bookcoverThe Drowned Earth: A Novel (50th anniversary edition)
Past J. G. Ballard; introduction by Martin Amis
208 pp. Liveright Publishing Corporation, July 2012.
Hardcover, $23.95; paperback, $15.95.

60 years agone this twelvemonth, the belatedly cracking British science fiction author J. G. Ballard published his novel The Drowned Globe. The book is a disaster novel, one that has come to be regarded equally a seminal contribution to the climate fiction genre. It's remarkable for its vivid depiction of a possible future Earth, its fascinating exploration into the psychological effects of environmental change and its brilliant inversion of the standard disaster story formula.

The novel finds Earth in the midst of runaway climate change acquired not by humans, but by a prolonged period of solar storm activity. In its climate, geography and life forms, this new Earth is a chaotic mashup of elements from diverse points forth its prehistoric hothouse past (by and large from the Carboniferous and Triassic periods, which are repeatedly invoked). The bulk of the planet is likewise hot for humans, but plants and reptiles are flourishing explosively, ferns growing as tall every bit sequoias and giant lizards presiding over sometime corporate boardrooms amid the inundated ruins. Malaria—spread past mosquitoes as big as today's dragonflies—is now mutual well beyond the equator. The continents take been completely reshaped by the rising seas and the shifting of billions of tons of topsoil. The continental interiors are covered in lagoons, jungles and silt flats.

Humans and other mammals occupy an e'er-dwindling ecological niche. Mammalian fertility in general has been steadily waning, and human births take become insufficiently rare. The total human population has gone from billions of people dominating most of the planet to a mere several one thousand thousand concentrated effectually the now-subtropical poles. In a moment of dark whimsy, one character wonders with entertainment whether "a point might ultimately be reached where a second Adam and Eve [observe] themselves solitary in a new Eden."

A United nations war machine unit has been traveling the globe for the past three years, surveying what's left of the globe'due south former capitals. At each new stop, the team, led past gruff military man Colonel Riggs, sets about mapping the coastline, studying the wildlife and evacuating whatever remaining inhabitants (who are generally either in terrible health or psychopathic). The biological studies are carried out by the main hero of our story, Robert Kerans, and his assistant, Alan Bodkin. The squad is currently stationed amid the partially submerged remnants of London. Once its piece of work there is done, it will leave the city to its fate and move on to another forsaken former majuscule, where the process will be repeated.

Kerans and Bodkin are fatalistic most the globe taking shape around them, repeatedly commenting on how its flora and fauna are evolving exactly every bit scientists predicted decades ago, so in that location'due south scarcely whatever point in continuing to study them. Indeed, Kerans has come to regard the reports he sends to his superiors at Camp Byrd, in northern Greenland, as a "pointless game," doubting that anyone still bothers to file or even read them. There's a sense that humanity has resigned itself to the will of nature—a feeling heightened by the manner the mutated horsetails and club mosses physically dwarf our characters like corn stalks towering over a mouse, and the manner the lizards watch and gauge the humans' every move similar sentries standing guard.

Equally the story opens, the team's stay in London has been cut brusque. Riggs has received orders from Military camp Byrd to pack up and return to the campsite immediately. Information technology seems the waters are standing to rise, rendering worthless all the effort spent on coastal mapping. In addition, the London region is near to be hit by soaring temperatures as well equally monsoon conditions brought on by the northern-migrating equatorial rain belts, which likely will brand the waterways leading into and out of London impassable in the coming months due to the e'er-accumulating silt. The upshot of all this is that the area volition soon exist unfit for homo survival, and in that location may be no way of rescuing anyone left behind.

If this were a conventional disaster story, it would take our heroes frantically racing against fourth dimension to either escape from, or somehow put an end to, the state of affairs just described. Instead, our three main protagonists—Bodkin, Kerans and Kerans' lover Beatrice—find themselves intractably fatigued to the coming disaster, and stay behind to welcome information technology when everyone else flees northward. How they cope psychologically with their devolving environment then becomes the novel's focus.

The scientific explanation every bit to why these 3 are compelled to stay behind unfortunately goes quite a scrap across the threshold of believability. It includes a lot of actually abstract psychoanalytic terminology and a long-discredited (fifty-fifty at the time this novel was written) theory called organic retentivity, which held that all organic matter has memory. "Every step we've taken in our evolution is a milestone inscribed with organic memories," explains Bodkin. It seems these memories are at present expressing themselves in the form of troubling dreams that are driving the characters to surrender themselves to the newly resurgent ancient ecosystem. The world is essentially traveling dorsum in fourth dimension, and humans are solitary amid nature'due south creatures in trying to resist this backward tide. Despite the shakiness of the science backside all this, there'southward no denying the sheer hypnotic surreality with which it's rendered. Ballard ingeniously succeeds in getting u.s.a. within the characters' heads every bit they succumb to the call of their organic memories.

The Drowned World isn't a plot-driven tale; rather, it's a contemplative, richly atmospheric study of a place and a set of characters. The lack of narrative drive is due to the metabolic slowdown the characters seem to undergo as they psychologically metamorphose, forth with the increasingly brutal heat that oppresses them whenever they get exterior. Amidst this rut and the ever-worsening atmospheric condition, they languidly pass the weeks. Kerans, in his mold-ridden penthouse suite in what was in one case the Ritz, ponders the nature of fourth dimension and the shifting landscape of his psyche. Beatrice drinks alone in her apartment along the shore of a neighboring lagoon. Bodkin wistfully wanders around the flooded husks of former haunts ("Not that they contained anything other than his memories," laments the narrator). These routines are interrupted at irregular intervals by increasingly jarring recurrences of the dreams, or the journeys "through archaeopsychic time," equally Kerans comes to think of them.

Well-nigh halfway into the book, we're introduced to an antihero named Strangman. He's the leader of a pirate crew that comes to the London lagoons looking for loot. With his white suit and entourage of tamed alligators, he's nothing if non a showman. He and his gang are reminiscent of Mr. Kurtz and his followers in Joseph Conrad'south Heart of Darkness, except that they're subsequently salvage rather than ivory. Like Kurtz, Strangman undergoes a descent into savagery and insanity, becoming ever more than threatening as he insinuates himself into the lives of our protagonists.

Though they eventually become curvation foes, there'south some fascinating philosophical give-and-take early between Strangman and Kerans. Their conversations give us a revealing glimpse into the ii men'southward clashing perspectives on the past: the biologist's affinity to deep fourth dimension versus the treasure hunter's love for the transitory details that get lost over such vast temporal swaths.

There is no sense of hope for humanity at the end of this novel. Most of the planet's human habitat has vanished, and it's surely only a matter of time before even the poles go too hot. But then cracking is the mesmeric power of this book'southward spell that information technology manages to make the specter of human extinction seem like a paradisiacal retirement (again invoking Eden). Even so, allow's promise that such a scenario is however far off in our existent-world future.