Ballard's first four science fiction novels, The Wind from Nowhere (1962), The Drowned World (1962), The Drought (1965) and The Crystal World (1966), all involve a drastic change in the global climate threatening to bring about the collapse of modern civilization. They therefore subscribe, at least superficially, to the conventions of what was then a most popular subgenre of science fiction: the so-called ‘disaster story’. Even though it is clearly indebted to a tradition of British catastrophe stories that includes such apocalyptic ‘classics’ as John Wyndham's Revolt of the Triffids (1952) and John Christopher's The Death of Grass (1956), Ballard's early fiction differs from the plethora of disaster tales published at the time in various SF and pulp magazines, in that it focuses less on the disaster itself than on the characters’ various mental and physical adjustments to it. Ballard's novels – which are entirely devoid of the scenes of private and collective panic which we usually associate with the genre – also mark a decided departure from the most basic ideological assumptions of the disaster tale, whose main emphasis had until then been on a small group of survivors and their heroic attempts to overcome the crisis and restore a new sense of social and political normalcy. This particular aspect of Ballard's fiction is most apparent in his second novel, The Drowned World (published shortly after The Wind from Nowhere, a hastily written apocalypse story later disowned by its author), in which the whole planet is reverting to prehistoric tropical times as a result of a sudden temperature increase caused by solar storms. The protagonist, Dr Robert Kerans, is a member of a scientific expedition whose aim is to conduct a survey of the effects of these rapid rises in temperature on the environment and observe the progression of the new world of Triassic swamps and jungles. Kerans soon begins to perceive that the metamorphosis of his surroundings is paralleled by changes in his own psychic state and that of the other characters. He eventually comes to accept the new landscape of steaming jungles and mangroves as both the concrete affirmation of an unconscious desire of mankind and the sign of the emergence of a new personality in himself.