The Drowned World by JG Ballard – archive, 27 January 1963
In the third of a new series of reviews from the Observer archive, Kingsley Amis hails the second novel by the brilliantly imaginative science-fiction author
Top 10 books of eco-fiction
Kingsley Amis
Sunday 15 February 2019
James Graham Ballard was born in Shanghai in 1930 and spent two years of his childhood in a Japanese prison camp during the second world war. The devastated city was the setting for several of his books, notably Empire of the Sun. The Drowned World, his second novel, established him as a major figure in the new wave of science fiction in the 1960s.
