J.G. Ballard, although slotted as a science-fiction writer, is in some senses a writer who has lost all faith, in God or man. Perhaps it's natural, then, that he was one of the first (perhaps the first) to write a novel about a natural disaster that overtakes the world: The Wind from Nowhere.
What's fascinating is that, as the title hints, there is really no reason given for this wind that comes, reaches hurricane speeds…and continues to increase to unimaginable strengths. The will of the author comes out in the determination to see his premise carried through, plausible or not, because it's what he wants to express. (As Spielberg showed in Empire of the Sun, Ballard had lost all innocence long before.)
What's fascinating/horrifying to me is the drama of people seeing their belief systems torn away. It's not pretty, but it's not forgettable, either.
"On the whole, people had shown less resourcefulness and flexibility, less foresight, than a wild bird or animal would. Their basic survival insticts had been so dulled, so overlaid by mechanisms deisgned to serve secondary appetites, that they were totally unable to protect themselves…they were the helpless victims of a deep-rooted optimism about their right to survival, their dominance of the natural order which would guarantee them against everything but their own folly, that they had made gross assumptions about their own superiority.
Now they were paying the price for this, in truth reaping the whirlwind!"
Ballard later called his first novel "just a piece of hackwork." The exclamation mark above does have that ring, but the book itself is more original that he dare admit. The characters are just okay, but the plot refuses to quit, which brings on a kind of terror.
Kit Stolz 