Verden under vand

by J. G. Ballard

Paperback, 1969

Status

Available

Call number

823.914

Publication

Hasselbalch 1969 193 pages. 1. edition

Description

"The Drowned World imagines a terrifying world in which global warming has melted the ice caps and primordial jungles have overrun a tropical London. Set during the year 2145, this novel follows biologist Dr. Robert Kearns and his team of scientists as they confront a cityscape in which nature is on the rampage and giant lizards, dragonflies, and insects fiercely compete for domination."--Provided by publisher.

Media reviews

... wirkt verblüffend modern, während so mancher einst gerühmte Bestseller längst im literarischen Urschlamm versunken ist ...

User reviews

LibraryThing member AnnieMod
The post apocalyptic genre is modern these days - everyone in the speculative fiction field seems to have an idea or three and the number of works being written is staggering. And most of those are concentrating on the cases where humanity brings the problems on its own. The roots of the genre are
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not exactly the same though - a lot of the classic novels that deal with the end of humanity are a lot more chilling.

In Ballard's "The Drowned World" the world as we know it is over but not because humanity did something wrong. Solar flares in the near future start the rise of the temperatures which leads to the melting of the permafrost and the ice and the changed surface of the world. But Ballard does not just presume that oceans will overrun the world - he accounts for the sludge and soil and the rivers will carry and the fact that the oceans will be as suffocated and displaced as the dry surface.

The novel opens just a few generation after the changes started (and one of the main characters had lived in the world before the floods and the rising temperatures) and humanity is already stuck in the old Arctic and Antarctic regions. Two types of people are still roaming the drowned world - the biologists, supported by military escorts that are trying to map the changes and understand what is happening to the flora and fauna, maybe discovering what will happen to the people as well in the near future; and the marauders - because this is the human way - when there is destruction and left property, there will be marauders.

The main character of the novel is one of the biologists - Kierans, who is sent to a city he had never heard of (which turns out to be London) and who has as a company an old colleague (the same one that had been born in London before the floods), a military escort and a beautiful woman (the only woman we ever hear of) who they found in one of the still standing above ground buildings. No, the story does not turn into a love story - because what Ballard decides to paint is not just the picture of the collapsing world (which is masterfully done) but also what happens in the human mind when this happens -- can humanity stay the same if the world around it changes. Written in the 60s, the portrayal of the women and the non-white races is expected even if it is a bit shocking for a reader in the 21st century. But at the same time, being written when it was, the novel re-delegates anyone that is not a white male to the position of a secondary character (with the woman becoming a damsel in distress sooner or later of course).

What makes this novel stand out is the fact that Ballard accepts the fact that humanity had not lost everything from its past and that when the climate changes to emulate a long forgotten one, our cells retain the memory and try to push it out into the conscience. How scientifically valid this is is not clear even to this day. But it makes for a great premise of a novel written with the masterful pen of Ballard. Even the arriving marauder and his crew does not change the tone of the story -- despite of what is happening around them, the inner world of the characters is what drives the story. The refusal of one of the main characters to accept that the changes can be reversed, even temporarily and the world to revert to what it was (or close enough) is deep into what can only be accepted as psychosis because of the human mind inability to accept that many changes.

The novel is a story on the drowned world. It is not attempting to find a solution or to find a way to save humanity. Nor it tries to find a way to save our characters - some will die, some will fail off the page and never be heard of (and some will reemerge out of nowhere to serve their purpose one more). The journey that begins at the start of the novel, the one through the minds of humanity, never ends. And it cannot end. The slice of time that we see in the novel is exactly this - a story that can go in either way. And yet - the novel is finished - the world is painted and the humanity has its choices - a few more than when the novel started but the world is still drowned and the humanity is on the verge of extinction.

It is an interesting novel - although I suspect that a lot of people will not like it. It does not have a real plot (at least not one where people do things) but at the same time it is a very coherent and chilly narrative. And even if it is written more than 50 years ago, it is as valid as back then (with some notes as mentioned above) - its main core remains (and will probably remain) a stark warning of what may happen... and what we cannot change no matter what.
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LibraryThing member Bookmarque
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
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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 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.
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LibraryThing member unclebob53703
Strange, increasingly hallucinatory post-apocalypse novel about a warming planet overrun with lagoons and exploding tropical plants and animals. The protagonist (and others) begin having nightmares which are described as racial memories of earlier times when these climatic conditions existed. A bad
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guy enters the scene to plunder what's left, and throws this new natural order into chaos, which strangely rouses the dazed characters into action to restore their surroundings. I found the characters mostly listless (and nearly lifeless), and the conflict seemed like a contrivance, just to make something happen. But the book was hard to put down, due to Ballard's powerful, visceral description of this "drowned world." The book seems more like an image to me than a story, but one I won't be forgetting that lagoon anytime soon.
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LibraryThing member overthemoon
A good, well-written and exciting read once I got into it, and quite topical because of global warming, which was not such an issue when the book was written in the early 1960s. It is set in an undetermined* future (a future seen from the 1960s - there is a Woolworths, communications in Morse, no
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computers, people listed to records and tapes); sun disturbance means the daytime peak temperature is around 150 degrees. We are in London - Leicester Square to be more precise, which is now a lagoon, only the top floors of buildings standing proud. Dr Kerans, born in Greenland where most of the surviving population has fled, is working on a research station moored in the lagoon but has chosen to live in a suite in the Ritz, furnished for a financier from Milan. Somehow he has supplies, electricity, a freezer, weaponry, and a lover - Beatrice Dahl who has decided to live alone in her grandfather's penthouse apartment also overlooking in the lagoon. Does she have a boat or does she spend all her time sunbathing on her balcony? I found her a rather vague character, is she part of the scientific team? I did have to suspend belief quite a lot and found myself questioning motives and behaviour - when it is so hot, would you really wear a suit and wonder if you should put on a jacket? As the vegetation luxuriates and the insect and reptile fauna proliferates, the few human characters experience vivid dreams that suggest regression into primeval times. When time comes for the scientists to return to base in the north, Kerans decides to stay behind. Why? he vaguely refers to the more organized, military life back home. Excitement comes with the arrival of a boat-casino manned by the megalomaniac pirate Strangman in a white suit, and his crew, intent on looting furniture and jewellery and holding parties. He gets pumps working to drain the lagoon. And I shall stop there, with all my questions unresolved.

*Have now seen on wiki that it is set in 2145 but I don't know where this date comes from - I'll have to look at the beginning again.
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LibraryThing member PlayingBooky
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
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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.
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LibraryThing member Petroglyph
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
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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.
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LibraryThing member lunacat
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
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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.
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LibraryThing member baswood
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,
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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 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.
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LibraryThing member MyopicBookworm
Not, perhaps, as well known or as often read as it might be, possibly because an opaque, baroque psychological narrative pervades the recounting of events. The setting is brilliantly conveyed: a European city overtaken by a swampy jungle of prehistoric lushness, where the first five storeys of the
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taller buildings are submerged in foetid lagoons inhabited by swarms of alligators, while gymnosperms invade the roofscape. There is a small cast of characters whose intentions and motivations are sometimes almost stereotypically clear, but more often deeply murky, swirling in fevered dreams under the grotesquely enlarged sun, source of the climate disruption that has driven the remnant of civilization north of the Arctic Circle. The end-point towards which the story reaches is more dissolution than resolution, so it remains unsettling.

I found it odd that, even in a text from 1962, there are signs of that inadequate editorial hand that so annoys the reader of more modern novels. The author confuses semaphore and morse, refers to alligators as amphibians, and misuses "I" for "me", in a manner which grates with the pedantic reader (i.e. me).

MB 20-vi-2023
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LibraryThing member Ailurophile
I was very disappointed in The Drowned World. I know that many readers consider it a seminal work, and that mine is a minority view, but I was unable to find much of interest in the story. Perhaps I simply lack the background to appreciate it. But here is my take.

The plot in brief: It is 2145. The
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earth's climate has changed due to an increase in solar activity, causing much of the planet to become uninhabitable. Global warming is rampant, the formerly temperate regions are largely flooded, climate change is accelerating rapidly, and what remains of humanity--only a few million people--has retreated to the arctic and antarctic. The closer to the equator one gets, the more the biosphere resembles that of the Mesozoic, with mosquitoes the size of dragonflies, large (and aggressive) iguanas, rampant vegetation, etc. The protagonist is Dr. Kerans, a scientist with a group of surveyors studying one of the now-flooded cities of the past. Like others in his party, he becomes troubled by strange dreams of a huge, pulsing sun, which a colleague explains as a kind of genetic memory of human evolutionary history that is embedded in his neurons, and which is evoked by the return of the environment to prehistoric conditions. All of this seemed highly improbable (and downright teleological) to me. It immediately challenged my "willing suspension of disbelief." But I tried to set it aside, and continued reading.

A party of looters soon arrive, and subject Kerans to various indignities. They are preparing to kill him when his fellow expedition members return and rescue him. But his outlook has been altered by the awakening of his evolutionary past, as embedded in his neurons, and so, rather than being pleased at the prospect of leaving an area that will soon be uninhabitable, he instead flees to the south, where conditions are even more hostile. He soon encounters another member of his expedition, similarly afflicted, who departed southward much earlier. This fellow is now blind and nearing death, but is still determined to continue southward, even though the temperature is already all but lethal, and increases the further south one goes. The story ends with Kerans battling his way southward into increasing heat and rains, "A second Adam searching for the forgotten paradises of the reborn sun."

So why did I so dislike this book? First: I was not at all engaged by the plot. Granted, this is not an adventure story. It is an examination of psychological and/or philosophical themes, and so it is not surprising that the emphasis should be on what is happening in the minds of the main characters, rather than on the imaginary world that they inhabit. But even so, the story unfolds as a series of largely disconnected events, barely stitched together by the framework of climate change gone amok.

Second: I did not think the characters were well drawn. Even the protagonist seemed two-dimensional. I could not picture how or why any of them were motivated to behave as they did.

Third: the theme of human beings descending into a kind of neurological "deep time" triggered simply by environmental changes is not presented in a way that makes it believable. To be fair, I am highly skeptical that the very idea is credible; but, setting that aside, Ballard simply declares it to us as a kind of fait accomplit without sufficient explanation or background.

Fourth: If The Drowned World does contain a deeper message about the nature of the human experience, the nature of human self-hood, of the impact of evolutionary biology on who we are, then it is so latent that I, at least, am not able to extract it. As far as I can see, the message seems to be, "Human beings have much in common with lemmings. Faced with insurmountable adversity, they will seek a metaphorical cliff from which they can throw themselves to their deaths."
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LibraryThing member Parthurbook
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
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our more primordial tendencies. Dark and beautiful all at once.
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LibraryThing member MeditationesMartini
Very far on the pulpy end of Ballard's œuvre, which is not a bad thing on its own, but this one also suffers for a few other reasons: we know a lot more about the potential effects of global warming now than in 1961, and the lagoony Triassic-redux world that Ballard imagines is compelling on its
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own terms and a good setting for the psychodrama of human regression to a Triassic state that Ballard envisions, but it's not at all realistic, which makes a goat of the hard-SF conventions that Ballard tries here to embrace and then play off of; then also, if the novel's goal is to explore the state of the psyche post-apocalypse, surely what we must be most concerned about is the fact that we did it, we blew it up (we maniacs), whereas Ballard uses sunspots as his plot device--considerably less interesting than the guilty reality. And while the regression Kerans undergoes from positivist biologist to heat-hypnotized rodent, more or less, is a fascinating one, and the high stagecraft of the settings--the lagoon full of crocodiles, the underwater ballroom, the drained and crusty Leicester Square seething with the stench of life and the squelch of rot, it's undermined by the dynamic Ballard sets up between the whites (in their different ways, dashing colonial men of action, the kind who were just then completing their march into history had Ballard only noticed) and Strangman's black crew (grunting, servile apes, no doubt affected like everyone else by the encroachment of sun and furze and perhaps you can hang their depiction on that as a regression too, but given the way they gambol and hoot (words deployed liberally include "bongos," "dusky," "paw," etc., and is there a carefully ambiguous gang rape scene you better believe there's a carefully ambiguous gang rape scene) and set Kerans up as a kind of kitschy African-style Fisher King with a crocodile head ... nope, we can only conclude that they are here as a missing link, lower humans who OH BIG IRONY slip into the steamy future JUST LIKE THE JUNGLES OF THEIR YOUTH and retain their humanity better than the thoroughbred Brits. And that's all bullshit, and I think redolent of the pulp conventions of its time but surely not of the broader culture, anymore? Dispiriting especially because at first Kerans is described several times as "ebony" and you think this book is gonna be forwardthinking but nope it's just a suntan. Same thing goes for the token woman, and her musky breasts, and the way she gets covered in jewels and desultorily takes on the sun goddess role ... basically when this book views regression as something akin to an actual pruning of higher neural functions and an embrace of buried instinct, and tries to imagine what kind of re-enchantment of the world might come from re-entering the mindset of a small beast, it has good moments, but more often it seems to view "savagery," and the kind of cartoonish tooth-flashing bestiality that implies, as a waystation to that latter regression, and that goes along with the unfortunate door-closing choices Ballard made in the way he set up the climate change–driven end of civ to make this seem a not super successful period piece at present.
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LibraryThing member KateSherrod
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
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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, "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!
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LibraryThing member BayardUS
A maverick with a ragtag crew tries to save art and the last shreds of the old civilization in an apocalyptic world where solar flares have caused most of the world's major cities to be flooded and overgrown with mutated plants and reptiles. His efforts to reclaim the scraps left behind in one of
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these drowned cities is frustrated by its few remaining inhabitants, who ramble about having a "neuronic need" for the lagoons that have formed over what used to be London. This isn't what actually happens in The Drowned World, but with only a few minor tweaks it could have been. While it wouldn't have been a great story, such a plot outline would at least have made sense in a way that this book's plot doesn't.

There really isn't much going for The Drowned World. Most of the characters have no drive to survive, so they're not that sympathetic or relatable, nor do they have some sort of firm purpose to give the main narrative momentum. The rest of the characters are complete clichés (Colonel Riggs) or cartoon villains (Strangman, a knock-off Kurtz with an alligator fetish and a painfully on-the-nose name), so it's not easy to care about what happens to any of these characters. It's made even harder by the fact that they do things that don't make any sense. See a guy that gives you bad vibes and is followed by a huge swarm of crocodiles? "We've everything to gain by showing ourselves," says the main character. Some of the city gets drained and the female lead breaks down into tears, crying "it's horrible" as if she hasn't been living in overgrown cities and seeing stuff like this for years at this point- what, they don't have tides in the future? Even the villain does things that don't make any sense, sparing characters instead of killing them with no discernible logic. The main characters are all suffering from some undefined psychological condition of this new world, experiencing genetic memories, and so Ballard seems happy to have them do whatever he wants them to instead of having understandable desires and motivations. It's really not well done.

The writing isn't great either. I was expecting some great descriptions of what this overgrown and perpetually flooded city looked like, but Ballard spends more time describing the inside of the Ritz, the massive sun, and the exterior of different buildings than he does a city retaken by nature. On top of that, Ballard's writing really beats you over the head with whatever he's trying to communicate. It isn't enough for him to describe a place as vaguely womblike, he has to have a character explicitly call it "womblike," and several times at that. He's not satisfied with having a character thinking one way and behaving in a contrary way, he has to have the character talk to himself about how he's "living on two levels." Thanks for assuming your readers are idiots Ballard!

Finally, the actual story is pretty dull. The psychological state of the main character dictates why he stays behind in this city in the beginning, instead of any real motivation. Then he lounges around the city in a stupor until Strangman shows up. Then Strangman does some stuff, oscillating between a creepy guy and an insane mustache-twirling villain at Ballard's whim. Then the main character is saved by a deus ex machina. Then the main character wanders South, again without any real motivation, but the ending nevertheless tries to paint this suicidal wandering that the main character can't seem to help as heroic, or at least noble, or at a bare minimum somehow understandable. It's none of those things. What was Ballard trying to do with this story, considering its complete lack of meaningful plot or realistic characters or message applicable to the real world? I'd bet he thought the setting of an overgrown London was cool, and just wrote whatever popped into his brain around this central concept (looking at his other books written around the same time I'm all but certain this was his usual M.O.). Anyway, I expect more from my science fiction than one idea for the setting that is rarely adequately presented by the book's prose. You want a good story about a drowning world? Go read Stations of the Tide by Swanwick.
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LibraryThing member kukulaj
Quite a rich book - ripe, overgrown. An exploration of how the inner world and the outer world are entwined. What kinds of patterns lie latent within us, to reemerge when the situation triggers them?

Some parts of this story didn't quite make sense. If things have been so devastated for so long,
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like everybody up at the arctic circle and have been for decades, are folks really going to be flying around in helicopters? Not that it matters. Realism isn't the point. It's plausible enough to permit suspension of disbelief.

Heart of Darkness, yeah, Lord of the Flies. Originally 1962, hmmm. When did Nevil Shute's On the Beach come out?

Classic Ballard, anyway. Everything kind of oozes.
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LibraryThing member Dreesie
This post-apocalyptic novel envisions a world that is heating, in the not-so-distant future. Only the polar areas are inhabitable, populations have plummeted, temperatures risen, lizards have taken over, Triassic-like plants are everywhere, much of the world is flooded. Solar flare storms, not
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global warming, are the cause as briefly explained.

The descriptions of the flora and fauna in this book are great--and I think Jeff Vandermeer appreciates them as well, as it feels so similar to Annihiliation (though the stories are very very different).

I found the story itself to be the weak point. A military research crew and a random woman are surviving in London on old stores, lizards, the last of the fuel, and some a/c. They need to abandon or risk the still rising heat and coming storms. Most go. Then a scavenging crew--the white captain Strangman and his African crew arrive. The descriptions of these men and their power structure are dated and uncomfortable. Their goal is unclear to the reader and Dr Kerans. And it still is to me, even after I finished.
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LibraryThing member Greatrakes
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
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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.
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LibraryThing member jaddington
Reverse evolution....genetic memory....and a drowned world. I couldn't put it down, it was a captivating world.
LibraryThing member marek2009
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, &
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man regresses in some vague atavistic way, with clear influences of Heart of Darkness.
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LibraryThing member lmichet
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
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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.
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LibraryThing member clong
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 characters, people well on their way to losing what little
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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 whisper.

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).
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LibraryThing member CarmeloRafala
Ballard's best of his apocalyptic novels. Shades of Conrad's Heart of Darkness abound.
LibraryThing member DinadansFriend
I'm very fond of this book. It's right up there with "Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen" as a book that spawned a host of imitations, and even proved to have some influence on the world of climate science. It certainly seems prescient, with regards to today and our problems.
LibraryThing member DCBlack
Good writing, great atmosphere,....but weak plot.
LibraryThing member in30minutes
The Drowned World is now 50 years old, and it's starting to feel a little long in the tooth. The technology and worldview seems dated, although it's interesting to view the book as an alternate take on the post-apocalyptic science fiction that was emerging at the time. While A Canticle For
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Leibowitz and On The Beach were focused on life after nuclear war, Ballard's work is set in London after an ecological catastrophe that returns Earth to a Triassic-like state.

Where the book excels is the rich, language that evokes fantastic scenes and emotional states. Long after I had finished the book, these scenes echoed in my mind, such as the visit to the sunken planetarium and the draining of Leicester Square. I have found some of his short stories to be similarly rich, and even Empire Of The Sun to have the ability to evoke particular scenes in the mind's eye.
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Subjects

Language

Original language

English

Original publication date

1962-08-02

Physical description

193 p.; 18.5 cm

Local notes

Omslag: Frithioff Johansen
Omslaget viser en mand, der løber
Indskannet omslag - N650U - 150 dpi
Oversat fra amerikansk "The drowned world" af Niels Erik Wille

Pages

193

Rating

(570 ratings; 3.4)

DDC/MDS

823.914
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