Customer Reviews
Thought provoking - By: John Hopper, 01 Jul 2008 
I much preferred this to The Drought - the settings turn out to be more familiar & the characters seemed somewhat easier to relate to (though likeable would be going too far). The central idea of regression to thought patterns displayed millions of years ago by earlier life forms is a fascinating & quite sobering one.
Haunting novel, not entirely successful as either science fiction or serious literature - By: Greshon, 21 Mar 2008 
The setting of this novel - a flooded, tropical London of the future - made me seek it out. However, despite being prepared to read a book that was not a fast-paced adventure (this is Ballard, after all), I was disappointed by the muffled stuffiness of the prose. I have heard it described as 'controlled' but this is really is too complimentary. I was similarly disappointed on reading Philip K Dick's The Manin the High Castle (strangely, publishedin the same year, 1962). In that novel too the author takes a great 'sci-fi' concept but his treatment of it is likewise oddly dull & blunted.
The opening follows the conventions of hard sci-fi, explaining scientifically how the world got to bein this state. However, right from this plain facts opening the novel is muddled. The explanation lacks clarity & doesn't make sense. We are told that the melting of the polar ice caps would only raise global sea levels by a few feet, yet London is 20-30 feet underwater. There is some explanation of this involving 'silt', but this is not clear. Even when describing events, Ballard fails to clearly demarcate the geographical spacein which his characters live. Mention of a 'shoreline' just doesn't make sense.
The central character, Kerans, & his two friends decide not to resist change & livein the relatively cooler poles with the rest of the survivors of humanity, & choose instead to try & adapt to the new conditions, as the planet's other life forms have. However, if London is only 20 feet underwater, there must be lots of places that are above the sea level, evenin southern Britain. Why don't Kerans & co. settlein some of these places instead of a filthy water world where they have to get around by boat & are constantly threatened by mutating marine creatures?
As well as these problems, the novel also suffers from some confused writing, for example using "apart from" instead of "including"in one place. This completely muddles the meaning of the prose & is, I think, a mistake. I had trouble working out clearly what was going onin plenty more passages, & I suspect that similar occurrences are answerable for it. Other details are ludicrous. Strangman & his pet crocodiles & alligators, for a start. I can't believe Ballard put themin here.
However, the novel does have its strengths. The hallucinatory descriptions of the physical reality, mirroring the internal consciousness of the characters, is done very evocatively and, I think, memorably. The study of the effects on the human consciousness the return of a pre-historic phasein the planet's climate would have is novel. Time has been effectively turned back & this awakens all sorts of long-dormant genetic memoriesin the characters. This is all very interesting, but not developed as fully as it could be.
The ending, however, is much better than the beginning, & it does consolidate a lot of what's gone before. We are left with the haunting spectre of a new epoch literally superimposing itself on our own age, as floodwaters & huge banks of silt overlay city streets & the former outlines of the continents. Humanity, no longer suitable to the new conditions, is dying out, being replaced once more by reptiles & amphibeans. The book shows how precarious all that we take for granted is. That it can be swept away as easily as the swatting of a fly.
Drowned world - the illustrated novel. - By: Neil Talbott, 13 Mar 2008 
In a series of 36 stunningly beautiful watercolours - some double spreads - Dick French (born 1946) manages to perfectly evoke the claustrophobic hothouse atmosphere of Ballard's novel.
The flyleaf to this larger than A4 sized edition reads:
'The sun has gone mad & stripped the earth of its ionosphere. For decades blasting radiation has poured upon earth, melting the polar caps & turning permafrost into streams, rivers, oceans. Huge deltas have been built, lakes formed, seas have risen. The continents have been entirely altered. Jungles have crept & then rushed from the equator to Greenland. Siberia is a tropical nightmare. Mosquitoes the size of dragonflies carry horrendous new malarias. Mammals are on their way out & iguanas have grown as large as horses. Ferns & clubmosses smother those parts of ancient cities - New York, Berlin, Moscow, Peking- that are not drowned & offering steaming shelter to gigantic alligators & other saurians. As for humanity, well, there are only 5 million men & women left, livingin the sub-tropical confinement of the Arctic & Antarctic circles.
It is as if history were rolled backward, as if the Triassic Age were here again. Man's science is useless against the solar furnace. And man's mind? Is that also slipping backward, far backward, to before the apes, to before the mammals, to the Triassic terror itself.
This novel- writtenin lucid, convincing, matter-of-fact prose - is both fierce & unsensational. It has a compelling authority which grips the reader at once & keeps himin its power long after the book is read. This is an unforgettable work.'
I'm not quite sure what Ballard is doing, but it's a lot of fun trying to figure it out - By: Mr. P. Rigby, 29 Jan 2008 Plenty of superlatives have been thrown around to describe Ballard. In order to avoid that, my opening gambit will be a quote by Christopher Priest. "I'm not quite sure what Ballard is doing, but it's a lot of fun trying to figure it out."
If you want a summary of the plot read the other reviews, my intention here is just to note the pleasure & excitement of reading this book. In the novel, Ballard's obvious intention is to explore what we can do with the genre normally referred to as sci-fi. In a traditionally British way he decides not to make everything as big as possible but instead reduces the elements of the catastrophe to the psychology at play.
As you would expect from any Ballard book there's a twisted longing to become the centre of the catastrophe & an uncomfortable thrillin enjoying the world going to hell.
The Chapter 'A NEW PSCHOLOGY' is almost a manifestoin itself with regards to how Ballard would go on to create a whole new take on what H.G. Wells called scientific romance. The novel covers biological manipulation, time travel, ecological disaster & allin ways so original that it makes the mind whirl. It's dream likein so many ways, but most interestinglyin that 'it seemed logicalin the dream but now...' feeling so common when trying to relate your inner mental journeys to someone else.
This is the first book by Ballard that I have read an actually got the whole 'Ballard is a genius' thing. The prose is controlled & effective & after I had finished i went back to re-read some chapters again, just for the hell of it.
Strongly recommended.
Planet Sauna - By: T. Bobley, 20 Apr 2007 The world is heating up as a result of solar instability. Ice caps have melted & oceans have risen, flooding low-lying areas. Once temperate zones remaining above sea level have become areas of lush, tropical jungle. Surviving populations have had to migrate to the cooler, polar regions. A party of soldier & scientist representatives of these exiled people, have travelled down from the north to study the new flora & fauna that is mutating & evolving rapidly back towards ancient Triassic forms. Some members of the party start to have disturbing dreams of belonging to a hotter, wetter climate & feel drawnin the direction of the equator by some sort of ancestral memory of livingin a primeval swamp. The bloated sun & steaming jungle start to feel like a fond memory of the womb to those who are most susceptible & the hypnotic pull of it dominates even their waking hours.
Some reviewers have complained that this is not proper science fiction, not hard science fiction, not fast-paced, not plot-driven. Ballard places itin an area on the fringe of science fiction that he calls `speculative fantasy' - an area where `dream & reality become fused together'. When I started the book I hoped it might be something like John Wyndham's `The Kraken Wakes', but it's differentin almost every way, apart from the flooding. There's no enemy to defeatin order to re-establish normality. There are no solutions to the problem, other than avoidancein the shrinking cool zone. A few individuals are making mental adjustments to the catastrophic climate change that seem superficially like a sort of Lamarckian evolutionary adaptation, but the chances of their survival,in isolation,in the crocodile populated swamp areas look doubtful. The reader has to adopt a fantastic amount of suspension of disbelief to swallow the notion of race memory & reverse evolution. Even so, I sank into the story & festered happily awayin its swamps & lagoons right from the start & was reluctant to slurp out of it at the end. Ballard's descriptions are, to use one of his own descriptions, like a fata Morgana: shimmering & evocative.
