ABSTRACT
John Wyndham's fusion of pulp thriller with neo-Wellsian investigation in novels including The Day of the Triffids and The Kraken Wakes was not wholly endorsed, with Brian Aldiss declaring in his history of Science Fiction (SF), Trillion Year Spree, that Wyndham was the "master of the cozy catastrophe". Wyndham's characters are almost exclusively white, middle-class Englishmen who fearlessly tackle postapocalyptic terrors and attempt to rebuild society in their own image. Ballard's trilogy of surreal disaster narratives such as The Drowned World, The Drought, and The Crystal World, are therefore key texts in identifying the aesthetic transformation taking place within British SF during this period. Barefoot in the Head is a broad examination of 1960s drug culture, the breakdown of Cold War states, and the troubling question of what to build in their place, some themes representing an overlapping concern for many disaster novels in the postwar period.
