J. G. Ballard in the context of "Miracles of Life"

Empire of the Sun is a 1987 American epic coming-of-age war drama film directed by Steven Spielberg and written by Tom Stoppard, based on J. G. Ballard's semi-autobiographical 1984 novel of the same name. The film tells the story of Jamie "Jim" Graham (Christian Bale), a young boy who goes from living with his wealthy British family in Shanghai to becoming a prisoner of war in an internment camp operated by the Japanese during World War II. The film also stars John Malkovich, Miranda Richardson, Nigel Havers, Joe Pantoliano, Masatō Ibu, Leslie Phillips, Ben Stiller, and Robert Stephens.

Harold Becker and David Lean were originally to direct before Spielberg came on board, initially as a producer for Lean. Spielberg was attracted to directing the film because of a personal connection to Lean's films and World War II topics. He considers it to be his most profound work on "the loss of innocence". The film received positive reviews, with praise towards Bale's performance, the cinematography, the visuals, Williams's score and Spielberg's direction. However, the film was not initially a commercial success, earning only $22 million at the US box office, although it eventually more than recouped its budget through revenues in foreign markets, home video, and television.

Climate fiction (sometimes shortened to cli-fi) is literature that deals with climate change. Generally speculative in nature but inspired by climate science, works of climate fiction may take place in the world as we know it, in the near future, or in fictional worlds experiencing climate change. The genre frequently includes science fiction and dystopian or utopian themes, imagining potential futures based on research about the impacts of climate change and speculations about how humans may respond to these and the problem of climate change. Climate fiction typically involves anthropogenic climate change and other environmental issues as opposed to weather and disaster more generally. Technologies such as climate engineering or climate adaptation practices often feature prominently in works exploring their impacts on society.

The term "cli-fi" is generally credited to freelance news reporter and climate activist Dan Bloom, who coined it in either 2007 or 2008. References to "climate fiction" appear to have begun in the 2010s, although the term has also been retroactively applied to a number of works. Pioneering 20th century authors of climate fiction include J. G. Ballard and Octavia E. Butler, while dystopian fiction from Margaret Atwood is often cited as an immediate precursor to the genre's emergence. Since 2010, prominent cli-fi authors include Kim Stanley Robinson, Richard Powers, Paolo Bacigalupi, and Barbara Kingsolver. The publication of Robinson's The Ministry for the Future in 2020 helped cement the genre's emergence; the work generated presidential and United Nations mentions and an invitation for Robinson to meet planners at the Pentagon.

Cyberpunk is a subgenre of science fiction set in a dystopian future. It is characterized by its focus on a combination of "low-life and high tech". It features a range of futuristic technological and scientific achievements, including artificial intelligence and cyberware, which are juxtaposed with societal collapse, dystopia or decay. A significant portion of cyberpunk can be traced back to the New Wave science fiction movement of the 1960s and 1970s. During this period, prominent writers such as Philip K. Dick, Michael Moorcock, Roger Zelazny, John Brunner, J. G. Ballard, Philip José Farmer and Harlan Ellison explored the impact of technology, drug culture, and the sexual revolution. These authors diverged from the utopian inclinations prevalent in earlier science fiction.

Comics exploring cyberpunk themes began appearing as early as Judge Dredd, first published in 1977. Released in 1984, William Gibson's influential debut novel Neuromancer helped solidify cyberpunk as a genre, drawing influence from punk subculture and early hacker culture. Frank Miller's Ronin is an example of a cyberpunk graphic novel. Other influential cyberpunk writers included Bruce Sterling and Rudy Rucker. The Japanese cyberpunk subgenre began in 1982 with the debut of Katsuhiro Otomo's manga series Akira, with its 1988 anime film adaptation (also directed by Otomo) later popularizing the subgenre.

The New Wave was a science fiction movement of the 1960s and 1970s, characterized by a great degree of experimentation with the form and content of stories, often influenced by the styles of non-science fiction literature, and an emphasis on the psychological and social sciences as opposed to the physical sciences. New Wave authors often considered themselves as part of the modernist tradition of fiction, and the New Wave was conceived as a deliberate change from the traditions of the science fiction characteristic of pulp magazines, which many of the writers involved considered irrelevant or unambitious.

The most prominent source of New Wave science fiction was the British magazine New Worlds, edited by Michael Moorcock, who became editor during 1964. In the United States, Judith Merril's anthologies and Harlan Ellison's 1967 anthology Dangerous Visions are often considered as the best early representations of the movement. Worldwide, Ursula K. Le Guin, Stanisław Lem, J. G. Ballard, Samuel R. Delany, Roger Zelazny, Joanna Russ, James Tiptree Jr. (a pseudonym of Alice Bradley Sheldon), Thomas M. Disch and Brian Aldiss were also major writers associated with the movement. Moorcock wanted writers to borrow from the genre's techniques but encouraged writers to develop their own styles. Apart from Moorcock and Ballard, authors included Hilary Bailey, Barrington Bayley, M. John Harrison, Pamela Zoline, Rachel Pollack and Christopher Priest.

Empire of the Sun is a 1984 novel by English writer J. G. Ballard; it was awarded the Guardian Fiction Prize, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Like Ballard's earlier short story "The Dead Time" (published in the anthology Myths of the Near Future), it is essentially fiction but draws extensively on Ballard's experiences in World War II. The name of the novel is derived from the etymology of the name for Japan.

Ballard later wrote of his experiences in China as a boy and the making of the film of the same name in his autobiography Miracles of Life.