Will I love The Drowned World?

There’s no storm in J.G. Ballard’s masterpiece of post-apocalyptic fiction, just the aftermath. This was another book that I read at a highly impressionable age and return to every so often, especially when I’m writing something disaster-related. It takes place in a London flooded by climate change: a science team is dispatched to the feverish swamp that was once a great city, where they’re confronted by pirates and other dangers.

It always blows my mind that Ballard wrote the book in 1962, well before the current debate over the climate. The thrilling set-pieces aside, it’s also a chilling reminder of… show more.

This classic science fiction novel, first published in 1962, is set in a future earth where the melting of the polar ice caps has turned the world’s cities into jungles teeming with life that hasn’t existed since the primordial past. The vision of a world where society has collapsed and human beings are no different than any animal struggling to survive is vivid and terrifying, and Ballard’s prose has a dreamy intensity that heightens the experience.