The Drowned World

The Drowned World (1962), by J. G. Ballard, is a British science fiction novel that depicts a post-apocalyptic future in which global warming, caused by increased solar radiation, has rendered uninhabitable much of the surface of planet Earth. The story follows a team of scientists researching environmental developments in the flooded city of London. The novel is an expansion of the novella "The Drowned World", which was first published in Science Fiction Adventures magazine, in the January 1962 issue, Vol. 4, No. 24.

In 2010, Time magazine named The Drowned World one of the ten best novels about a post-apocalyptic world on Earth. In science fiction literature, The Drowned World is considered one of the founding novels of the climate fiction sub-genre.

About seventy years before the action of the novel, violent and prolonged solar storms enlarge the Van Allen radiation belt, which deteriorated the ionosphere of the Earth. The solar radiation bombarding the planet increased surface temperatures, raised the levels of the seas, and so established a tropical climate throughout most of the planet; with most of Earth no longer habitable by humans, the survivors migrate to the North and South Pole, which the planetary tropical climate has rendered fit for human habitation.

Under the command of Colonel Riggs, Dr Robert Kerans is part of a scientific expedition sent to catalogue the flora and fauna of the lagoon that covers the city of London. In the course of their scientific work, the members of the expedition begin to experience strange dreams. Amidst talk of the army and the scientists moving north, Lieutenant Hardman, the other officer in the expedition, flees the London lagoon and heads south; a search team sent to fetch him failed.

As the other inhabitants of the lagoon finally flee the overheating sunlight and head north, Kerans and two other scientists, the reclusive Dr Beatrice Dahl and Dr Alan Bodkin, decide to remain. A group of pirates led by a man named Strangman arrives to loot treasures from the deep waters of the London lagoon. After draining the lagoon, Strangman and his pirates expose part of the city of London, which disgusts Kerans and Bodkin; the latter attempts and fails to explode the flood defences and re-flood the area. Afterwards, with Kerans and Dahl resigned to their fate, Strangman vengefully pursues and kills Bodkin.

Meanwhile, Strangman and his pirates become suspicious of Kerans, and they imprison him and Dahl. The pirates torture Kerans, which he survives; although weakened by the torture, Kerans attempts and fails to free Dahl from captivity. Kerans and Dahl are confronted by Strangman and his pirates, but Colonel Riggs and the army return to rescue them. Rather than punish Strangman, the military authorities co-operate with him, which angers and frustrates Dr Kerans, who then successfully re-floods the lagoon.

Weakened by a wound, Kerans flees the lagoon and heads southwards aimlessly, and encounters a frail Lieutenant Hardman, who has become blind. After aiding Hardman, Dr. Kerans continues travelling south, like "a second Adam searching for the forgotten paradises of the reborn sun".

In The Drowned World (1962) J.G. Ballard presents characters who take advantage of societal and civilisational collapse as opportunities to pursue new modes of perception, unconscious urges, and systems of meaning. In the Humanities Review, the writer Travis Eldborough said that literary works of Ballard in general, and The Drowned World in particular, allow the readers to "ask whether our sense of Self – and of the self as independent, sovereign, irrevocable – is, itself, a [social] construction, and a temporary one."