| 1979 D. Pringle Disaster Novel in P. Nicholls Encycl. Sci. Fiction 173/1
|
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.
|
| 1982 D. Hartwell The Golden Age of Science Fiction is Twelve in Top of News (1982, issue number unknown) 146
|
Ballard continued to produce such stories into the early 1960s and then emerged as a novelist with four disaster novels, The Wind from Nowhere , The Drowned World , The Burning World , and The Crystal World.
|
| 1986 G. K. Wolfe Crit. Terms for Sci. Fiction & Fantasy 22
|
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’.
|
| 2002 Locus Sept. 27/2
|
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.
|
