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The Drowned World

by J.G. Ballard

Cover artist unknown

Publisher: Berkley

Pub year: 1966

Cover price: 50¢

 

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Book detail for The Drowned World

Cover tagline

Civilization lies buried beneath the stagnant seas of The Drowned World

Back cover text

Back to the Jungle

Kerans could not remember how it had been before the violent solar storms shattered the ionosphere and turned the earth into a vast tropical heat zone, a seething world of jungle, swamp and fetid water...

In the drowned, lost cities, there was the eerie beauty of the lagoons, the towering sixty-foot high plants, the once-proud buildings smothered in silt...

Above all, there was the colossal fireball in the sky, the giant solar disk that seemed to blind him with its rays, lulling him into a strange hypnotic state, seeming to lure him back to the dawn of the preconscious, to another age when Man was yet unborn and reptiles ruled the earth...

You will also want to read these other science fiction novels by J.G. Ballard:
The Wind from Nowhere
The Burning World

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Interior text

The Sunken Planetarium

The dark vault with its blurred walls cloaked with silt rose above him like a huge-upholstered womb in a surrealist nightmare. The black opaque water seemed to hang in solid vertical curtains, screening the dais in the centre of the auditorium

Standing on the dais, Kerans looked around at the blank rows of seats facing him, wondering what uterine rite to perform for this invisible audience that seemed to watch him. The air pressure in his helmet had increased sharply, as the men on deck lost contact with him by telephone.

Then, a sharp spur of pain drove itself into his eustachian tube. Abruptly, he realized that the intake valve of the helmet supply was no longer working...