I FIRST encountered the writing of J. G. Ballard (1930 – 2009) as a teenager and, like many readers discovering him for the first time, I found his novels unsettling yet oddly hypnotic.
Here were familiar landscapes that felt weirdly distorted, worlds in which ordinary reality had slipped sideways. At the time, I was immersed in science fiction – Star Trek, Thunderbirds, the works of Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Philip K Dick and many others.
But what originally drew me to Ballard’s fiction were the eye-catching cover designs by artist David Pelham. They shouted from the shelves of a small bookshop in the market town of Boston, Lincolnshire, that I loved browsing during Saturday afternoon family outings.
Pelham was best known for his iconic designs for editions of A Clockwork Orange and In Cold Blood before, in 1974, he created a distinctive set of covers for a Penguin box set of four Ballard books: The Wind from Nowhere, The Drowned World, The Drought and The Terminal Beach.
The images were bold and a perfect doorway to Ballard’s fiction – even before opening the books you sensed these were stories about worlds slightly out of joint. I was hooked and Ballard has been part of my literary journey ever since.
His fiction was profoundly imaginative – often surreal, even improbable – and, several decades later, I found myself returning to his work with rather different eyes.
Today, in an age of extreme weather, rising seas, recurring floods and growing anxiety about the future of technology, some of Ballard’s once startling visions feel less like fantasy and more like uncomfortable possibility.
When journalist and author Derek Turner kindly compared my debut novel Flood Waters Down to Ballard’s work – particularly The Drowned World – in his introduction, I felt honoured, if also slightly daunted.
Comparisons with writers one admires are dangerous territory. Yet his observation made me reflect on just how much of Ballard’s writing had quietly shaped my own thinking.
Landscapes that become characters
One of the things I came to appreciate about his novels is that they were never really about catastrophe in the conventional sense.
Yes, cities had flooded. Societies had fractured. And familiar structures had crumbled. But the disasters themselves often felt secondary to something more profound – how human beings psychologically adapt to transformed environments.
In The Drowned World, for example, London has become a humid, lagoon-like wilderness reclaimed by rising waters and tropical heat. The city’s half-submerged environs are dreamlike and psychologically destabilising.
I probably absorbed these dystopian worlds instinctively rather than analytically, but the idea of landscapes shaping behaviour and identity stayed with me.
Looking back, I can see how this understanding influenced the way I approached my debut novel, Flood Waters Down. The flooded Lincolnshire Fens and the raging climate are not simply a backdrop for action – they shape everything from politics and survival to social relationships.
One of the lead characters, Sara Flynn, arrives from London to encounter not simply environmental collapse but a landscape where the remnants of decimated communities cling to their former identities.
Perhaps it is not surprising that this otherworldly landscape becomes a character because, long before I ever began writing Flood Waters Down, I had always felt there was something uncanny about the Fens.
I say this as someone who has lived in South Lincolnshire for most of my life and cares deeply about this extraordinary region. Stoically beautiful and endlessly fascinating, it is also frequently misunderstood.
Beneath the immense skies and infinite horizons it is far from comforting, especially for first-time visitors. Human engineering is everywhere – drainage systems, embankments, pumps, razor straight waterways and industrial-scale agriculture – reminders that much of this land exists because people wrested it from the sea.
The water might be tamed for now but it never entirely disappears – the Fens exist in an uneasy balance, suspended between land and sea. Anyone who has stood on the coast after a storm surge, or watched floodwater creep across fields, understands how fragile that can feel.
In many ways, the Fens scarcely needed fictionalising to become Ballardian. They already contain that quality of liminality – a sense of existing between states, haunted by older landscapes beneath the present one.
That feeling intensified for me after visiting the tiny settlement of Surfleet Seas End in the aftermath of the damaging east coast storm surge of 2013.
Speaking to farmers and residents whose lives had been disrupted by flooding made the effects of climate change feel tangible and immediate rather than abstract. The seed of Flood Waters Down was planted.
From environmental anxiety to climate reality
Though Ballard was writing long before anthropogenic climate change became part of everyday public consciousness, re-reading his work today feels uncannily contemporary.
His fiction endures because he understood something we are only now beginning to confront collectively: environmental catastrophe rarely arrives all at once.
A little more flooding. A little more heat. Slight disruptions to systems once assumed reliable. Rising anxiety beneath the surface of daily life. Institutions struggling to adapt. Politics hardening. People normalising the abnormal.
In writing Flood Waters Down, I wanted to explore similar questions through the lens of contemporary fears: climate disruption, social fragmentation, wealth and the unsettling rise of artificial intelligence (AI).
Unlike much science fiction, my interest has never been technology for its own sake, which is perhaps surprising given my long career as a journalist specialising in space and technology.
As Turner perceptively notes in his introduction, “technologists are often accused of excessive faith in systems”, so working in and around the space sector for decades might easily suggest an unquestioning belief in technological progress.
Practical and everyday experience, however, teaches a more complex lesson. Technology can create just as many problems as it can solve. Liberation isn’t always without cost.
In Flood Waters Down, AI emerges partly as humanity's attempt to manage crisis, only for that solution to become a threat in its own right – reflecting our anxieties and contradictions.
Ballard was primarily concerned with the psychological consequences of a transformed environment. In Flood Waters Down, I wanted to explore its political and social consequences: the wealthy insulating themselves from catastrophe while others are left to struggle, and technology becoming as much an instrument of control as a means of survival.
The instinct to resist
At its heart, Flood Waters Down is a story about resistance and, even amid loss and upheaval, the endurance of communities. People improvise. Moral choices remain.
Yet amid the danger, greed and oppression of this flooded world, there is also a stubborn hope. Maybe this stems from my experience as a journalist – years of reporting on human ingenuity and scientific achievement leave one reluctant to surrender entirely to pessimism.
Or perhaps it comes from the Fens themselves – a landscape shaped by generations of people refusing to give up in harsh circumstances. The rebels and survivors in my novel certainly owe something to that spirit.
What strikes me most when re-reading Ballard today is not his accuracy as a prophet (though there is an element of that in his work) – it is his emotional truth.
He understood instability. Psychological unease. And the feeling of living through transition when the familiar world is no longer dependable.
Those feelings increasingly define life in the 21st century. We live in an era shaped by climate uncertainty, technological acceleration, military hubris and a growing awareness that systems we assumed permanent may be more fragile than we imagined.
Echoes of Ballard’s visionary prose may occasionally surface in Flood Waters Down – in its flooded landscapes, environmental anxieties and moral ambiguities.
No writer, however, wishes simply to imitate another and my novel is very much its own story – a future history rooted in the Lincolnshire landscape and shaped by contemporary concerns and events.
Literary influences, however, have a way of lingering beneath the surface. Just like the rising water.
Flood Waters Down (2026) is available now in paperback and ebook from bookshops and online.
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