James Nicoll wrote:
The Drowned World by J. G. Ballard
For biologist Dr. Robert Kerans, tropical London is Eden... and
every Eden has its serpent.
https://jamesdavisnicoll.com/review/let-there-be-sunlight
Ballard wrote four disaster novels in the 1960s. It's what British
authors did, but he did it differently.
He wasn't always concerned about the reason for each disaster.
In "The Wind from Nowhere", the first, he gives no reason, as the title implies. In the end he wasn't keen on the idea, but he had eleven days
to write the book before returning to a job he disliked. Sales of the
book enabled him to be a full-time writer. Those were the days!
In "The Drowned World" he actually has a mechanism, an increase in solar output. Even if anthorpogenic warming was a common topic at the time,
he might not have used it as it would confuse the message. It is
important for the book that the disaster not be of human making. The
human response to the changed world must not get too muddled with
assigning blame to other humans. That would have been a different book.
In "The Drought", though, the disaster is of human making, as pollution
leads via some chemical handwaving to a near total reduction in
evaporation from the oceans. This is not just a rewrite of "The
Drowned world" in reverse, bur is a much more complex book.
In "The Crystal World" no explanation is given for the crystallization
disease that affects living things (as far as I recall, anyway). Nor is
it clear that this is a world-ending disaster or even a bad thing in the
end. The book got more attention outside SF than usual:
"Beautifully rendered Ballard the poet in full ecstatic blast." ?Anthony Burgess
Apparently an editor thought that Ballard had made a typo in the ending
of "The Drowned World". Surely, he told Ballard, Kearns should go
north, not south, at the end?
William Hyde
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