Product Description

This fast-paced narrative by the author of CRASH and EMPIRE OF THE SUN is a stunning evocation of a flooded, tropical London of the near future and a foray into the workings of the unconscious mind. Set in the future, Ballard imagines a world in which global warming has melted the ice-caps and primordial jungles and swamps have returned to a tropical London. As various members of an expedition to the city busy themselves with more or less futile schemes like draining Leicester Square in hope of loot, the central character Kerans moves to a strange acceptance of and assimilation by this lushly transformed world, vanishing into a final epiphany of heat and light. 'The Drowned World' is a potent, sensual mood-piece -- jewelled and unforgettable.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #9559 in Books
• Published on: 2006-02-20
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 176 pages

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

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

About the Author
J.G. Ballard was born in 1930 in Shanghai, where his father was a businessman. After internment in a civilian prison camp, he and his family returned to England in 1946. His 1984 bestseller Empire of the Sun won the Guardian Fiction Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. It was later filmed by Steven Spielberg. His controversial novel Crash was also made into an equally controversial film by David Cronenberg. His most recent novels include the Sunday Times bestsellers Cocaine Nights and Super-Cannes.

Customer Reviews

Planet Sauna
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.

Reissue of JG Ballard's debut novel proper
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?

dreamy, steaming, languid disaster novel
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.