Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
The un-drowned world, 16 Sep 2003
This is a compelling and all-too-real piece of science fiction. Ballard focuses on only a few characters, and sketches the wider events. This makes the portrait of the collapse of society all the more troubling. The descent from civilisation to primitive tribal life on the edge is convincing. A perpetual drought forces people to the edge of the sea, where the competition for water and food is intense. Only a few survive. As ever, Ballard is working at two levels, and this is also the descent into the characters losing their very identities. Most of the survivors live in subjugation. While in "The Drowned World" the characters find their primeval selves, here they risk losing all identity. The end is not the strongest part of the book, but perhaps the problem with Ballard's method is having no where further to go when everything has changed. Well worth the journey.
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7 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Magical, haunting, evocative: his best novel yet?, 11 Sep 2000
By A Customer
This book still haunts my mind nearly fifteen years after I first read it. It is, quite simply, brilliant. To call Ballard a science fiction writer is misleading, because what he writes is not reliant on technology or futuristic scenarios; he takes our own lives, suburban and mundane, products of school and advertising, and places them in a world for which they have not been trained. Here, environmental pollution has formed a scum on the surface of the sea, restricting rainfall and causing a draught and the breakdown of society. Ballard explores people's reactions to this catastrophic event, and how society reassembles itself, with new pecking orders and struggles. To my mind, it's one of his best novels and one of my all-time favourite books, with truly memorable images and scenes, almost crying out to be filmed. Read this for a start on his novels, and then get stuck into his short stories, perfectly crafted gems every one.
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6 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Ballard, Moorcock, Harrison, Sinclair, 21 Mar 2001
By A Customer
They need to invent a new category. This isn't science fiction as we know it, Jim. There is a group of writers associated mostly with the magazine NEW WORLDS and which includes Ballard as well as Michael Moorcock, M. John Harrison and Iain Sinclair, which takes its material from the modern world pretty much as it occurs! None of the terms (New Wave etc.) suits them and while they make reference to science as much as art in their workk, they simply aren't what we mean by sf writers. Then again, they have almost all produced superb sf -- Ballard had a reputation as an outstanding sf writer in the 60s long before he began his more experimental stuff, as did Moorcock -- and this is one of the books that made his reputation. I read it first, as I remember, in an old copy of New Worlds, which also ran the earliest version of The Crystal World (The Drowned World first appeared in the companion magazine which also featured Moorcock heavily, Science Fantasy). At the time I'd never read anything like it and sought out the rest of Ballard's material of the time. The Drought is as much a mirror of the human soul as it is a regular disaster novel. It reflects the barrenness of so many of our ambitions. The Drowned World is a world flooded by the unconscious. The Drought is a world where the unconscious is dying. The Crystal World is the unconscious gone mad, proliferating out of control, destroying itself in baroque beauty. Ballard hasn't changed his examinations (a la The Atrocity Exhibition), just his scenery. Read this and understand why science fiction was once considered to be the salvation of Anglophone fiction. It still could be, if this is what science fiction is.
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