The Drowned World

The Drowned World is a science fiction novel by the English writer J. G. Ballard, published in book form in 1962 after appearing in a shortened version in a magazine earlier that year.

The novel is set in a future in which solar radiation has melted the polar ice caps and transformed London into a flooded tropical lagoon. At the centre of it is the biologist Robert Kerans, who becomes increasingly drawn towards the altered environment rather than towards restoring the old social order.

Critics have grouped The Drowned World with Ballard's early science fiction as part of an ambiguous sequence of apocalypses that also includes The Drought and The Crystal World, and it belongs to the period in which he was developing the ideas he described as inner space.

The book is usually read as a disaster narrative that rejects the conventional plot of recovery and emphasises psychic transformation, ecological adaptation and a regression into deep evolutionary time, which is why later criticism and genre reference works treat it as an important early work of climate fiction.