The Drowned World
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Amazon.co.uk Review
This torrid, powerful 1962 novel--the 17th of Millennium's very strong SF Masterworks classic reprints--was a major turning point in J.G. Ballard's career. In this future our old world has been gradually drowned as global warming melts the ice-caps and primordial jungles and swamps have returned to tropical London, recreating the ancient ecology of the Triassic age. According to the logic of Ballardian "inner space", these Turkish-bath surroundings evoke the psychological suction of the deep past, calling the human "hindbrain" back to the enfolding warmth of the womb. The text is rich with dreamy phrases like "the fata morgana of the terminal lagoon" and "the brighter day of the interior, archaeopsychic sun". As various members of an expedition to London busy themselves with more or less futile schemes like draining Leicester Square in hope of loot, the passive central character Kerans moves in his own "neuronic odyssey" to a strange acceptance of and assimilation by this lushly transformed world, vanishing into a final epiphany of heat and light. There is little narrative drive or sense of story (fans of rip-roaring, action-adventure SF tend not to get on with Ballard). The Drowned World is a potent, sensual mood-piece--static, jewelled and unforgettable. --David Langford
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Review
‘Extraordinarily prescient…Ballard is a prophet’ Philip Pullman, Guardian
‘One of the brightest stars in post-war fiction. This tale of strange and terrible adventure in a world of steaming jungles has an oppressive power reminiscent of Conrad’ Kingsley Amis
‘Powerful and beautifully clear…Ballard’s potent symbols of beauty and dismay inundate the reader’s mind’ Brian Aldiss
--This text refers to the Paperback edition.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
20 of 21 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
The world is heating up as a result of solar instability. Ice caps have melted and oceans have risen, flooding low-lying areas. Once temperate zones remaining above sea level have become areas of lush, tropical jungle. Surviving populations have had to migrate to the cooler, polar regions. A party of soldier and scientist representatives of these exiled people, have travelled down from the north to study the new flora and fauna that is mutating and evolving rapidly back towards ancient Triassic forms. Some members of the party start to have disturbing dreams of belonging to a hotter, wetter climate and feel drawn in the direction of the equator by some sort of ancestral memory of living in a primeval swamp. The bloated sun and steaming jungle start to feel like a fond memory of the womb to those who are most susceptible and the hypnotic pull of it dominates even their waking hours.
Some reviewers have complained that this is not proper science fiction, not hard science fiction, not fast-paced, not plot-driven. Ballard places it in an area on the fringe of science fiction that he calls `speculative fantasy' - an area where `dream and reality become fused together'. When I started the book I hoped it might be something like John Wyndham's `The Kraken Wakes', but it's different in almost every way, apart from the flooding. There's no enemy to defeat in order to re-establish normality. There are no solutions to the problem, other than avoidance in the shrinking cool zone. A few individuals are making mental adjustments to the catastrophic climate change that seem superficially like a sort of Lamarckian evolutionary adaptation, but the chances of their survival, in isolation, in the crocodile populated swamp areas look doubtful. The reader has to adopt a fantastic amount of suspension of disbelief to swallow the notion of race memory and reverse evolution. Even so, I sank into the story and festered happily away in its swamps and lagoons right from the start and was reluctant to slurp out of it at the end. Ballard's descriptions are, to use one of his own descriptions, like a fata Morgana: shimmering and evocative.
Some reviewers have complained that this is not proper science fiction, not hard science fiction, not fast-paced, not plot-driven. Ballard places it in an area on the fringe of science fiction that he calls `speculative fantasy' - an area where `dream and reality become fused together'. When I started the book I hoped it might be something like John Wyndham's `The Kraken Wakes', but it's different in almost every way, apart from the flooding. There's no enemy to defeat in order to re-establish normality. There are no solutions to the problem, other than avoidance in the shrinking cool zone. A few individuals are making mental adjustments to the catastrophic climate change that seem superficially like a sort of Lamarckian evolutionary adaptation, but the chances of their survival, in isolation, in the crocodile populated swamp areas look doubtful. The reader has to adopt a fantastic amount of suspension of disbelief to swallow the notion of race memory and reverse evolution. Even so, I sank into the story and festered happily away in its swamps and lagoons right from the start and was reluctant to slurp out of it at the end. Ballard's descriptions are, to use one of his own descriptions, like a fata Morgana: shimmering and evocative.
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
In a series of 36 stunningly beautiful watercolours - some double spreads - Dick French (born 1946) manages to perfectly evoke the claustrophobic hothouse atmosphere of Ballard's novel.
The flyleaf to this larger than A4 sized edition reads:
'The sun has gone mad and stripped the earth of its ionosphere. For decades blasting radiation has poured upon earth, melting the polar caps and turning permafrost into streams, rivers, oceans. Huge deltas have been built, lakes formed, seas have risen. The continents have been entirely altered. Jungles have crept and then rushed from the equator to Greenland. Siberia is a tropical nightmare. Mosquitoes the size of dragonflies carry horrendous new malarias. Mammals are on their way out and iguanas have grown as large as horses. Ferns and clubmosses smother those parts of ancient cities - New York, Berlin, Moscow, Peking- that are not drowned and offering steaming shelter to gigantic alligators and other saurians. As for humanity, well, there are only 5 million men and women left, living in the sub-tropical confinement of the Arctic and Antarctic circles.
It is as if history were rolled backward, as if the Triassic Age were here again. Man's science is useless against the solar furnace. And man's mind? Is that also slipping backward, far backward, to before the apes, to before the mammals, to the Triassic terror itself.
This novel- written in lucid, convincing, matter-of-fact prose - is both fierce and unsensational. It has a compelling authority which grips the reader at once and keeps him in its power long after the book is read. This is an unforgettable work.'
The flyleaf to this larger than A4 sized edition reads:
'The sun has gone mad and stripped the earth of its ionosphere. For decades blasting radiation has poured upon earth, melting the polar caps and turning permafrost into streams, rivers, oceans. Huge deltas have been built, lakes formed, seas have risen. The continents have been entirely altered. Jungles have crept and then rushed from the equator to Greenland. Siberia is a tropical nightmare. Mosquitoes the size of dragonflies carry horrendous new malarias. Mammals are on their way out and iguanas have grown as large as horses. Ferns and clubmosses smother those parts of ancient cities - New York, Berlin, Moscow, Peking- that are not drowned and offering steaming shelter to gigantic alligators and other saurians. As for humanity, well, there are only 5 million men and women left, living in the sub-tropical confinement of the Arctic and Antarctic circles.
It is as if history were rolled backward, as if the Triassic Age were here again. Man's science is useless against the solar furnace. And man's mind? Is that also slipping backward, far backward, to before the apes, to before the mammals, to the Triassic terror itself.
This novel- written in lucid, convincing, matter-of-fact prose - is both fierce and unsensational. It has a compelling authority which grips the reader at once and keeps him in its power long after the book is read. This is an unforgettable work.'
16 of 18 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
In 1961, J.G. Ballard published a key work of the British New Wave of Science Fiction, his debut novel 'The Drowned World.' This is a minor lie, as Ballard's first novel was entitled 'The Wind from Nowhere' and something that he wrote on a holiday - a book now deleted Orwell style from his oeuvre and likely to be a novel/lla of curio value rather than literary merit. 'The Wind from Nowhere' did predict the themes of Ballard's initial wave of novels published alongside those groundbreaking short-stories (see 'The Terminal Beach' & 'The Voices of Time'). Ballard's initial concerns hinged around ecology and entropy...
'The Drowned World' focuses on a 21st Century world where fluctuations in solar radiation have lead to the polar ice-caps melting & the sea levels rising. Coming just a few years after the Millhaven disaster, 'The Drowned World' is a prescient book (it's only George Bush and his oil engorged cronies who really believe this isn't happening, isn't it?) - and one that might make sense when experiencing something surreal like a whale in the Thames (though here the species are more tropical).
'The Drowned World' like many Ballard novels takes a central idea and runs with it, already those key titled chapters are apparent ('The Drowned Ark', 'The Pool of Thanatos', 'Descent Into Deep Time', & 'The Paradises of the Sun' - the latter not far from the title of Ballard's most famous book 'Empire of the Sun'!). 'The Drowned World' doesn't offer much in terms of plot - the drowning world is what happens and central character Kerans (a precursor of Travens et al) embraces this new world. The feeling of the book is one that's advancing on earlier works by Joseph Conrad and Aldous Huxley - and it's a book of profound imagery that you can literally get lost (...drown?) in. This is probably a love or hate book and certainly far from Ballard's best work - which novel wise would probably be 'Empire of the Sun', 'High Rise','Super Cannes' & 'The Unlimited Dream Company.'
'The Drowned World' is deserving of discovery/rediscovery in this Harper Perennial reissue alongside 'Empire of the Sun' - the ecology/entropy thing has been detailed since (most recently with the movie 'The Day After Tomorrow'), in many ways this is science fiction in its most reductive sense: Ballard taking a central idea in science then and writing a fiction. It's far from the kiddy-drivel that sci-fi has been seen as, e.g. George Lucas' tedious world of cod mythology. (I'm surprised no one has wanted to make a film of this...). 'The Drowned World' is a very good debut, one that Ballard built on with the equally good 'The Drought' (...makes me thirsty thinking about that one) and the best work of the ecology-entropy trilogy 'The Crystal World' - which surely deserves to be reissued in the near future?
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
Beautiful and Majestic
One of the greatest books i have read.
Ballard had a magical way with words and weaves a wonderful tale. Read more
Ballard had a magical way with words and weaves a wonderful tale. Read more
Published 2 months ago by Peter J. Wedesweiler
Disbelief in a drowned World
I chose this book without sampling it on the basis of having enjoyed Ballard novels. However this is science fiction and requires that the reader makes one step of belief in order... Read more
Published 2 months ago by Dickie
Just plain bizarre - like biting into what you think is a pork pie and...
Begins as a ponderous "psy-fi" novel that is clearly more concerned with the author's pet theory (that the Earth's reversion to a pre-historical climate will generate a similar... Read more
Published 18 months ago by Rod Neill
Embracing the transformation
Robert Kerans lives and works in a profoundly changed planet. Sinking ecologically into the past as the waters and temperatures rise, the metamorphosed environment begins to... Read more
Published 18 months ago by foram
Hauntingly powerful
Every time I read Ballard I am struck by how utterly brilliant, scarily accurate and chilling his writing is, whether speaking about our contemporary world or an imagined future. Read more
Published 19 months ago by Jo Bennie
The shape of things to come...
Everything you've ever heard about Ballard's view of the world is here in his first novel: distopian, lyrical and prophetic - all from a man bringing up three children on his own... Read more
Published on 20 Feb 2010 by Parthurbook
Good but I felt it was unfinished
,this felt like a short story in that it started off at a great rate with you straight into the main plot - the Earth is flooding as the water levels rise due to the sun being... Read more
Published on 10 Jan 2010 by A. J. Sudworth
The master at his best
"like explosions frozen in time" this is the way Ballard describes a shattered mirror, I think that's just the most perfect way to describe it and is an indication of the quality... Read more
Published on 28 Nov 2009 by Marc Munier
Book purchased for third person
The book was purchased for a third party who was very satisfied with the condition and the delivery timescale.
Published on 13 Nov 2009 by R. W. Mason
J.G. disappoints
A massive fan of Empire of the Sun, I was seriously disappointed by (what is supposed to be) J.G. Ballard's sci-fi masterpiece. Read more
Published on 9 Oct 2009 by A. Mcveigh
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