The Drowned World (original 1962; edition 2006)

The Drowned World is a post-apocalyptic novel that features a central character who is enraptured by the chaotic reality of the post-apocalypse, and so presents a different point of view for the sub-genre.

Read long ago due to my interest in apocalyptic fiction. ( )

After reading [b:The Jungle Book|1897435|The Jungle Book (Oxford Children's Classics, #2)|Rudyard Kipling|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1189994727s/1897435.jpg|17441265], more jungles for me: this time in the flooded cities of a world where fluctuations in solar radiation have melted the ice caps and caused sea levels to rise. Dr Kerans is part of a scientific expedition cataloguing the changes in flora and fauna regressing towards the Triassic with a resurgence of iguanas and alligators in once temperate cities and, as Kerans increasingly isolates himself, he finds that their minds also seem to be devolving to a pre-historic state reviving some kind of hidden race memories of the heat and sun.

The loss of the veneer of civilised society, especially in an exotic setting, and particularly with Strangman and his crew, is quite reminiscent of [b:Lord of the Flies|7624|Lord of the Flies|William Golding|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1327869409s/7624.jpg|2766512].

First off, thanks to First Reads and Liveright publishing for giving me a chance to read The Drowned World.

J.G. Ballard is often praised for his prophetic, creative settings and The Drowned World is no exception. Envisioning a world with unmanageable heat, extreme storms, melted ice caps, and oceans flooding major cities, The Drowned World holds surprising similarities to some scientific predictions of the future effects from Global Warming. Ballard's ability to bring a harsh reality and detail to this world is impressive and, while the story follows a man named Kerans, it is the Ballard's drowned world that is the main character.

While the setting is rich, the plot does have a tendency to lag. In Marin Amis' introduction, he mentions that Ballard often seems uninterested in the traditional movement of action and plot, only providing those elements to placate us readers. While Amis views this as a sign of Ballard's next level genius, I, as a reader, can only see this as a plot that fails to motivate. There is a lot of time spent describing the setting and even more describing Kerans' visions that connect him to the ancient past. It is all well-written, but, even so, it is a rather unexciting read through a good portion of the book.

With great writing and an incredible setting, The Drowned World is still a great achievement brought back from the past, regardless of its plot difficulties. ( )

This novel left a bad taste in my mouth -- and I mean that in a good way. The scorching sun heat and the lethargic sweating that most characters are reduced to was palpable throughout most of the novel. This one packs quite a punch.

The setting is a dystopean future. Increased solar activity has sharply raised the temperature on earth, causing a global flood. The world is reduced to an unpleasant swamp and the climate reverts to a Triassic jungle marsh. Abandoned high-rises stick out of the silty water like rotting teeth, overgrown by fantastically mutated plants and inhabited by giant iguanas, bats and caymans. What remains of humanity has set up refugia in the formerly frozen polar areas, which are rapidly becoming the only habitable zones on the planet: ambient temperatures in temperate zones are routinely up in the 110s F (i.e. 40s and 50s C).

This is the background for a series of events set in now-abandoned London. A final army outpost scavenging for resources is getting ready to leave the place for good, but the biologists sent along to catalogue the diversity of animal and plant life can't be bothered to give self-preservation any serious thought. Atavistic behaviour takes over, memories from the reptile part of the brain awaken. What is left of the world is inherited by the lizards and the insane.

Creative, morose, and gripping. Recommended. ( )

While this is a book quite literally about global warming, it is the sun rather than man and his polluting ways that is the culprit.

Ballard gives us a provocative tale filled with powerful imagery. It follows a small group of interesting and complex characters, people well on their way to losing what little connection remains to a rational, objective view of the disintegrating world around them. This is a world in which mankind sits on the verge of going out not with a bang, but a nightmarish Jungian whimper.

I can see that this will not be everyone's cup of tea but I enjoyed it (despite several seemingly highly implausible aspects of Ballard's near-future environmental apocalypse scenario). ( )

A not-so-cosy British catastrophe.

Solar flares and rising water levels result in a dystopian future where the majority of the world is submerged under water and only the poles are inhabitable (unless you’re on a boat). Moreover, the increase in temperature means that the world is reverting back to the primordial swamp it used to be, with insects and reptiles growing larger and dominating other species.

Amid this landscape, three people decide to stay in submerged London, living in skyscraper hotels that are above the water line or a floating science station, as opposed to returning to the north with the military expedition team of which they were a part.

Ballard explores the possibility of devolving, or the reaction of the human mind to revert to its prehistoric past form (form? memory? sense of self?) when faced with a physical environment that echoes that past. Thus, the three main characters can no longer stand the thought of living in concrete buildings and communicating with other humans — each lives within his or her own mind and its subconscious memories.

An interesting concept, and written in a style that suits it. The story doesn’t really aim to be more than it is, and the style is slow and full of descriptions that help to set the scene. This isn’t one to read if you’re looking for an action packed dystopian thriller, but rather a more psychological one. (Characters often just sit around all day, staring at the surrounded lagoons and absorbing the rhythmical beats of the sun as it shines.) This would be great to read on a beach somewhere, around noon, with the sun beating down on you and glaring from waves on the water. As long as there are no giant lizards around ...

http://lebookshelf.tumblr.com/post/5856089909/55-the-drowned-world-j-g-ballard-h... ( )

The Drowned World has much in common with Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. It is set in a future just a couple of generations hence. Freak solar flares have wrought havoc on the Earth's climate, resulting in temperature rises of tens of degrees. Massive flooding and silting have completely changed the landscape, leaving most of the cities of the temperate zone submerged in tepid swamp water and overgrown with jungle. Thus, London, where the novel takes place, has come to resemble Conrad's Congo.

The remnants of humanity have withdrawn to the arctic and antarctic, but survey teams still penetrate the drowned cities looking for scavengeable materials and assessing the still-evolving climate. Members of these teams cope well with the oppressive heat and aggressive jungle life, but find themselves strangely beset by dreams of primitive scenes from mankind's distant past. They become withdrawn, unsociable, and experience an irrational desire to push south into the equatorial inferno. One scientist theorizes that racial memories of our species' distant past are buried in our chromosomes, ready to be triggered by contact with the corresponding environment.

Whatever the cause, something compels certain men to turn away from the comforts and companionship of civilization and push into the darkness. Ballard's contribution to the literature of that phenomenon is concise and well-written. There is a palpable sense of decay and smothering heat in his descriptions of the fetid swamps and ever-encroaching jungle growth. The reader begins to share the character's sense that the jungle is "right," and that civilization is best left entombed.

It's tempting to read The Drowned World as a cautionary tale on global warming, but Ballard, writing in 1962, probably had no such intent. In a way, his version is even more frightening, because it depicts catastrophic changes utterly beyond man's control--changes that affect not only our world, but ourselves as well. ( )

An early novel that pre-empts many of the themes present in his later books. It's set in a future flooded London with the few remaining humans living in high up floors of crumbling buildings, getting around the tropical lagoons that now fill the city by boat. The new environment is changing the humans, making them more lizard-like, in keeping with the climate. Not always great writing, but lots of great ideas. ( )

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 in a semi-detached house in Middlesex. JGB uses rich language to conjour a vivd sense of a broken planet and the pull of our more primordial tendencies. Dark and beautiful all at once. ( )

If you know and like 1960s science-fiction, you will adore this book. If you don't, it might take a bit of work, but I predict you'll like it just the same, despite its shadowy racism and the jibber-jabber psychojargon Ballard adopts to explain his conceit. Instead of just going Lord of the Flies and having his characters degenerate in the face of the outer world's post-civilization brutality, he has his characters deliberately psychoanalysing themselves at every step. It gets a tad tedious, but the setting is excellent and there's a bit of action-adventure stuff going on here, too. Anyway, it's just plain clever all around. If you like Ballard, this is definately something you should take a look at; if you don't know what you think of him yet, this is also a good place to start. ( )

The only other thing I’ve read by Ballard is a short story about a man waiting at an abandoned Cape Kennedy as time slowly comes to a standstill. This book is very similar, although the setting is a London flooded by the melting of the ice caps. This makes ancient strains of plant life appear, & man regresses in some vague atavistic way, with clear influences of Heart of Darkness. ( )

London is under water. In fact, the entire world is, except the Artic and Antarctic cirles. Robert Kerans, Bodkins and a team of military support are investigating the change in flora and fauna as the world progresses back to the Triassic period, complete with 140F temperatures and giant mosquitoes.

But, slowly, the men's mental state is beginning to deteriorate. And then there is Beatrice, a woman who has refused to evacuate to cooler, safer climes.

The tone is dark, bitter and mesmerising as Ballard describes the setting, the tops of 17 storey office blocks poking through the surface of the boiling water, giant iguanas lying in wait for the kill. All of the characters (with the possible exception of Riggs) appear self contained and as the book progresses they seem increasingly likely to lose themselves. I never found that I connected with any of the characters but was instead just happy to watch their battles from a distance.

I initially struggled with the premise of the characters changing mental state but as I got more used to the writing style and became more intergrated into the world being created, it ceased being unrealistic and instead became entirely possible.

As the book went on, I found myself occasionally struggling with the writing (it felt like a very masculine book) but was interested enough to keep reading, especially as the plot sped up a notch.

The end is both unexpected and extremely expected, and it didn't feel like a 175 page book, instead including enough content to appear longer. Whilst written in the 1960's sci fi style that I am gradually becoming used to, once I had got mostly used to that I found it a quick, intriguing and innovative read.

In one line: London is underwater in this 1960's sci fi novel with a dark and enthralling setting and a well paced story. ( )

I much preferred this to The Drought - the settings turn out to be more familiar and the characters seemed somewhat easier to relate to (though likeable would be going too far). The central idea of regression to thought patterns displayed millions of years ago by earlier life forms is a fascinating and quite sobering one. ( )

https://sites.google.com/a/toonen.org/www/readers-advisory/Drowned World, by J G Ballard.doc ( )

This classic SF novel was published in 1962 but is surely due for a revival, or even a Hollywood blockbuster, as it deals with intense and sudden global warming (caused by sunspots, rather than carbon). The story centres on a military/scientific outpost in the superheated tropical lagoons around an inundated London, the civilized world has retreated to the Poles, and this groups is about to decamp and head north ahead of a rain-belt and the superheated air of up to 180 degrees, which is moving north behind the rain. Of the main characters; Kerans, Bostock, Colonel Riggs and Beatrice Dahl, only Riggs is still in his right mind.

The world conjured up by Ballard is rich and vivid, I loved the albino freebooter, Strangman and his army of scavengers with crocodile outriders. Kerans is the hero and like many Ballard heroes he is passive and an odd fish. The rather silly conceit of the book is that greenhouse earth is causing 'higher' animals to revert back along the spinal cord, following coded memories, back to pre-mamailan evolution, at the same time radiation is causing massive mutations resulting in super fast evolution of primitive plant and animal types. Dr Bostock, explaining this theory, claims that bit isn't merely Lamarckism in reverse, and, of course, it isn't, it's far more barking mad even than that.

However, it's still an atmospheric and compelling read. ( )

http://nomiddlename.blogspot.com/2008/02/drowned-world.html ( )

Another end-of-civilization tale from Ballard, this one portrays a London sinking under the waves. Dreamy, hypnotic, we struggle along with a survivor who watches helplessly as the primordial returns to reclaim England's greatest city. Interesting, even compelling.

Cool descriptive style. Dark and original. ( )

This torrid, powerful 1962 novel 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.

In the 21st century, fluctuations in solar radiation have caused the ide-caps to melt and the seas to rise. Global temperatures have climbed, and civilization has retreated to the Arctic and Antarctic circles. London is a city now inundated by a primeval swamp, to which an expedition travels to record the flora and fauna of this new Triassic Age.

This early novel by the author of CRASH and EMPIRE OF THE SUN is at once a fast paced narrative, a stunning evocation of a flooded, tropical London of the near future and a speculative foray into the workings of the unconscious mind.