On a much larger scale The Drowned World offers a character study of a villain and a hero, both of whom are morally ambiguous, as they navigate a truly alien environment with totally different sets of rules for survival.
There is a hero, a villain, a love interest who is desired by both the villain and the hero, a climax to the tension between the battle of the hero and the goals of the villain, tied off nicely with a sacrificial confidant and companion to the hero. On a small scale Ballard includes the traditional elements of science fiction and action-adventure. Surrounding them are the rest of the research team sent to monitor the changing landscape, and Strangman’s crew of tribalistic-minded followers. Bodkin, the emotionally distant heiress Beatrice Dahl and the villainous looter, Strangman. Central to the book are the biologists Dr. In one such lagoon, floating over the decaying architecture of London, sits the stage and players of the story. Much of Europe has been reduced to lagoons nestled between vast expanses of jungle and silt dunes. The evolution of disease has kept pace with the changing environment malaria becomes the most common affliction hitting the human population. Large bat-sized mosquitoes bash themselves relentlessly against the wire meshes and cages encircling the last human bastions in London, while dog-sized bats feast upon the oversized insects. Enormous iguanas, crocodiles and snakes are now a common site in Berlin and London, whose streets and buildings are now submerged by upwards of 50 feet of water. Bombarded by solar radiation and spurred on by the intolerable heat, flora and fauna have begun to mutate to prehistoric shapes and sizes. The Earth’s equator, by comparison, is close to 200 degrees on any given day. The remaining 5 million humans have fled to the Antarctic circle where the temperature is a tolerable 85 degrees. Due to a sun which has become unstable, the Earth is rapidly heating. The location of the story takes place in an entirely fictional future vision of Earth. Ballard’s The Drowned World is a post-apocalyptic ballad performed by a select cast, and encased in a small slice of Ballard’s much larger story of the evolution of Earth. I found this to be true, although the time it took me to process the book was far longer than than I had expected. The bookseller said that it would take me no time at all to read. That all changed on June 30th, however, when I went to the town bookstore and purchased The Drowned World. He was well published, I knew, but ultimately a background figure to my science fiction library.
Prior to reading The Drowned World I was only aware of J. At last, the levity that I so desperately needed has been provided.
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