The Burning World
By J. G. Ballard
Original edition: Berkley Medallion, Jan. 1964, 160 pp.
Reissued in various print and ebook editions.
J. G. Ballard, a key figure in late 20th-century science fiction (aka sf) began his career in the early 1960s with a trio of novels exploring various climate change scenarios. The first of these, The Wind from Nowhere (1961), is a conventional disaster novel about a cataclysmic global windstorm. The second, The Drowned World (1962), subverts this formula by presenting a hero who accepts and even comes to embrace the disaster, in this case an Earth reshaped by rising seas and a return to a primordial hothouse climate. The Burning World, which turned 60 earlier this year, continues this subversion with characters who strangely relish the desolation of a parched, rainless Earth.
This theme of reveling in devastation is vividly captured early on. Consider how our protagonist, Dr. Charles Ransom, marvels at the gradual drying up of the large lake in the fictional town of Hamilton: “[T]he slow transformation of the lake exhilarated Ransom. As the wide sheets of water contracted, first into shallow lagoons and then into a maze of creeks, the wet dunes of the lakebed seemed to emerge from another dimension.” A little while later, Quilter, the town miscreant, grins perversely at the macabre sight of countless dead birds, victims of the vanishing of the fish that had once sustained them.
At the story’s outset, the planet has been without rain for months. Half a century of unchecked human pollution has caused a miniscule but impermeable film to coalesce on the ocean’s surface, one that is preventing rain from forming. Geoengineering efforts like cloud seeding have failed to produce either rain or clouds. The resulting water crisis has toppled civilization: Communities of every size, from major cities to small towns, have splintered into isolated factions, each vying desperately for dwindling water resources. Once-fertile lands have become barren wastelands, abandoned infrastructure lies in ruin, and fires rage uncontrollably across the land.
The novel’s cast is varied and sharply drawn. Ransom is a man adrift, estranged from his wife and preparing to leave his failing medical practice and dwindling community to seek solace by the sea. Quilter is a developmentally disabled young man with a devious streak. There’s also Richard Lomax, a former architect known for his white silk suit, unctuous charm and continual efforts, alongside Quilter, to exploit resource shortages for personal gain. Other characters include a resolute reverend whose congregation has mostly left him, a charter boat operator who continues his trips down the river out of habit despite having no passengers, and a woman who cares for the animals at the nearby zoo, struggling to tend to them in a world where even humans can barely manage to survive.
The novel’s plot functions as a tour through a post-apocalyptic landscape, following Ransom and several others as they move from Hamilton to a burning nearby city to coastal shantytowns to a settlement ruled by despots. The group travels in an abandoned car, shelters in shacks made from discarded scrap, and subsists on dried seaweed and smoked herring. At the coast, Random builds a freshwater still and a makeshift aquaponic pool filled with kelp and sea anemones. Despite having separated early on in the novel, Ransom and his wife end up living together again out of necessity. Eventually, tired of their animal-like existence, they reluctantly seek a new life as serfs in a newly formed feudal community.
The novel skillfully explores the tension between environmental preservation and human progress without being preachy. Only on a couple of occasions does it explicitly spell out its ecological themes. One of these is a scene in which Ransom casually mentions “the balance of nature,” prompting Lomax to retort that without the willingness of people like himself to bend nature to humanity’s will, “we’d all be living in mud huts.” There’s also a moment when Ransom reflects that the film on the ocean’s surface seems to be nature’s revenge against humanity: “This act of retribution by the sea had always impressed Ransom by its simple justice.” However, such direct messaging is rare; for the most part, the environmental themes unfold subtly through descriptive imagery and narrative developments.
As so often in Ballard’s works, this novel combines a physical journey with a deeper, metaphysical one, with the characters’ inner lives mirroring the changes in the outer world. Just as the water is vanishing, so too, are the “memories and stale sentiments” our travelers once held dear. Much like the legendary Philip K. Dick, Ballard was a pioneer in pushing sf into the realm of the inner space of the human psyche.
For all its bleakness, The Burning World offers a more hopeful outlook on humanity’s future than does The Drowned World. While the latter leaves no room for hope that human extinction can be averted, the former hints at the possibility of recovery and renewal for humanity.
Still, I prefer Drowned. I find it to be imbued with a magnificent sense of sf wonder—arising from the prospect of Earth returning to a mysterious pre-dinosaur era where pelycosaurs roam, inland seas abound and ferns soar 300 feet high—completely absent from this book, where nature simply withers away, leaving dry, barren earth. In short, I prefer the surreal grandiosity of Drowned to the sparse groundedness of Burning—and the notion of a newly prehistoric Earth free from humans to that of a biologically impoverished one where humans remain supreme. But that’s just me.
