The Drowned World

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The Drowned World is a 1962 science fiction novel by J. G. Ballard. It first appeared in shortened form in the January 1962 issue of the UK edition of Science Fiction Adventures and was published in book form later that year by Victor Gollancz Ltd in London; an American edition followed from Berkley Medallion. Critics have grouped The Drowned World with Ballard's early science-fiction novels as part of an "ambiguous apocalypse" sequence that also includes The Drought and The Crystal World, from the period in which he was developing the ideas he described as "inner space". Set in a future in which solar radiation has melted the polar ice caps and transformed London into a flooded tropical lagoon, the novel follows biologist Robert Kerans as he becomes increasingly drawn toward the altered environment rather than toward restoring the old social order. Critics have often read The Drowned World as a disaster narrative that rejects conventional plots of recovery and instead emphasizes psychic transformation, ecological adaptation, and regression into deep evolutionary time; later criticism and genre reference works have also treated it as an important early work of climate fiction. Contemporary reviewers including Kingsley Amis and Michael Moorcock praised its imaginative power and literary ambition, though some notices were more divided, and retrospective critics have tended to place it among Ballard's key early novels and among the central works of his catastrophe fiction.