The Drowned World

In contrast to much post-apocalyptic fiction, J.G. Ballard’s 1962 science fiction novel The Drowned World features a central character who, rather than being disturbed by the end of the old world, is enraptured by the chaotic reality that has come to replace it. Template:Spoiler The Drowned World opens within the conventions of a hard SF novel, as the catastrophe responsible for the apocalypse is explained scientifically – solar radiation has caused the polar ice-caps to melt and worldwide temperature to soar, leaving the cities of northern Europe and America submerged in beautiful and haunting tropical lagoons. Yet Ballard’s novel is thematically more complex than is immediately apparent. The key to understanding the meaning of The Drowned World lies in realising that Ballard uses the post-apocalyptic world of the story to mirror the collective unconscious desires of the main characters. A theme throughout Ballard’s writing is the idea that human beings construct their surroundings to reflect their unconscious drives. In The Drowned World, however, a natural catastrophe causes the real world to transform itself into a dream landscape, causing the central characters to regress mentally.

"Just as psychoanalysis reconstructs the original traumatic situation in order to release the repressed material, so we are now being plunged back into the archaeopsychic past, uncovering the ancient taboos and drives that have been dormant for epochs…Each one of us is as old as the entire biological kingdom, and our bloodstreams are tributaries of the great sea of its total memory."

- The Drowned World, J.G Ballard, Millennium 1999, p41.

The book's title is probably an allusion to The Lost World by Arthur Conan Doyle. In 1998, pop singer Madonna recorded a song of the same title, although the lyrics appear to have only a tenuous relation to Ballard's novel.