The key is in the title. While the two earlier novels looked at Ballard�s life from particular angles, his autobiography is a partial one, exploring a theme through the life rather than trying to capture the whole of it. And those �miracles of life� are Ballard�s three children, which he brought up single-handed after the sudden death of his wife. So, childhood is the theme: Ballard�s own � which takes up nearly half the book � and Ballard as the parent and full-time writer. Especially in the Sixties, he witnessed many of the cultural changes but was on the periphery, always having to leave parties to go home and relieve the babysitter.

In between whiles, we hear about the writing of certain key novels (his �first� novel �The Drowned World� - he does mention the real, disowned first, �The Wind from Nowhere - The Atrocity Exhibition� and �Crash� as well as the two autobiographical ones). We also have an excursion into the film industry with his writing credit on �When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth� and especially David Cronenberg�s controversial film of �Crash.�

Half of this book takes Ballard up to the age of fifteen: his childhood in the expat community in Shanghai and his internment with his family in Lunghua Camp. No doubt these experiences shaped Ballard�s subsequent life; they certainly shape this autobiography. These are the originals of the events fictionalised in �Empire of the Sun� and (to a lesser extent) �The Kindness of Women�, such as the killing of a young Chinese man by Japanese soldiers at a railway station, a scene which recurs in �Kindness�. As with the novels, here are the originals of the imagery that has haunted Ballard�s fiction ever since: the crashed airplanes, the drained swimming pools. (Another inmate was a young man by the name of Cyril Goldbert, later to find fame as an actor called Peter Wyngarde.) And at the end of the book, Ballard returns to Shanghai as part of a BBC documentary. He attains closure by the experience, and a brief postscript apart, that is the end of the book. So �Miracles of Life� is a themed memoir, not necessarily a full autobiography. That may be a task for another writer, after Ballard�s death.

Gary Couzens was born in 1964 and lives and works in Aldershot. He has had twenty short stories accepted by F&SF;, Interzone, The Third Alternative, Peeping Tom and other magazines, plus a large number of articles and reviews in The British Fantasy Society Newsletter, Zene and elsewhere. He has three novels in varying stages of completeness and has just started his fourth.