The Drowned World

"Yes. This was recommended to me by Amy Liptrot . I’d never read any Ballard before that. The Drowned World is set in a post-apocalyptic future, in which the ice caps have melted and the planet is growing ever hotter. The world’s surviving population has fled north to what was the Arctic. London is flooded; its buildings rise from steamy lagoons where once were Piccadilly Circus and Pall Mall and Trafalgar Square. Dr Kerans is a research scientist working for the military, and is making ecological study of this strange new habitat. He lives in some style in the penthouse of the abandoned Ritz Hotel, helping himself to the cocktail cabinet and wearing the luxury suits left by its last occupant before the evacuation, a Milanese financier. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . All the time it’s getting hotter, and the wildlife is getting wilder and more primitive – de-evolving, in Ballard’s way of thinking. And so is Kerans. You can think of it as a sort of cli-fi Heart of Darkness, with that unhinged quality, and the intense heat, and this ominous ramping up of tension. It also has a number of things in common with Annihilation , in as much as the main character Kerans is a biologist studying this uncanny world, and growing increasingly psychologically affected by it. As a vision of the future, it’s rather terrifying. But it’s rather beautiful too: this steamy, swampy London where alligators lurk in cloudy waters, and giant lizards roar at the sun. There’s an incredible scene in which a sort of pirate, Strangman, drains Leicester Square using pumps and dams, and the few remaining residents walk into the silted-up, slimy city streets, and find it horrifying. While working on Islands of Abandonment , I found I kept circling back around to sci-fi . Although I’m writing nonfiction, there was something in the atmosphere of Annihilation and The Drowned City that I wanted to recreate; I wanted my book to feel the way I did reading those books. Because abandoned places often are uncanny in the manner of weird fiction, they can be ominous and eerie and unsettling. And yet they are thrilling too – and that what draws me back, the way I keep being drawn back to these books. Cal Flyn’s Islands of Abandonment: Life in the Post-Human Landscape is out now. January 26, 2021. Updated: July 17, 2021 Five Books aims to keep its book recommendations and interviews up to date. If you are the interviewee and would like to update your choice of books (or even just what you say about them) please email us at [email protected]"

"Well, I think it’s a good example of using the natural world in fiction, and dystopian fiction, and I like the way that it uses the natural world, animals, and they are threatening and dangerous and strange rather than a source of solace or escape. They are the opposite. It was ahead of its time, it could almost be seen as a novel about climate change: ‘de-evolution’ is the word used. Ballard is a master of the surreal but revealing detail, often using plants and animals. I remember one section in High Rise, a bit that stuck with me, was a seagull picking a diamante from a pair of sunglasses abandoned at the top of a building. And in The Drowned World, he has what was London, now flooded, and all these hotels now silted up where only the top floors are still accessible. And when it’s drained there are all these sea creatures—giant anemones and starfish and kelp—in Leicester Square, and dinghies stranded on traffic islands. This idea of the familiar being made strange and awful is part of what creates his distinctive, and highly influential, atmosphere. Kerans, the main character, the biologist—when the other people are retreating further towards the poles where it’s cooler, he’s going deeper in towards the equator…into the heart of darkness…A lot of Ballard’s books are about dark psychological stuff. But I can relate to being attracted to some of the more brutal elements of nature. I chose to go and live on a small Orkney island during winters rather than summers, when most people would choose the opposite. The big winds and the wild seas that sometimes cause damage are appealing to me, in their power and inhospitability. I think there are two parts of me. The island lass and the city dweller. I think I tend towards one extreme or the other, either inner city or outer isle for me—although, currently, I’m living in small-town Yorkshire which is a completely different environment. But I think these kinds of places, that are quite tough, quite sensory, appeal to me."