John Christopher, another English writer from the time, fits into this style, and a prior American work, George R. (I don’t know enough about styles of the time to know if something similar to Niven and Pournelle existed in disaster fiction prior to this book.) For instance, the narrator here has no definite proof that the blindness which strikes most of humanity is the result of satellite weapons - an interesting idea for the beginning of the satellite age - or that the lethal plague which breaks out after the blindness is an engineered disease - and limited means of dealing with it. This stands in direct contrast to the best-seller idiom of later American works like Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle’s Lucifer’s Hammer. I don’t think, in retrospect, he meant that the disasters of Wyndham’s works are improbably nice and clean. I think he was referring to the narrative strategy Wyndham used in this and The Kraken Awakes: first person narratives centering around one or two individuals who have limited knowledge and explanation of the disaster they face. Brian Aldiss referred to the work of John Wyndham as “cosy catastrophe”.
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