horizon like a road cutting through a desert.
And along with these stories came tears and mournful songs and passionate remembrances and cries against injustice. All of which seemed humanly necessary and morally correct and certainly the thing to do but none of which fully expressed my own reactions, which were more...structurally focused.
There was a word for the way I saw the grinding wheels within wheels, even while I wept or laughed or lusted or loved along with everyone else...as was my human duty. But I didn't know it. I didn't know what to call this filter till I read Empire of the Sun and learned what it meant to see the world through *Ballardian* eyes.
...
Now we see little Jim exploring the abandoned mansions of British expats. These houses, so familiar, the scenes of dull adult parties and racialist bravado, now took on the sublime aspect of instant ruins. It only took a moment for the Japanese to sweep aside a way of life which, the twinkling of an eye ago seemed as solid as a mountain.
Oh, there's young Jim, considering, with an admirable precision, the decaying corpse of a downed Japanese pilot, seared within the cockpit of his beautiful Zero. Jim watches as B-29's contrail their way to the Japanese islands with little resistance. Their aluminum frames brilliantly reflect the sun.
Jim looks across the field where he and his fellow prisoners are being held by Japanese soldiers; suddenly, penetrating light streams from the horizon -- harsh, white, and strangely warm to have come from so obviously far away. Most of the other prisoners -- and even the Japanese soldiers, who're now almost as hungry and threadbare as their inmates -- are unmoved, or confused or too worn out to notice or care.
Only Jim (and one other -- a cautious, dangerous survivor) recognizes that a system -- the same system that built those glittering B-29s -- must have made the horizon burn as bright as a thousand suns.
..
17. I'm sitting in the back pew of church, reading about this British boy. A smile crosses my face. This was it; this was what I'd been looking for. I'd found the way to describe what I saw.
There was no going back.
.d.