The American Dream has run out of gas. The car has stopped. It no longer supplies the world with its images, its dreams, its fantasies. No more. It's over. It supplies the world with its nightmares now: the Kennedy assassination, Watergate, Vietnam.

It remains one of his iconic works and was filmed in 2001. David Cronenberg
The Atrocity Exhibition (2001) dir. In the early 1970s Bill Butler a bookseller in Brighton was prosecuted under UK obscenity laws for selling the pamphlet.

Ballard's novels and stories especially dystopian modernity bleak man-made landscapes and the psychological effects of technological social or environmental developments. His best-known works include Crash (1973) adapted into a film by David Cronenberg and the semi-autobiographical Empire of the Sun (1984) made into a film by Steven Spielberg based on Ballard's boyhood in the Shanghai International Settlement and internment by the Japanese Imperial Army during the Second Sino-Japanese War.