Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Planet Sauna, 20 April 2007
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.
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13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Reissue of JG Ballard's debut novel proper, 2 Mar 2006
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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7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
dreamy, steaming, languid disaster novel, 31 May 2000
By A Customer
The book lacks a plot, as the characters are not going anywhere. It is a book of atmosphere rather than action. The novel centres on a group of last scientists and soldiers as they prepare to leave a lagoon created by an old city square, as it is slowly swallowed by the rising jungle, heat and the impending tropical rains.Almost all the characters are plagued by disturbing dreams of a Triassic period. It is only when they allow themselves to be carried back by these dreams that they cease to be a nightmare and become more of a revelation. The central character eventually flees into the jungle in a reversion not just to nature but also to the planets past. This novel preceded Ballard's second book, 'the wind which came from nowhere'. That book followed a similar theme of nature reasserting itself, in that case by a wind which only abates when the last man made structure has been blown flat. The same is true of this novel, in that the characters only find peace when they accept the inevitability of nature, although this entails an end, which most readers would regard as an escape into the most nightmarish option for the central character. The book is strangely lush and disturbing in the intensity of the characters dreams with their oppressive heat and nature of their daily reality. I would recommend it to anyone who appreciates atmosphere as much as action.
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