Graham Greene once wrote that a writer's childhood is the bank at which, in later life, he will cash his creative cheques. In another exploration of the writer's inspiration, he also declared, in A Sort of Life, that novelists write out of 'a desire to reduce a chaos of experience to some sort of order'. If the extraordinary life and work of JG (Jim) Ballard is a case study of these observations, then Miracles of Life, his autobiography, is a detached commentary on a life foretold.