The Drowned World

The Drowned World

Cover of first edition (paperback)
Author	J. G. Ballard
Country	United Kingdom
Language	English
Genre	Science fiction
Publisher	Berkley Books
Publication date	1962[1]
Media type	Print (hardback & paperback)
Pages	158

The Drowned World is a 1962 science fiction novel by British writer J. G. Ballard. The novel depicts a post-apocalyptic future in which global warming has caused the majority of the Earth to become uninhabitable. The story follows a team of scientists researching ongoing environmental developments in a flooded, abandoned London. The novel is an expansion of a novella of the same title first published in Science Fiction Adventures magazine in January 1962, Vol. 4, No. 24.

In 2010, Time Magazine named The Drowned World one of the top 10 best post-apocalyptic books.^[2] The novel has been identified as a founding text in the literary genre known as climate fiction.^[3]

Synopsis[]

Set in the year 2145 in a post-apocalyptic and unrecognisable London, The Drowned World is a setting of tropical temperatures, flooding and accelerated evolution.^[4]

The Earth went back to its Paleozoic era sixty or seventy years before the novel began. There are two main causes of the flood, both unrelated to humans' activity on the planet. First, a series of sudden violent and prolonged solar storms lasting several years enlarged the Van Allen belts and diminished the Earth's gravitational hold upon the outer layers of the ionosphere. As a result, the Earth remained unprotected from solar radiation and temperature climbed steadily making it all a tropical zone. Cities around the Equator were abandoned as temperature reached 100 degrees (Ballard never mentions if these are Celsius or Fahrenheit). Second, the continued heating of the atmosphere melted the polar ice-caps and the contours of the continents were reshaped: in Europe the Mediterranean became a system of inland lakes and the British Isles were linked to France. In North America, the Mississippi basin became an enormous gulf opening into the Hudson Bay and the Caribbean was transformed into a silt desert.

Only one city is mentioned in the novel, Camp Byrd (pop. 10,000), Greenland, and only five million people are estimated to live on the polar caps. Birth of mammals has been drastically reduced, for humans only one couple in ten yields any offspring. On the other hand, reptilians and amphibians rapidly reproduce across the planet; as the novel develops once rare albino iguanas, alligators, and serpents become more common.

Ballard's story follows the biologist Dr Robert Kerans and his struggles against the devolutionary impulses of the environment. As part of a scientific survey unit under the leadership of Colonel Riggs, sent to map the flora and fauna in the boiling lagoon, the tranquility and banality of their role is soon upset by the onset of strange dreams which increasingly plague the survivors' minds. Amidst talk of the army and scientific team moving north, Lieutenant Hardman, the only other commissioned member of the unit, flees the lagoon and instead heads south, a search team unable to stop his escape.

When the other inhabitants of the lagoon finally flee the searing sun and head north, Kerans and two associates, the beautiful but reclusive Beatrice Dahl and fellow scientist Dr Alan Bodkin, settle down in the swamp into an isolated existence. Kerans is still tormented by his psycho-analytical tendencies, ever analysing and debating the regression of the environment into a neo-Triassic period, but the brief quiet is ended by the arrival of Strangman. The leader of a team of pirates seeking out and looting treasures within the deep, Strangman defies the remaining civilised reasons of Kerans' mind and disrupts the world that the survivors have grown to know. When Strangman and his team drain the lagoon and expose the city beneath, both Kerans and Bodkin are disgusted; the latter attempts to blow up the flood defences and re-flood the area, but without success. With Kerans and Beatrice resigned to their fate, Strangman pursues Bodkin and kills him in revenge.

Strangman and his team grow tired and suspicious of Dr Kerans, and with Beatrice now under Strangman’s web of control, Kerans is imprisoned and subjected to bizarre and tribalistic rituals intended to kill him. He survives, although severely weakened by the ordeals, and attempts to save Beatrice from her own imprisonment, to little avail. With the doctor and Beatrice facing the guns of Strangman and his men, the army under Colonel Riggs returns to save them at the last moment. With no reason or evidence to prosecute Strangman, the authorities co-operate with him, and Kerans once more grows frustrated by the inaction, finally taking a stand and succeeding in re-flooding the lagoon where Bodkin had failed. Wounded and weak, the doctor flees the lagoon and heads south without aim, meeting the frail and blind figure of Hardman along the way. After he aids Hardman back to some amount of strength, he soon continues onwards on his travels south, with little idea of an aim or objective, a "second Adam searching for the forgotten paradises of the reborn sun".

Themes[]

As with many of Ballard's later works, the novel depicts characters who seize on apocalyptic or chaotic breakdowns in civilization as opportunities to pursue new modes of perception, unconscious urges, or systems of meaning.^[5] Writer Travis Eldborough stated that Ballard's work, and this novel in particular, allows us to "ask whether our sense of self—and of self as independent, sovereign, irrevocable—is itself a construction, and a temporary one."^[6]

Critic Brian Baker states that The Drowned World "explores the deep implications of time, space, psychology and evolutionary biology in order to dismantle anthropocentric narratives and, in turn, open up alternative ways of experiencing, and conceiving of, contemporary human subjectivity."^[7] Scholar Jim Clarke stated that in the novel and its 1966 successor The Crystal World, "Ballard's solitary protagonists traverse liminal states, often as psychological as physical, in which civilization recedes to the status of memory, and existence comes to be dominated and defined by the environment."^[8]

Reception[]

Following the novel's release, writer Kingsley Amis called Ballard "one of the brightest new stars in post-war fiction," and described the book as containing "an oppressive power reminiscent of Conrad." Galaxy Science Fiction writer Algis Budrys mocked The Drowned World as "a run, hide, slither, grope and die book".^[9]

In a retrospective piece for The Telegraph, writer Will Self noted that Ballard's work was unappreciated during his life, and that following a critical reappraisal of his work, "The Drowned World shows him to be the most important British writer of the late 20th century."^[10] Writer Martin Amis states that "it is the measure of [Ballard's] creative radicalism that he welcomes these desperate dystopias with every atom of his being," but criticized the novel's perfunctory plotting, stating that "We conclude that Ballard is quite unstimulated by human interaction – unless it takes the form of something inherently weird, like mob atavism or mass hysteria. What excites him is human isolation."^[11]

References[]

Sources[]

• McCarthy, Patrick A., (1997). "Allusions in Ballard's The Drowned World", Science-Fiction Studies #72, 24:2, July, 302–10.
• Rossi, Umberto, (1994). "Images from the Disaster Area: An Apocalyptic Reading of Urban Landscapes in Ballard's The Drowned World and Hello America", Science-Fiction Studies #62, 21:1, March, 81–97.

External links[]

• The Drowned World title listing at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
• The Drowned World at Open Library