J. G. Ballard saw himself “as a kind of investigator, a scout who is sent on ahead to see if the water is drinkable or not” in the dystopic worlds he envisioned.

After the Flood

Decades before climate change became irrefutable, the English novelist J. G. Ballard envisioned a much warmer world with vastly higher sea levels

By Jason Guriel

Christopher Hitchens condemned multitudes: Henry Kissinger, the Clintons, aggressive sommeliers, God, even science fiction. The late critic loathed the stuff. But one day, friend and novelist Martin Amis delivered unto Hitchens a care package containing three works in the genre by the English writer J. G. Ballard. “Any one of these,” Hitchens later wrote, “would have done the trick.” A sci-fi skeptic had been converted.

One of Amis’s picks, The Drowned World, turned 60 this year. It helped launch not only Ballard’s career back in 1962 (the older Amis, Kingsley, loved it, too) but also a modern subgenre of sci-fi about climate disasters (later called “cli-fi”) that’s now almost as prevalent as carbon. Recent entries include Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2020 novel, The Ministry for the Future, Jon Raymond’s Denial, out this month, and the forthcoming story anthology Terraform.