disaster adj.

I want to congratulate you on reprinting London’s wonderful epic, a story that is outstanding among all outstanding ‘disaster’ fiction. If the Plague had been replaced by an atomic bomb, it would have been hard to say that it had not been written by a modern-day author.

It is this which saves ‘No One Will Escape’ from being just one more disaster novel (like ‘1984’ or ‘The Day of the Triffids’), encouraging a fatalistic yielding to a situation beyond the control of human wisdom.

It is another fairly recent disaster novel and one written in the more traditional Wyndham–Christopher manner.

J.G. Ballard stands oddly and enigmatically apart from the mainstream of science fiction. Although his early work, particularly his first four novels, continued an especially British theme (the ‘disaster’ novel), they had the quality of being internalized; most s-f tends to be militantly externalized.

American disaster novels are fewer in number. Oddly enough, where British writers reveal an obsession with the weather, American writers show a strong concern for disease.

One could accuse John Christopher of cynicism, but one could also say that The Death of Grass blows a much-needed cold draught of reality through the cosy parlour of 1950s disaster fiction.

Cosmic disaster story, Kingsley Amis' phrase for a long-popular tradition of science fiction and fantasy stories that deal with world- or even universe-threatening disasters brought on by natural forces (as in John Christopher’s No Blade of Grass, 1956, which Amis discusses) or by human folly (as in numerous nuclear war tales; see Post-Holocaust). Amis argues that such tales differ from other science fiction in that they bear no real extrapolative or analogical relationship with our own society, but instead may be used to explore propositions about the nature of society and human interaction. (Amis does not mention the nature of reality, which came increasingly to be of central concern in J. G. Ballard’s series of disaster novels such as The Crystal World, 1966.) Such works are perhaps more commonly referred to simply as ‘disaster stories’ or ‘disaster novels’.

You've heard of raining cats and dogs? It gets worse here; much worse… He captures the same sort of arid power so often admired in J. G. Ballard’s classic disaster novels.

His early disaster novels reimagined the postapocalyptic subgenre of science fiction.