 In an essay on Ballard, Will Wiles notes how his short stories 'have a lingering fascination with the domestic interior, with furnishing and appliances,' adding, 'it's a landscape that he distorts until it shrieks with anxiety'.He concludes that 'what Ballard saw, and what he expressed in his novels, was nothing less than the effect that the technological world, including our built environment, was having upon our minds and bodies.