JG Ballard is one of my favorite fiction writers. I read Crash and several of his other highly imaginative works when I was younger. Crash is my favorite, a controversial concept novel about sexual fantasies mixed with car crashes. Ballard explains the genesis of that book in one brief chapter. But the bulk of Miracles of Life is his description of growing up in Shanghai, including 2.5 years in an internment camp with other British expatriates in the early 1940s, when Japan had invaded China. He also describes how he went from studying medicine to becoming a writer, and his family life.

Overall the book has some lovely reminiscences by Ballard and we find out why he came to write highly original and intense novels in the 60s and 70s. He described his approach as being science fiction, but focusing on "inner space" - he wrote that "I would interiorise science fiction, looking for the pathology that underlay the consumer society, the TV landscape and the nuclear arms race, a vast untouched continent of fictional possibility".

As I said, one of my fave fiction writers. Recommend this book for fans.