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.

This is empty advice by an unenlightened soul. Save your money and do some serious reading.

Is this original? I do not think so. Ballard is a borrower and not an original. He is a watered down self-help guide. I say avoid it and save your money.

It is very popular to give analysis to an incredibly disparate number of subjects (literature, art, film, history, behavior, anthropology, etc.) through the murky lens of Jungian psychology. This is exactly what Stephenson is attempting to do with Ballard. Such an effort is vastly short-sighted. Stephenson wants to use all the currently stylish thinkers in pop psychology, the New Age movement, and Western inner-self dogma to give analysis to Ballard. He wants to use Joseph Campbell's methods, Jungian methods, Elliade's ideas, and he wants to use romantic and inaccurate ideas of the utopian nature of primitive cultures, and he also uses banal words like "transcendence," "fertility rituals," "infinite," "sublime," "psychic forces," "ego," and on and on. Clearly in books like Concrete Island and Crash, such silly commonplace analysis is just more of what we've all heard before a thousand times from every stylish, transient postmod thinker. In 50 years the next stylish thinker will come out and supplant Jung and Elliade. Then the hordes will compare that method to art, literature, film, and Ballard.

Ballard is a thinker that is beyond rigid systems of all the numerous 20th century thinkers that Stephenson wants to fit Ballard in to. Ballard needs to be looked at from the lens of the underworld, as Hillman might say, rather than from the tiring lens of the dayworld. Then perhaps we can get an analysis of Ballard that is more than just the cud of Freud, Jung, and Elliade.