The Drowned World. Martin Amis

      

      The Drowned World

      J. G. Ballard

       Copyright

      Fourth Estate

      An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

      1 London Bridge Street

      London SE1 9GF

      www.harpercollins.co.uk

      This edition published by Fourth Estate in 2014

      First published in 1962

      Copyright © J. G. Ballard 1962

      J. G. Ballard asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

      ‘The Drowned World’ © Martin Amis 2011

      ‘Reality Is a Stage Set’ © Travis Elborough 2006

      ‘Time, Memory and Inner Space’ © J. G. Ballard 1963

      A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

      This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

      All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

      HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constrainst in operation at the time of publication.

      Source ISBN: 9780007221837

      Ebook Edition © OCTOBER 2014 ISBN: 9780007290123

      Version: 2016-03-22

      Contents

       Cover Page

       Title Page

Copyright

Introduction by Martin Amis

CHAPTER ONE: On the Beach at the Ritz

CHAPTER TWO: The Coming of the Iguanas

CHAPTER THREE: Towards a New Psychology

       CHAPTER FOUR: The Causeways of the Sun

       CHAPTER FIVE: Descent into Deep Time

       CHAPTER SIX: The Drowned Ark

       CHAPTER SEVEN: Carnival of Alligators

       CHAPTER EIGHT: The Man with the White Smile

       CHAPTER NINE: The Pool of Thanatos

       CHAPTER TEN: Surprise Party

       CHAPTER ELEVEN: “The Ballad of Mistah Bones”

       CHAPTER TWELVE: The Feast of Skulls

       CHAPTER THIRTEEN: Too Soon, Too Late

       CHAPTER FOURTEEN: Grand Slam

       CHAPTER FIFTEEN: The Paradises of the Sun

       Reality is a Stage Set

       Time, Memory and Inner Space

       Keep Reading

       About the Author

       Also by the Author

       About the Publisher

       Introduction by Martin Amis

      IS PRESCIENCE A LITERARY VIRTUE? And should the work of J. G. Ballard be particularly prized (as some critics maintain) for the ‘uncanny’ accuracy of its forecasts? The answer to both these questions, I suggest, is a cheerful no.

      In The Atrocity Exhibition (1970) Ballard famously tapped Ronald Reagan for president. His Hello America (1981), on the other hand, surmised that the United States in its entirety would be evacuated by 1990. The meteorological cataclysms envisaged by his first four novels still look plausible. But the social crisis envisaged by his last four novels – violent and widespread anomie brought about by a glut of leisure and wealth – now looks vanishingly remote.

      So here’s a prophecy: fictional divination will always be hopelessly haphazard. The unfolding of world-historical events is itself haphazard (and therefore unaesthetic), and ‘the future’ is in a sense defined by its messy inscrutability. Besides, the art of fiction owes allegiance to a muse, a goddess as pure as her eight sisters, and not to some bustling Madame Sosostris (Eliot’s ‘famous clairvoyant’, with her ‘wicked pack of cards’). Nevertheless there are certain writers whose visionary power is indifferent to the corroboration of mere upshots – writers who seem to be able to feel, and use, the ‘world hum’ of the ‘near-after’. That first quote is from Don DeLillo, who is one such; the second quote is from James Graham Ballard (1930–2009), who is another.

      Ballard foresaw manmade climate change, not in The Drowned World (1962), but in The Drought (1964). In The Drought (originally entitled The Burning World), industrial waste has thickened the mantle of the oceans and destroyed the precipitation cycle, transforming the planet into a wilderness of dust and fire. In The Drowned World, ecological