The surrealists, and the modern movement in painting as a whole, seemed to offer a key to the strange postwar world with its threat of nuclear war. The dislocations and ambiguities, in cubism and abstract art as well as the surrealists, reminded me of my childhood in Shanghai.

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.