J G. Ballard

Cassette Pack

The Drowned World

里森

A giant Anopheles mosquito, the size of a dragon-fly, spat through the air past his face,

This growing isolation and self-containment, exhibited by the other members of the unit and from which only the buoyant Riggs seemed immune, reminded Kerans of the slackening metabolism and biological withdrawal of all animal forms about to undergo a major metamorphosis. Sometimes he wondered what zone of transit he himself was entering, sure that his own withdrawal was symptomatic not of a dormant schizophrenia, but of a careful preparation for a radically new environment, with its own internal landscape and logic, where old categories of thought would merely be an encumbrance.

As Kerans sometimes reminded himself, the genealogical tree of mankind was systematically pruning itself, apparently moving backwards in time, and a point might ultimately be reached where a second Adam and Eve found themselves alone in a new Eden.

The automatic player in the radiogram switched from Beethoven’s Pastoral to the Seventh, Toscanini giving way to Bruno Walter.

https://www.nationalgalleries.org/art-and-artists/8943

On another wall one of Max Ernst’s self-devouring phantasmagoric jungles screamed silently to itself, like the sump of some insane unconscious.

However selective the conscious mind may be, most biological memories are unpleasant ones, echoes of danger and terror. Nothing endures for so long as fear.

how else can you explain the universal but completely groundless loathing of the spider, only one species of which has ever been known to sting? Or the equally surprising—in view of their comparative rarity—hatred of snakes and reptiles? Simply because we all carry within us a submerged memory of the time when the giant spiders were lethal, and when the reptiles were the planet’s dominant life form.

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 slower a clock, the nearer it approximated to the infinitely gradual and majestic progression of cosmic time—in fact, by reversing a clock’s direction and running it backwards one could devise a timepiece that in a sense was moving even more slowly than the universe, and consequently part of an even greater spatiotemporal system.

Acknowledging his escape, the intensity of the sunlight diminished fractionally.

His unconscious was rapidly becoming a well-stocked pantheon of tutelary phobias and obsessions, homing on to his already over-burdened psyche like lost telepaths. Sooner or later the archetypes themselves would become restive and start fighting each other, anima against persona, ego against id…

for what had a more gloomy prognosis than life?—every morning one should say to one’s friends: ‘I grieve for your irrevocable death’, as to anyone suffering from an incurable disease, and was the universal omission of this minimal gesture of sympathy the model for their reluctance to discuss the dreams?

Phantoms slid imperceptibly from nightmare to reality and back again, the terrestrial and psychic landscapes were now indistinguishable, as they had been at Hiroshima and Auschwitz, Golgotha and Gomorrah.

I also felt very strongly at the time I wrote The Drowned World that all of us carry, coded into our nervous systems, these archaic memories of the world that our ancestors grew up in thousands of years ago.

the comfortable day-to-day life, school, the home where one lives, the familiar street and all the rest of it, the trips to the swimming pool and the cinema – were just a stage set. They could be dismantled overnight, which they literally were when the Japanese occupied Shanghai and turned our lives upside down.

I think young writers today are tempted into writing novels far too early. I think part of the reason I did take such a long time to write my first novel was that, of course, there was this huge market for short stories, which doesn’t exist today.

On reflection it seems to me that the image of an immense half-submerged city overgrown by tropical vegetation, which forms the centrepiece of The Drowned World, is in some way a fusion of my childhood memories of Shanghai and those of my last ten years in London.

Abigail Mills

Water had long ceased to flow through the taps, but Kerans maintained a reservoir in the plunge bath, carefully purified in a home-made still on the roof and piped in through the window

Although he was only forty, Kerans' beard had been turned white by the radio-fluorine in the water

8 In the latter task he often needed Kerans' help, for most of the people still living on in the sinking cities were either psycho- paths or suffering from malnutrition and radiation sickness.

J. G. Ballard

In the 21st century, fluctuations in solar radiation have caused the ide-caps to melt and the seas to rise. Global temperatures have climbed, and civilization has retreated to the Arctic and Antarctic circles. London is a city now inundated by a primeval swamp, to which an expedition travels to record the flora and fauna of this new Triassic Age.This early novel by the author of CRASH and EMPIRE OF THE SUN is at once a fast paced narrative, a stunning evocation of a flooded, tropical London of the near future and a speculative foray into the workings of the unconscious mind.

Sarah Sammis

Link+ due 7/10/12

Thematically it's somewhere between On The Beach and Quatermas and the Pit. The world destruction, this time, is global warming and thus global flooding. 

http://www.pussreboots.pair.com/blog/...

I feel like there’s a story in here somewhere about humans needing nature more than nature needs humans. I could be wrong though and it’s really just about an iguana-overrun newly-tropical London sinking into the sea.

The Crystal World

Angus Bretherick

This fast-paced narrative by the author of 'Crash' and 'Empire of the Sun' is a stunning evocation of a flooded, tropical London of the near future and a foray into the workings of the unconscious mind.

The drowned world

Sabine Delorme

JG Ballards “The Drowned World” stand schon eine Weile auf meiner Leseliste, hatte es aber bislang nicht. Und wo finde ich dieses – ok etwas mitgenommene Exemplar? – in LAOS (!) in einem klitzekleinen Laden in dem man das weltbeste “Morning Glory” essen konnte. Das lag da schon eine Weile und ich durfte es gerne mitnehmen.

Wo läßt sich “The Drowned World” besser lesen, als im schwül-warmen Südostasien? Die Geschichte spielt in London, die Polarkappen sind geschmolzen, die Welt fast komplett abgesoffen und die Zivilisation so gut wie hin. Brennendes Sonnenlicht mit unglaublichen Temperaturen machen es nahezu unmöglich zu überleben. Unglaublich das diese Geschichte bereits 1962 geschrieben wurde, als noch kein Mensch von Klimawandel gesprochen hat.

Den Rest der Rezension findet ihr hier: http://bingereader.org/2014/09/12/the...

yasi

When London is lost beneath the rising tides, unconscious desires rush to the surface in this apocalyptic tale from the author of ‘Crash’ and ‘Cocaine Nights’.

Elena Menendez

John Manoogian III

Ricky Burgess

From J. G. Ballard, author of ‘Crash’ and ‘Cocaine Nights’ comes his extraordinary vision of an African forest that turns all in its path to crystal.

The Drowned World Cassette Pack

Reviews

Highlights