2009 books
20) J.G. Ballard, The Wind from Nowhere, 1961
Little more than a rather one-dimensional extreme disaster novel, and so easy is it to see why Ballard later dismissed it as hackwork and didn't want it reprinted (it doesn't even get a mention in official JGB bibliographies, and just last week on Radio 4 Will Self, who certainly knows better, also referred to The Drowned World as Ballard's first book). Bereft of much in the way of characterisation or the explorations of symbolic inner spaces that he later did so well, he depicts a bunch of can-do types who actually can do little more than survive in the face of winds that are circling the northern hemisphere at hundreds of miles an hour (for no adequately explained reason). It seems like a purposefully extreme kind of set up designed as wish fulfillment to wipe the industrialised nations off the face of the Earth, which Ballard does completely. It was far from being the greatest start to a career, but for a few recognisably Ballardian themes The Wind from Nowhere needs to be viewed as a kind of premature birth.