{"version":"1.0","type":"rich","provider_name":"Acast","provider_url":"https://acast.com","height":250,"width":700,"html":"","title":"The Drowned World: Ballard's Heat Death of Civilization","thumbnail_width":200,"thumbnail_height":200,"thumbnail_url":"https://open-images.acast.com/shows/6a28001ca917ce4c7065c483/b7e35302-463b-44c3-b254-33d267a77621.jpg?height=200","description":"J.G. Ballard's The Drowned World (1962) is the founding text of climate fiction. Solar radiation has melted the ice caps; London is a lagoon of steaming water and tropical vegetation; the few remaining humans are retreating toward the poles. But Ballard's protagonist, Dr. Kerans, does not want to escape — he is drawn deeper into the heat and the primordial swamp, experiencing a kind of devolutionary bliss. Ballard was a British writer who spent part of his childhood interned in a Japanese civilian camp in Shanghai, and his fiction is saturated with the experience of civilization's collapse as both horror and liberation. The Drowned World is a deliberately anti-survivalist climate novel: it asks whether the human response to ecological catastrophe might be not resistance but surrender. This episode examines the novel's prophetic geography (the specific flooding of London), its psychological argument about entropy and desire, and its place as the origin point of climate fiction.","author_name":"Atween Studios"}