The Drowned World

The Drowned World could easily look like a climate change cautionary tale nowadays, depicting as it does a planet on which all the major cities are under hundreds of feet of water, the average daytime temperature is a good 120-140 degrees, and the biosphere is reverting to something much like its Triassic state, teeming with giant ferns and reptiles that some people are starting to suspect are evolving back into dinosaurs. But the book (first published in 1962) predates modern theories; here the sun is the culprit; a series of really bad solar flares having stripped away a lot of the protections Earth's atmosphere provides, the planet has gotten hot and steamy; The Drowned World could well be a sequel to Stephen Vincent Benet's poem, show more "Metropolitan Nightmare," which is even older.

So the characters here are neither hand-wringers nor moralizers. Robert Kerans, Colonel Riggs and Beatrice Dahl are studying the vast series of lagoons that used to be London as the book opens. But it's time to go back to the relative safety and comfort of the Arctic Circle; the iguanas and gators are getting uppity and the heat is going to get unbearable. Everything looks good to go -- but nobody asked Beatrice. And Beatrice, like many other members of the expedition, has started to have "deep" dreams that seem to be seducing her into staying, into giving up her humanity as it is commonly understood and becoming a quiescent consciousness submerged in jungle and lagoon. And because she and Kerans have become a couple during their time in the Lagoons-That-Were-London, he's going to stay, too. Besides, Kerans kind of likes his living arrangements, in the penthouse of the ruins of the Ritz Hotel -- a penthouse that's now more or less at water level, and still crammed full of a long-dead resident's silk shirts and other treasures.

What follows is a short -- shockingly short by modern standards; I had almost forgotten that novels once took up just 133 pages! -- account of a myriad of ways in which people can go mad outside of civilization. We have looters, a savage king (who arrives on a paddle steamer escorted by hundreds of alligators who seem to respond a bit to his will), and more than one person who has decided to do as the dreams suggest and just sort of zone out and become human lizards. When the savage king finds a way to drain the lagoon where Kerans and Beatrice are basking, the better to get at the treasures he imagines are still to be had in the abandoned stores and museums at the bottom, things get even stranger, which I would not have thought possible.

I had my own "deep" dream after reading The Drowned World in which I basically invented my own sequel to it and shared the sense of being subsumed in its waters; Ballard's sequences are so vivid and compelling that I wasn't at all surprised by this. I too, want to see London's big planetarium filled with water and teeming with sponges and coral and angelfish, the little specks of light from the water's surface far above forming a new set of constellations that Kerans imagines mirror those that appeared in the night sky when the Earth's climate was last like this.

Ballard is a wonder! show less

I have conflicting impressions about this book. Its recent popularity is likely due to its perceived connection to climate fiction - a kind of an early warning novel. It is not that at all. It does not deal with anthropogenic climate change, it rather explores the fragility of human species to externally caused changes, our inability to adapt in the face of impending doom.
How thin the veneer of civilisation is, how easy it is for all culture to become irrelevant, to become "the bones" in a tomb at the bottom of a bigger ocean! What is interesting in Ballard's take is that the civilizational collapse does not occur only on the level of the society, crumbling of individual psychology is even more striking. While the "scientific" show more explanation via "genetic memory" the author offers is clearly fallacious, the rapid changes to individual world views are possible if not inevitable given the circumstances.
Ballard's accomplishment lies in the atmosphere he creates - the beautiful ending of the world scorched by the sun, rising waters washing away all traces of human activity - with the lowest instincts and behaviors resisting the collapse longer than anything else.
If you are looking for interesting characters, their interactions and development, you will not find them in the extreme temperatures of the drowning world show less

Earth reverts back to the Triassic age in Ballard's unforgettable The Drowned World. Published in 1962 and now part of the science fiction masterwork series. I read this as a teenager and picking it up today nearly sixty years later, it all came flooding back; the lagoons and the claustrophobic, melancholic atmosphere, the feeling of impotency, powerlessness and an eventual bowing to the inevitable; unforgettable. Ballard's hero Kerans struggles to make sense of the changing world, he withdraws from the small unit of men charged with charting the overheating climate, he tries to come to terms with his ecoanxiety, tries to adapt, tries to embrace the situation, almost welcomes being overwhelmed. A strange kind of hero, but he fits show more Ballard's world like a glove.

The change to the climate in this novel is nothing to do with man. Prolonged solar storms have led to a deterioration in the earths ionosphere and solar radiation has bombarded earth resulting in overheated tropical climates. Only the artic circle has a temperate climate, but the temperatures are continuing to rise and while scientists have predicted an end to the solar flares, there is no end in sight yet. The earth has rapidly degenerated to a new Triassic age, which was noted for its rise in sea levels and the appearance of early mammals. The action is situated in London which is now largely underwater and a series of equatorial lagoons forms the new landscape. High rise buildings are keeping their heads above water, but the silt washed down is clogging everything up and creating giant mudbanks. Giant lizards, Iguanas, crocodiles and snakes share the lagoons with a variety of fish; giant mosquitoes, vampiric bats and horse flies are food for early species of birds. Vegetation in the form of giant bushes and trees is taking over all buildings and establishing itself in the newly formed mudflats. In the 70 years since the eruption of the solar flares the animal kingdom has evolved and is teeming with life, while man struggles to keep a foothold.

Kerans is a scientist attached to a small unit led by Riggs on military lines, but chains of command have broken down. Kerans has made a bolt hole for himself in the upper floors of the Ritz hotel and has access to a certain amount of luxury. Beatrice Dahl his sometime lover lives in another luxury apartment block, but oil for cooling systems is beginning to run out and temperatures are unbearable after 10 am. Kerans enjoys spending time on his balcony looking down at the lagoons plotting his day, his duties, but something else is becoming apparent. The psychology of the human mind is changing, people in Rigg's unit are suffering from bad dreams and insanity. Hardman a fellow scientist goes rogue, drawn to travel South towards an even more hostile landscape:

"was the drowned world itself and the mysterious quest for the south, which had possessed Hardman no more than an impulse to suicide an unconscious acceptance of his own devolutionary descent, the ultimate neuronic synthesis of the archeopsychia zero"

This idea of man's mind, his outlook adapting to the changes around him becomes an important theme in the book. The arrival of a pirate crew in the lagoons; looters and psychotics, over halfway through the book threatens to spin the novel in another direction, but Ballard juggles his themes in an exotic mix that is captivatingly satisfying. By todays standards the 160 odd pages of this book would appear concise in world building terms and there is only one female character who does not quite live up to her promise of being a femme fatal; black people are negroes and belong firmly to the pirate band, however this is an early sixties science fiction novel with some fine writing that has not lost its power to amaze and so 5 stars. show less

As one of Ballard’s early works, this is pretty readable, esp. if you’ve ever tried the atrocious witterings of the likes of Crash. It’s sci-fi, and the basic premise is that the temperature of the world has risen so much the equatorial regions of the world have become unihabitable swamps flooded by the entirely melted polar regions to which the population has now retreated.

The primordial landscape becomes the setting for our narrative of competing factions pitted not only against the physical environment but, of more consequence it seems, the mental strain of living in such climatic extremes.

This latter pressure very much gives the novel a Heart-of-Darkness feel. Madness isn’t far away from anyone as their dreams are haunted by show more visions of being enveloped by heat or water or both and their daylight (and there’s a lot of that) seems an undending nightmare from which there is no relief.

This results in characters subject to some kind of reverse evolution whereby they find themselves unable to resist urges to strip themselves of every vestige of humanity, abandon community and launch themselves off into the annihilation of the endless wastes.

Ballard raises a lot of questions exploring what this means about humanity and our role in nature. There’s no hierarchy. It’s a symbiosis. While it’s our power over the environment that has destroyed the balance of the planet’s ecosystems, at the same time humanity finds itself unable to exert any power at all in the resulting ecosystem.

Continued global warming and rising sea levels have lent the 1962 novel even greater prescience than when it was first published. It strikes me that it should be more widely known because of this.

But then it strikes me daily that despite the rhetoric no one actually gives a toss.

I see friends and family around me continuing to buy single-use plastic drinks bottles and takeaway containers in the face of clear alternatives. I hear people’s plans to take absolutely unnecessary transcontinental flights when things open up again. I continue to pull plastic out of the sand on the beach where I live, plastic that comes directly from the shops on the sea front selling complete shit no one needs.

And if you’re more angered that I used the word ‘shit’ than by my description of our needlessly selfish behaviour, I’m writing this for you.

If we’re not bothering with all the evidence we’re presented with, Ballard’s fiction might well become fact. And having read quite a bit of him, a world in which Ballard’s fiction is fact is not one I want to live in any longer. show less

Like diving willingly into a hungry whirlpool of Deep Time, surrounded by all the nightmares of drowning and the unknowable ocean, spinning further and further into the muck which has no bottom...

Eons ago I read this and was so struck by it that I bought a Folio Society edition as soon as they published it. Now I’ve read it again, I think a lot of it went over my head on the first reading. I was about 20 and hadn’t read anything about evolutionary biology. I hadn’t read many apocalyptic or speculative fiction novels either and having done both in the interim, I think it enhanced my enjoyment and understanding of the book.

On my first reading I was captivated by Strangman’s cruelty and dominance. I didn’t see him as a symbol of humanity’s downfall and assigned him more importance than I think he merits. This time he was more of a distraction which I think mirrored how Kerans and Beatrice actually viewed him. They show more wanted to get along back into Deep Time and he was impeding their progress down the evolutionary ladder.

That’s the bigger theme of the novel and one I felt was interesting and not beaten to death with lots of pontificating and monologuing. Instead we have the understanding that our regression, along with everything else on the planet, is right. Instead of being outraged by the calamity that destroyed our culture and ecosystem, humans are dreaming of their time before. Triassic time. Racial memory. Flashbacks embedded in our DNA. It isn’t scary, but soothing, and Bea, Kerans and the others who have fallen into the spell, want nothing but to embrace these dreams and go peacefully into the back of beyond.

Our regeneration is limited as is everything else. Whole species have disappeared only to be replaced by their progenitors of millennia past. The idea is intriguing and I wonder if it is truly an evolution or a devolution? When the old life forms are the only way to survive a new climate, isn’t it a sign of progress when those adaptations rise again? While we do know some about what the flora and fauna have done to adapt in the book, we know little about what form humans will take. Our birth rate has plummeted along with our general numbers and large mammals are gone as well. Insects, spore-bearing plants and reptiles have taken over, leaving little room for mammals of any sort.

This book takes a swipe at the answer, but dodges a couple of things in its execution. First is the negativity that a human-created catastrophe always brings to an apocalyptic novel. Oh if we hadn’t been so dumb or ignored whatever, we wouldn’t be dying off and the world wouldn’t be ruined. The Drowned World’s nexus of ecological change has nothing to do with us, so we’re off the hook. Instead of chest-beating, hand-wringing and fighting, we go gracefully, which is another difference I’ve noticed with this versus other end-of-the-world novels. We escape victimhood and gracefully accept our extinction. It’s introspective and relatively serene and reminded me a lot of Earth Abides by George R. Stewart and of Blood Music by Greg Bear. Instead of trying to save the world and make it our dominion again, the humans left behind adapt in the best way they know how. It may not be the way we behaved before, which chafes at some, but eventually they accept the way things are moving and look to the future with calm, positive that even if things are never the same, they won’t be the end, only different. show less

Ballard seems to rely on similar characters and scenarios to construct his dark visions. The situation he conjures is nothing more than a simple vehicle for his language. He is fascinated by still-lifes, it seems. Especially, in the way he touchingly describes things. It builds moisture in your mouth to read his lines aloud, seems to make you sweat, the heart to flutter a little. It’s actually quite unsettling how often he utilizes the storyteller's arts. The whole of some of his novels are pure self-indulgence. The sentences are onanistic. But perhaps I am exaggerating.

Like The Drought, most of the characters are extremely well-adapted post-apocalyptic aristocrats, barely sacrificing their quality of life in the wake of total show more annihilation of the human race. If Ballard wrote an epidemic novel it would be the opposite of Stephen King’s The Stand – short, floral, and utterly one-sided. One expects this sort of thing from Ballard after reading Concrete Island, High-Rise and his other descents into mundane barbarism. He makes it look so easy to descend into animalistic instincts from the heights of aesthetic cultivation. The downside to this style is you never get a true sense of dread from what is happening. Even if peoples’ limbs start falling off you don’t quite feel any sympathy for them. It would be rather like if the main character of Ellis’ American Psycho were complaining about a toothache. I would not feel bad for him. Likewise, when the character in this novel actually has to exert himself, has to get off his ass and ends up paddling around uselessly on a bloody sea, dodging the corpses of the pismires he’s ignored his whole life, it’s actually morbidly hilarious rather than chilling. One doesn’t know whether to implicitly trust Ballard’s mental state or write him off as a psychopath. But perhaps that was the whole point. show less