The novel depicts a global, human-caused drought in which industrial waste forms a thin film on the oceans, impeding evaporation and disrupting the water cycle, and follows Dr Charles Ransom as social order fragments and displaced communities reorganize around scarcity.[4][5]
Critics and reference sources often discuss the book within Ballard's early catastrophe fiction and his 1960s "climate novels," emphasizing its focus on psychological disturbance, altered perception, and social isolation under environmental pressure.[6][7][8][9][10]
Reception has described the novel in visionary or hallucinatory terms, while also noting that Ballard's catastrophe novels divided opinion.[11][12][3]
Background and publication
J. G. Ballard's novel first appeared in the United States in 1964 under the title The Burning World, issued as a Berkley Medallion paperback.[1]WorldCat catalogue records describe the first edition as a Berkley paperback published in New York in August 1964.[1] A revised form of the text was subsequently published in the United Kingdom in 1965 under the title The Drought, released by Jonathan Cape, and reference accounts commonly treat The Drought as a revised variant title of The Burning World.[2][3] Later criticism often discusses the novel as part of Ballard's early sequence of catastrophe fiction.[10][9]
Plot
A global drought sets in after industrial waste forms a thin, polymer-like film on the surface of the oceans and evaporation falters, disrupting the normal water cycle. Rivers and lakes retreat into mudflats and channels, and large-scale migration begins toward the coast as inland supplies fail.[5]
Near the half-evacuated city of Mount Royal, Dr Charles Ransom, cut loose from his hospital work and separated from his wife, Judith, chooses to linger in the lakeside district of Hamilton, living on a houseboat among the draining waterways. Around him, a small constellation of holdouts remains: Catherine Austen stays close to the Mount Royal zoo even as its enclosures fail, while Ransom is drawn into the lives of fringe families and scavengers, including Philip Jordan and Philip's father, Jonas. As civic order collapses, authority shifts to armed patrols and local strongmen, and Ransom becomes increasingly entangled in a struggle for resources and control centered on the architect Richard Foster Lomax and the "oasis" culture he attempts to maintain amid scarcity.[5]
As Mount Royal deteriorates and burns, Ransom drifts between competing impulses: to leave with the coastal exodus or to remain inside the brittle social world forming around dwindling stores of water, status, and protection. When the inland towns can no longer sustain even the remaining holdouts, Ransom joins the migration south, moving through abandoned streets, improvised camps, and semi-militarized checkpoints where travelers barter for fuel, food, and access to water and violence flares with desperation.[5]
At the coast, the promise of water proves largely illusory. Refugees crowd into shantytowns and makeshift coastal communities under shifting, quasi-feudal authority, and survival depends on improvised methods such as hoarding, bartering, and attempts to collect or distill fresh water. Beyond the settlements, the shoreline turns into fields of salt and dunes; Ransom drifts to the margins and lives for a time outside the main camps in a rough shelter on the salt flats.[5]
In the coastal wasteland, Ransom repeatedly encounters a lion moving across the salt and dunes, a displaced animal that echoes the earlier fate of the zoo creatures Catherine refused to abandon. The lion's movements, along with other signs that the coast is not a refuge, help prompt Ransom to turn back inland with a small, exhausted party. They haul supplies across exposed riverbeds and dune-fields in the former lake country, pushing a cart and rationing their remaining water as they aim again for Mount Royal.[5]
Near the end of the novel, Ransom reaches an inland enclave gathered around Quilter and Miranda in the former lake country. The community has formed around one of the last usable water sources in the area, a concrete pool and its dwindling supply, and access to it becomes the focus of pursuit, bargaining, and violence as rival parties close in. Quilter, outfitted in makeshift regalia and moving across the dunes on stilts, becomes a looming presence around the pool as the settlement tightens its grip on the water. As that fragile settlement breaks apart, the remaining water is lost and the small court around it collapses into flight.[5]
After leaving the enclave, Ransom heads back toward Mount Royal and the places he once knew. On his return journey he passes scattered holdouts and surreal improvisations in the dried-out interior before the novel closes on an ambiguous note, without restoring the old world to what it was.[5]
Themes and Analysis
Critics frequently discuss The Burning World and its expanded UK version The Drought as part of Ballard's early catastrophe fiction, where the environmental crisis functions less as a problem to be solved than as a pressure that reorganizes perception, behavior, and social relations. Lorenz J. Firsching characterizes Ballard's apocalyptic mode as "ambiguous," emphasizing how the catastrophe novels resist straightforward moral closure or restorative resolution.[6]
In a study of Ballard's climate novels, Moritz Ingwersen frames the catastrophes as processes that reshape the human from the outside in, linking environmental change to transformations in subjectivity. Rather than treating drought as a purely external hazard, Ingwersen describes the novels as staging a mirrored relation between landscape and inner life, with drained or eroded environments corresponding to narrowing horizons of desire and increasing isolation.[7]
A more explicitly socio-environmental emphasis appears in Cenk Tan's reading of The Drought, which foregrounds the disaster as human-caused and stresses Ballard's critique of the industrial order that produces it. Tan approaches the breakdown of the water cycle as a way of exposing how ecological damage and social breakdown reinforce each other under scarcity.[13]
Jim Clarke places Ballard's catastrophe fiction within debates about reading climate change in literature, arguing that the novels register environmental crisis through disorientation and altered perception as much as through external devastation. In Clarke's account, the distinctive effect of the catastrophe sequence lies in how it renders the cultural and psychological reorganizations produced by environmental pressure, rather than offering a conventional cautionary narrative with clear solutions.[8]
Rachele Dini situates The Drought among Ballard's 1960s "climate novels," noting that Ballard himself grouped The Drought with The Drowned World and The Crystal World as a trilogy. Dini treats the shared emphasis across these works as not only the extremity of their environments but the way those environments intensify psychological disturbance and reshape characters' sense of reality.[9]
Reception
Contemporary responses often emphasized the novel's visionary and hallucinatory effects. In a review published in New Worlds Science Fiction in 1965, Michael Moorcock, writing as "James Colvin," described The Drought as difficult to review in conventional terms and treated its impact in terms of "visions" that dominate over ordinary plot expectations.[11]
Another period response came from Judith Merril in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fictions "Books" column (1966). Merril discussed The Drought in relation to Ballard's other catastrophe fiction and treated it as a companion to The Drowned World, writing that it explores "the effects of dryness ... on the human psyche".[12]
Reference summaries of Ballard's early career note that his catastrophe novels, including The Burning World and The Drought, drew sharply divided reactions. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction states that these mid-1960s works helped to "polarize opinion," attracting both adverse criticism and strong advocacy.[3]
Later retrospective criticism has often framed the novel as part of Ballard's disaster sequence in which characters adapt psychologically rather than "solve" the crisis. Robert A. Latham discusses Ballard's disaster stories as challenging genre expectations by shifting attention from heroic resistance to accommodation and altered desire in an essay for the Los Angeles Review of Books.[14]
Ballard's own later view of the novel was reserved. In a 1975 interview, he said that he did not care for The Drought very much, while also describing it as containing ideas he went on to develop more fully in later experimental work.[15]
A later public-radio essay by Jason Heller, published by New England Public Media, revisited the novel as an early entry in Ballard's 1960s catastrophe sequence and characterized its tone as clinical and hallucinatory rather than didactic, emphasizing the book's interest in how social collapse might transform perception and reality.[16]
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