JG Ballards Cli-Fi Novel is the best indoors
At the end of The 1950s renewed the British science fiction writer JG Ballard Writing by depicting “internal space”. This had a double meaning: his prose became hallucinating and inside. At the same time, he pointed his literary aids on the earth, considered it a foreign planet. The result was some of the best SF novels of the 20th century, yes, some of the best novels in the 20th century in general.
“The Drowned World” from 1962 is usually considered the first novel to display climate change. In the book, solar storms destroyed the upper atmosphere of the earth, melted the polaren and moved a waste of humanity to the poles. A UN biologist travels in a flood of England to map the Triasian Flora and new diseases as a result of melting permafrost. Does it sound creepy? Ballard predicts exactly what IPCC reports say that it will happen. Read Jonathan Jeppsons “Against the heart of the collapse” and realize that our civilization is almost against a Ballard future.
The novel has one The somewhat crawling tension, which you forgive for the frightening realistic disaster management. But what attracts my attention is not so much the prophetic – how Ballard describes the sun. Rarely has the sun felt so bad. The “drums” against the skin, “” carries “sweat from the body and” drilling “by ferns. An indifferent burning sphere over a rotting jungle.
In a masterful prose, Ballard succeeds in pulling the sun off the symbols in which it is heavily screwed. Try “to say gloomy as a sun”. Ballard makes it sound good. “The Drowned World” means the start of the Cli-Fi tradition and it is difficult to imagine Marit Sahlströms Surrealistic disaster zone in “Fire Summer” and Maja Lundes Description of climate refugees in “blue” without Ballard’s descriptions of how the heat distorts the landscape. There will be more novels.
In the Alondon countries Summer short and we are used to throwing a blanket on the lawn when the sun is shining. This will change in the future. Instead, we will be able to do like in the Mediterranean Sea where you pull the blinds down when it is the hottest. In such a future, Ballard can be strangely converted into a constructive writer (he would have hated). Perhaps it is already happening. “Coolcation” is supposed to be an increasingly common expression – as derived from “The Drowned World”.
I can’t imagine a better book to read in the hammock. Or sorry. When the high summer now comes in with lively heat, brownish lawns and firefighters who go to the Mediterranean Sea area enjoy: enjoy the AC, enjoy the “Ivory-Svalka” (another Ballard image) and read “The Drowned World” indoor.
Internship Art Pod: The Crit Circle Special with Willem Daf
With Willem Dafoe in Venice
15:08
