1st U.S. cloth edition of The Drowned World & 1st cloth edition of The Wind From Nowhere. The Wind from Nowhere, 1st published in '61 is the debut novel by English author J.G. Ballard. Prior to this, his published work had consisted solely of short stories. The novel was the 1st of a series of Ballard novels dealing with scenarios of natural disaster, in this case seeing civilization reduced to ruins by prolonged worldwide hurricane force winds. As an added dimension he explores the ways in which disaster & tragedy can bond people together in ways that no normal experiences ever could. This, too, is a recurring theme in his works, making one of its 1st appearances here. Written in ten days, Ballard later dismissed this novel as a "piece of hackwork", referring instead to The Drowned World as his 1st novel. The Drowned World is a '62 science fiction novel by Ballard. In contrast to much post-apocalyptic fiction, the novel features a central character who, rather than being disturbed by the end of the old world, is enraptured by the chaotic reality that has come to replace it. The novel is an expansion of a novella with the same title published in Science Fiction Adventures magazine of 1/62, Vol. 4 No. 24 (Nova Publications).
Author
James Graham "J. G." Ballard (15 November 1930 – 19 April 2009) was an English novelist, short story writer, and essayist. Ballard came to be associated with the New Wave of science fiction early in his career with apocalyptic (or post-apocalyptic) novels such as The Drowned World (1962), The Burning World (1964), and The Crystal World (1966). In the late 1960s and early 1970s Ballard focused on an eclectic variety of short stories (or "condensed novels") such as The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), which drew closer comparison with the work of postmodernist writers such as William S. Burroughs. In 1973 the highly controversial novel Crash was published, a story about symphorophilia and car crash fetishism; the protagonist becomes sexually aroused by staging and participating in real car crashes. The story was later adapted into a film of the same name by Canadian director David Cronenberg. While many of Ballard's stories are thematically and narratively unusual, he is perhaps best known for his relatively conventional war novel, Empire of the Sun (1984), a semi-autobiographical account of a young boy's experiences in Shanghai during the Second Sino-Japanese War as it came to be occupied by the Japanese Imperial Army. Described as "The best British novel about the Second World War" by The Guardian, the story was adapted into a 1987 film by Steven Spielberg. The literary distinctiveness of Ballard's work has given rise to the adjective "Ballardian", defined by the Collins English Dictionary as "resembling or suggestive of the conditions described in J. G. Ballard's novels and stories, especially dystopian modernity, bleak man-made landscapes and the psychological effects of technological, social or environmental developments." The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry describes Ballard's work as being occupied with "eros, thanatos, mass media and emergent technologies".
