THE DROWNED WORLD & THE WIND FROM NOWHERE
by J.G. Ballard
It's an odd thing about the English predilection for weather. Sometimes they are carried away (i.e. John Christopher's The Long Winter) but often they are bogged down as Mr. Ballard is in The Drowned World where he has two stories going for him and reaches no logical conclusion in either. The reader is immediately absorbed by the intenseness of the moment and the prehistoric landscapes that Mr. Ballard conjures up out of a world smitten by a hot cataclysmic catastrophe. But as the reader plunges with each character into a dream world of gradating Darwinian memory, descending the scale of evolution with each recurrent nightmare, he is abruptly jolted by the appearance of some swamp scavengers who shuffle merrily through the mud, smile at the crocodiles and kick up a conventional stir. One wishes that Mr. Ballard had let us become fishes but then if wishes were... The Wind From Nowhere gets nowhere.