In the mid-21st century an ecological disaster has struck the world. Temperatures have risen, the polar ice caps have melted and much of the Earth has been flooded. Only around the poles is civilization now possible. London has sunk beneath the waters and is at the centre of a vast swamp where life is much as it was in the Triassic Age. An expedition heads southwards from the Arctic to study the flora and fauna of this new world. One of the expedition members is a scientist named Robert Kerans. Amid the lush swamplands and hidden monuments of a drowned London, Kerans begins to experience strange dreams. Just as the Earth has regressed to a past state, so too Kerans seems to be making a psychic descent into prehistory. Left in the primal lagoons covering the city when the expedition heads back north, Kerans and two colleagues begin to respond to the deep, atavistic urges that are calling to them from the surreal landscape but they are interrupted by the arrival of Strangman, a dandified pirate with a cohort of violent henchmen intent on plundering the drowned world.

Ballard's fascination with the exploration of inner space and with plumbing the psychic depths, so unusual and liberating in the SF of the early 1960s, is most brilliantly revealed in The Drowned World. His prescience in describing a world transformed by environmental catastrophe may seem all the greater as the years pass but the strength of the novel lies not so much in this as in the voluptuous power with which he conjures up his vision of a primeval landscape and its effects on those who enter it. The Drowned World is a short novel but it is one that provides a startling and memorable perspective on the conscious and subconscious mind.

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