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.

Ballard links avant‑garde visual art to psychological survival in the mid‑20th century. Surrealism, cubism, and abstraction—styles built on fragmentation, dream-logic, and ambiguity—become for him not mere aesthetic fashions but interpretive tools for a world newly defined by technological catastrophe and the looming possibility of nuclear annihilation. By tying these “dislocations” to his childhood in wartime Shanghai, he suggests that modernism’s broken perspectives mirror lived experience under extreme instability: reality itself feels discontinuous, uncanny, and charged with threat. The quote also hints at Ballard’s broader project as a writer: to treat modernity’s landscapes (ruins, media, technology, violence) as inner states, where external disorder and personal memory converge.