drowning dreams
Before climate change there was radiation and fears of the nuclear, but in this 1962 novel the seas have risen just the same and the remaining cities of the old world, flooded, supra heated, abandoned, reverting back to the prehistoric are all that remains.
As much a novel of the psychological reversion as it is to do with any plot or great events, this is a strange but compelling kind of science-fiction. It is one of Ballard's earliest work and his language is ornate and his love of the extravagant simile here in abundance.
Sweet feverish dream
I loved this book only recently read even if its writing is up to '60s.
The world is covered by water, cities are blue lagoons surrounded by jungles and reptiles and iguanas. Men are dying: everywhere the temperature rises and the sun becomes bigger and bigger in the eyes of the survivors...
Ballard depicts the new environment with scientific precision, but it is the psychological analysis of the characters that strucks deeply the reader: humankind is regressing to the triassic era and the humans ancestral fears and obsessions take hold of their mind. Rationality progressively disappear and only the sun remains, beating as a colossal red heart in the mind of Kerans.
Wow, the water of the lagoons is a warm primordial soup and Kerans looks forward to plunge into it and to never resurface again...
Oneiric and strangely realistic.
(2 reviews)
