I’ve made a shift to an e-reader (a Kobo) over the last month and it’s been a much easier transition than I was expecting. I do miss the tactility and sensuality of physical books but there is something exhilarating about having so many titles at my fingertips. In particular, I love the possibility of working my way through a writer’s oeuvre without having to spend weeks or months sourcing each text. Of course, it’s pleasurable in a different way to find physical copies but for the moment I’m enjoying the sense of having entire bibliographies opening up before me.

One of my projects is to read J.G. Ballard’s bibliography since I loved the few I read years ago. His first widely available novel, The Drowned World, has also been on my radar for a while, and it absolutely delivered. Despite being written in the early 1960s, it feels remarkably contemporary and I can see why it has been hailed as a foundational work of cli-fi. In fact, Ballard’s first three novels – The Drowned World, The Burning World and The Crystal World – all seem to pair “hard” science fiction with contemplations of climate, as does his first novel (not widely available now, and which he has disowned), The Wind from Nowhere.

In The Drowned World, rising temperatures and ocean levels have left most of the planet uninhabitable. Rather than being caused by excessive fossil fuel use, as has occurred in our own period, this climate shift is the result of a solar flare that burned away a significant part of the earth’s Van Allen Belts. By the mid-22^nd century, when the novel begins, only the poles are inhabitable on a permanent basis, glacial melt has raised ocean levels by about thirty metres, and temperatures have soared so radically that the biosphere has reverted back to prehistoric forests and the age of the reptiles, with iguanas leading the way.

Most of the novel takes place in what was once London, and follows Dr. Robert Kerans, a member of a scientific expedition that is cataloguing fauna and flora before retreating to the North Pole for the last time. The first half of the book follows Kerans’ gradual dissociation from his team, as he is haunted by dreams of returning to his primeval self, leading him to remain behind when the crew departs London. During the second half, Kerans and a few other survivors are besieged by Strangman, a pirate who raids the main London lagoon and holds them hostage with increasingly anarchic acts. 

Ballard’s descriptive powers are absolutely astonishing here. He has an amazing vocabulary and one of the most vivid spatial imaginations of any writer I have read. In fact, Ballard’s spaces are so vivid that they often seem to exceed reality and become hyperreal, converging with the thoughts, bodies and unconscious fantasies of the people inhabiting them: “I am convinced that as we move back through geophysical time so we re-enter the amniotic corridor and move back through spinal and archaeopsychic time, recollecting in our unconscious minds the landscapes of each epoch, each with a distinct geological terrain, its own unique flora and fauna…”

This fusion of physical space, geological time and individual consciousness imbues The Drowned World with an extraordinary hallucinatory intensity, and this culminates around the two great set pieces of the novel, both of which occur once Ballard has established the setting of the lagoon and after Strangman arrives. In the first, Kerans dons a scuba suit and dives into a submerged planetarium, where he comes face to face with his desire for primeval regression, framed in this case as a longing for annihilation that is more primal than mere suicidal ideation: “Far above him, as his consciousness faded, he could see the ancient nebulae and galaxies shining through the uterine night, but eventually their light was dimmed, and he was only aware of the faint glimmer of identity within the deepest recesses of his mind.”

The second great set piece occurs when Strangman and his motley crew manage to drain a segment of the lagoon, throwing the old city into vivid relief. By this point, the water has converged space, time and consciousness in such a dramatic way that its absence jettisons Kerans “on a small spur of reality in the centre of the time sea,” forcing him to flood it once more to continue the “avalanche backwards into the past” that sustains his fantasies and fears: “He longed for this descent through archaeopsychic time to reach its conclusion, repressing the knowledge that when it did the external world around him would have become alien and unbearable.”

This conception of time is the futuristic core of the novel. Increasingly, it feels like Ballard is distantly glimpsing a postmodern world where space and time have broken down and ceased to ramify in their modernist manner. This is the “space of flows” and “timeless time” that Manuel Castells describes – or alternatively, the “sheets of present and peaks of past” that Gilles Deleuze associates with the increasing disconnect between sight and action that haunts post-WWII cinema. The Drowned World is cinematic in precisely that sense, as the sun becomes an enormous eye that engulfs sight and overwhelms agency, ultimately leaving Kerans with nothing left to do excerpt merge himself with it: “Relentless and magnetic, it called him southward, to the great heat and submerged lagoons of the Equator.”