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Currentlyâ€� ‌inâ€� ‌theâ€� ‌challenge:â€� ‌Isaacâ€� ‌Asimov'sâ€� ‌Robot/Empire/Foundationâ€� ´¥â€� ‌Margaretâ€� Atwoodâ€� ´¥â€� ‌JGâ€� ‌Ballardâ€� ´¥â€� Cliveâ€� ‌Barkerâ€� ´¥â€� Christopherâ€� Buckleyâ€� ´¥â€� ‌Jim Butcher's Dresden Files | ‌Lee Child's Jack Reacher | ‌Philipâ€� ‌Kâ€� ‌Dickâ€� ´¥â€� ‌Ian Fleming | Williamâ€� ‌Gibsonâ€� ´¥â€� ‌Michelâ€� Houellebecqâ€� ´¥â€� Johnâ€� ‌Irvingâ€� ´¥â€� ‌Kazuoâ€� ‌Ishiguroâ€� ´¥â€� Shirleyâ€� Jacksonâ€� | ‌Johnâ€� ‌Leâ€� ‌Carreâ€� ´¥â€� Bernardâ€� ‌Malamudâ€� ´¥â€� Cormac McCarthy | Chinaâ€� ‌Mievilleâ€� ´¥â€� Toni Morrison | ‌VSâ€� Naipaulâ€� ´¥â€� Chuckâ€� ‌Palahniukâ€� ´¥â€� ‌Timâ€� ‌Powersâ€� ´¥â€� ‌Terryâ€� ‌Pratchett'sâ€� ‌Discworldâ€� ´¥â€� Philipâ€� ‌Rothâ€� ´¥â€� Nealâ€� Stephensonâ€� ´¥â€� ‌Jimâ€� ‌Thompsonâ€� ´¥â€� Johnâ€� ‌Updikeâ€� ´¥â€� Kurtâ€� ‌Vonnegutâ€� ´¥â€� Jeanette Winterson | PGâ€� ‌Wodehouseâ€� â€�

For the last several years, I've ended up at the holidays with something like 20 to 30 book reviews still to write; so I've tended to just log them and give them scores so they'll count towards that year's reading challenge, but then move on in January to new books and not go back and review the ones from the previous December I didn't get around to. (Thankfully I'm keeping up with the reviews fairly well this year, so this hopefully won't be a problem again.) Anyway, as I sat down today to review JG Ballard's 1964 The Burning World, I realized that the book previous to this, 1962's The Drowned World, was one of those ones from last December that never got reviewed; and it's important to today's book that you know what I thought of the previous book, so it looks like today's one of those occasional days where I'll be doing two book reviews in one.

Ballard is now mostly remembered for the freaky, transgressive tales he wrote in the '70s and '80s, so it'll be surprising to most to learn that he started his career with a quadrilogy of Mid-Century-Modernist-style straightforward post-apocalyptic science-fiction stories about ecology and natural disasters, which in the early '60s originally got him lumped in with writers like Ray Bradbury and Arthur C. Clarke, before heading off in much weirder and unclassifiable directions during the Countercultural Era. Per Ballard's wishes, I skipped entirely his 1961 debut The Wind From Nowhere, which he himself hated to the extent of literally omitting it from his bibliography while alive; so I'm instead starting with his trilogy of the similarly titled The Drowning World, The Burned World and 1966's The Crystal World, in which the planet Earth alternatively dies out from global flooding, a global drought, and an alien infection that crystallizes all organic matter it touches. (The Wind From Nowhere, meanwhile, is about the Earth dying out from an unending series of hurricanes and tsunamis, effectively making his first four novels concern global disasters via air, water, fire and earth.)

And indeed, for an author I mostly currently know because of head-trippers like High-Rise and Crash, what struck me most about The Drowning World when I read it last December was how sober and grounded in science it is, with Ballard spending a huge chunk of the book simply looking at how the planet gets into the untenable position it's in, and only delving into his trademark weirdness at the very end, in which our James-Kirkesque hero falls in with a group of doomsday cultists who have decided to stay behind in a now flooded London in order to loot the city of random treasures for absurdist reasons. This left me thinking that Ballard was perhaps going to play all three of these novels with a straight face, until getting to what's widely acknowledged as his first transgressive book, the 1970 experimental story collection The Atrocity Exhibition (which was then followed with 1973's sex-and-car-accident fever dream Crash, which was such a force of nature that it singlehandedly changed his literary reputation into the one we still now have of him...but more on this in a few months).

I was wrong, however; for if you define The Drowned World as a book mostly about the science of ecological disaster, which as a bonus delves a little bit into the bizarre ways some humans would behave during such a disaster, you can define The Burning World as the exact opposite, as mostly about the freakouts that people go through in the face of a world-ending disaster, with only lip service paid (literally only a few paragraphs in the entire book) to how the disaster came about in the first place. Or, I mean, to be fair, Ballard isn't looking here at how all humans would change in the face of a global disaster, with our story taking place well into the end-times and most of rational, sane humanity having already packed up and headed to the nearest ocean; instead, Ballard is interested in looking at the small amount of people who would choose to stay behind in their now waterless towns even after such a disaster took place, pointing a laser eye at the nihilists, criminals, mentally challenged, and cultishly religious who would voluntarily choose to end their existences under such dire circumstances, effectively making this a companion piece to the recent indie movie Beasts of the Southern Wild, only with Ballard damning his freak-flag-flying stragglers instead of celebrating them like the film does.

For those looking for their expected Ballard bizarro fix, this is basically the earliest book of his career where you can find one, as the author serves up nightmarish visions of landlocked pirates, genocidal armed struggles on beachfronts, monstrously obese billionaire climate-deniers who have gone insane, developmentally disabled man-child animals who hunt humans for sport while wrapped in the bloody pelts of emaciated tigers from the local zoo, and all kinds of other chapters that will make you think, "Ah, right, there's the singular weirdo we all know and love." It makes me much more excited to delve into the final volume of the trilogy, and of course from that point on to throw myself into the New Weird books he's now much better known for.

JG Ballard books being reviewed for this series: The Drowned World (1962) | The Burning World (1964) | The Crystal World (1966) | The Atrocity Exhibition (1970) | Crash (1973) | Concrete Island (1974) | High Rise (1975) | The Unlimited Dream Company (1979) | Hello America (1981) | Empire of the Sun (1984) | The Day of Creation (1987) | Running Wild (1988) | The Kindness of Women (1991) | Rushing to Paradise (1994) | Cocaine Nights (1996) | Super-Cannes (2000) | Millennium People (2003) | Kingdom Come (2006)