The Drowned World
and over 900,000 other books are available for Amazon Kindle .
Learn more
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Did you know you can trade in your old books for an Amazon.co.uk Gift Card to spend on the things you want? Visit the Amazon.co.uk Trade-In Store for more details. |
Frequently Bought Together
Product details
|
More About the Author
Product Description
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
Praise for J.G.Ballard: 'There are those (and I am among them) who would back Ballard as Britain's number one living novelist' John Sutherland, Sunday Times 'One of the brightest stars in post-war fiction' Kingsley Amis
Inside This Book
(Learn More)
Browse and search another edition of this book.
Browse and search another edition of this book.
Tags Customers Associate with This Product(What's this?)Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.
|
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
|
Share your thoughts with other customers:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
20 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Planet Sauna,
By
This review is from: The Drowned World (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.
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Drowned world - the illustrated novel.,
By
This review is from: Drowned World (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.'
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Haunting novel, not entirely successful as either science fiction or serious literature,
By Greshon (UK) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Drowned World (Paperback)
The setting of this novel - a flooded, tropical London of the future - made me seek it out. However, despite being prepared to read a book that was not a fast-paced adventure (this is Ballard, after all), I was disappointed by the muffled stuffiness of the prose. I have heard it described as 'controlled' but this is really is too complimentary. I was similarly disappointed on reading Philip K Dick's The Man in the High Castle (strangely, published in the same year, 1962). In that novel too the author takes a great 'sci-fi' concept but his treatment of it is likewise oddly dull and blunted.
The opening follows the conventions of hard sci-fi, explaining scientifically how the world got to be in this state. However, right from this plain facts opening the novel is muddled. The explanation lacks clarity and doesn't make sense. We are told that the melting of the polar ice caps would only raise global sea levels by a few feet, yet London is 20-30 feet underwater. There is some explanation of this involving 'silt', but this is not clear. Even when describing events, Ballard fails to clearly demarcate the geographical space in which his characters live. Mention of a 'shoreline' just doesn't make sense. The central character, Kerans, and his two friends decide not to resist change and live in the relatively cooler poles with the rest of the survivors of humanity, and choose instead to try and adapt to the new conditions, as the planet's other life forms have. However, if London is only 20 feet underwater, there must be lots of places that are above the sea level, even in southern Britain. Why don't Kerans and co. settle in some of these places instead of a filthy water world where they have to get around by boat and are constantly threatened by mutating marine creatures? As well as these problems, the novel also suffers from some confused writing, for example using "apart from" instead of "including" in one place. This completely muddles the meaning of the prose and is, I think, a mistake. I had trouble working out clearly what was going on in plenty more passages, and I suspect that similar occurrences are answerable for it. Other details are ludicrous. Strangman and his pet crocodiles and alligators, for a start. I can't believe Ballard put them in here. However, the novel does have its strengths. The hallucinatory descriptions of the physical reality, mirroring the internal consciousness of the characters, is done very evocatively and, I think, memorably. The study of the effects on the human consciousness the return of a pre-historic phase in the planet's climate would have is novel. Time has been effectively turned back and this awakens all sorts of long-dormant genetic memories in the characters. This is all very interesting, but not developed as fully as it could be. The ending, however, is much better than the beginning, and it does consolidate a lot of what's gone before. We are left with the haunting spectre of a new epoch literally superimposing itself on our own age, as floodwaters and huge banks of silt overlay city streets and the former outlines of the continents. Humanity, no longer suitable to the new conditions, is dying out, being replaced once more by reptiles and amphibeans. The book shows how precarious all that we take for granted is. That it can be swept away as easily as the swatting of a fly.
Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
Would you like to see more reviews about this item?
|
Most Recent Customer Reviews |
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
Listmania!
|
|
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
|
