Wind from Nowhere

Rating:
Summary: Where Ballard Began
Review: This is one of Ballard's earliest novels, and it shows. The plot and characters are flat: the world is swept by an unexplainable storm of winds increasing up to 550 miles an hour, leading to global devastation. Survival hinges on underground refuges. A thoughtfully ill-assorted group of characters, united by chance, find themselves dealing with a peculiar industrialist and his wind-resistant stronghold...or is it? Unlike many of Ballard's later novels with their hallucinogenically lovely or compelling landscapes, The Wind From Nowhere is universally dirty and claustrophobic, almost all of the action cramped in submarines, overcrowded warehouses, or the London underground. Many of the characters are two-dimensional standards of the concluding era of 1950's sci-fi--the lovely reporter, the military men, the university professor. At the same time, there are hints of the Ballard to come; moments of tense sexuality, of down-to-earth brutality, of striking images. Perhaps Ballard was destroying the standard 1950's sci-fi universe to make way for his Triassic jungles, surrealist beauties, sliding deserts and time-wracked astronauts? Anyway, if I was just starting with Ballard, I'd proceed straight to The Drowned World and his other short stories.