Why J.G. Ballard still matters

 

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.

FICTION FOR NOW

 

Talking climate, catastrophe and imagined futures at the Threekingham Literary Festival

by Clive Simpson

There was a phrase I wrote when signing a copy of Flood Waters Down at the Threekingham Boutique Literary Festival which, with hindsight, summed up much of the discussion that followed.

“Fiction – for now, at least.” It was meant to be slightly tongue-in-cheek. But after the summer Britain and Europe have just experienced, perhaps not entirely.

On Saturday (29 August), novelist and creative writing lecturer Amy Lilwall and I opened the literary programme at Three Kings Organic in the tiny Lincolnshire village of Threekingham with a panel entitled 'Imagining Our Future – Climate Fiction'. It was an intimate setting for a very large subject.

The festival itself, held over the August Bank Holiday weekend, was an enjoyably eclectic affair: authors, historians, poets and readers gathering in the conference room of Three Kings Organic, a delightful wine bar and café in a beautifully renovated 1200-year-old former inn.

Over two days of talks, workshops and conversation the programme ranged from Lincolnshire history and the Middle Ages to poetry, creative writing and discussions about the sheer business of being an author.

Our opening panel, hosted by Samantha Maw, brought together two rather different novels. Amy's The Water That May Come imagines Britain preparing for a potentially catastrophic inundation and the possibility of its citizens having to escape their own country. 

Flood Waters Down moves further into a climate-damaged future, following characters attempting to survive in a Britain where weather extremes, environmental degradation and the insidious rise of AI combine begin to fundamentally reshape society.

Different stories and different approaches, but with a common question lurking beneath them: what happens when the previously unimaginable starts becoming reality? 

When fiction and forecast collide
It was difficult to discuss that question at the end of August 2026 without acknowledging what had been happening outside.

Britain has just experienced an extraordinary summer. Provisional Met Office figures in mid-August put the UK's mean summer temperature at 16.48C to 10 August – already 1.88C above the 1991-2020 average and on course to exceed the previous summer record, itself set only in 2025.

The heatwaves produced a provisional 38C at Kew Gardens, the fifth-highest UK temperature recorded, while 40 observing locations across central and southern England reached 36C or more.

And heat has only been part of the story. Much of England and Wales endured prolonged dry conditions before the weather turned sufficiently unstable for forecasters to start warning of heavy rain, thunderstorms and localised flooding – the peculiar contemporary contradiction of needing rain while simultaneously worrying about getting too much of it too quickly.

This increasingly feels like the climatic world in which we now live: not simply warmer weather but instability and extremes. Heat. Drought. Flood. Fire. Then heat again.

Against that background, sitting in a Lincolnshire wine bar and café discussing novels about flooded landscapes didn't feel quite as speculative as it might once have done. And in this context Lincolnshire really matters – it is a significant food growing and processing area, an increasingly key part of the country’s critical infrastructure.

Large areas of the Fens exist because generations of people have engineered water out of the landscape. Pumps, drains, embankments and sluices maintain an extraordinary artificial geography, much of it at or even below sea level. It is the environment I grew up with – and the landscape in which the idea for Flood Waters Down first took shape.

The night the idea arrived
During the panel, Samantha asked where the novel had begun. I traced it back to the North Sea storm surge of December 2013. At the time I was doing some reporting in the area and visited Surfleet Seas End, where farmers and drainage officials had been watching the water rise alarmingly close to the top of the flood banks.

What stayed with me was the margin. A few inches. Standing there afterwards, I found myself wondering what would happen if, one night in the future, the water rose those extra few inches. What happens when it over tops the bank? Where does it go? And what happens to the people who have spent their lives believing those banks will protect them?

This eventually became the opening chapter of Flood Waters Down. The scene is a remote Fenland sluice at Surfleet Seas End where Jack Craft and his father watch the water rise through the darkness. The water eventually tops the bank and Jack's father sets off upstream in an old motorboat. It is the last time Jack sees him.

Though water is the catalyst, my intention was never simply to write a novel about a flood.. What interested me was what follows as the accelerating effects of climate change take hold. 

Turning fact into “future history”
My route into fiction was different from Amy's. She came through creative writing, completing an MA and PhD before becoming a lecturer in creative writing at the University of Lincoln. I came through journalism.

I became a reporter at 18, partly inspired, rather improbably, by seeing All the President's Men. Later I was able to combine journalism with another lifelong interest – space exploration – and have spent much of the past three decades writing about the international space sector.

Alongside that has been a longstanding interest in environmental issues and climate change. More recently, however, something began to trouble me. You can write factual articles about climate change until, as I put it during the panel, you are “blue in the face”. There is an enormous amount of excellent science, journalism and analysis available.

Yet facts alone do not necessarily connect. Graphs showing projected sea-level rise and reports explaining the consequences of two degrees of warming are important. But neither necessarily answers the intensely human question: what will that actually feel like? 

That was where fiction began to interest me. I described Flood Waters Down during the discussion as a kind of “future history” – taking what we know now and asking what one plausible version of the future might look like if today's trends continue.

There is a distinction between prediction and possibility. Climate fiction does not need to tell us precisely what will happen – its power lies in asking us to inhabit something that could happen.

What if we are the refugees?
Amy's novel The Water That May Come approaches that question from another direction and, interestingly, she told the audience that she had not originally set out to write a climate-change novel at all.

One of its inspirations was a much-publicised theory from the 1990s that a volcanic collapse in the Canary Islands might generate a huge Atlantic tsunami affecting the UK. Another came much later, after Brexit.

Having spent several years in France, Amy began wondering what would happen if Britain suddenly had to be evacuated. Where would British people go? And, outside the European Union, who would take them? It produces one of the most interesting reversals in The Water That May Come – British citizens becoming refugees.

Amy read a passage in which her character Jane is travelling north with a baby, hoping eventually to reach safety in Finland. Passing through the Lake District, she encounters an official responsible for allocating space to displaced people. Jane suddenly understands her position. She is, effectively, a refugee in her own country.

That prompted one of the strongest strands of our conversation. We are accustomed to seeing refugees through the distancing lens of television screens and newspaper reports: people crossing borders, boarding boats, fleeing floods, wars, droughts and failed states.

But what if the people looking for sanctuary were us? What if a British family arrived at a foreign border carrying everything it could salvage?
What if we needed the small boat?

Fiction can perform that reversal extraordinarily effectively because it removes the comforting distance between observer and victim.

Geography of disaster
Disaster fiction traditionally destroys places such as New York, Washington, Los Angeles or London. Hollywood has demolished them repeatedly, Samantha observed. “It feels different when catastrophe arrives in Spalding, Boston, Sittingbourne or Nuneaton,” she said.

Both novels use familiar British geography. In Flood Waters Down, the Fens are central to the story. Spalding becomes important. London is decaying under the combined pressure of climate disruption and social breakdown.

Amy, meanwhile, makes Nuneaton significant precisely because of its geography: being about as far from the sea as it is possible to get in England.

For readers who know these places, the effect can be oddly unsettling. Climate change stops being something happening to a Pacific island or a melting glacier thousands of miles away. It happens down the road.

Don't buy a bungalow
The point became unexpectedly entertaining when the discussion opened to the audience. One questioner recalled hearing archaeologist and Fenland expert Francis Pryor discussing his book The Fens. His advice, she remembered, to people contemplating the future of low-lying Fenland communities included two particularly memorable suggestions. “Don't buy a bungalow.” 

And, if evacuation ever becomes necessary, don't expect the official evacuation routes to be empty. It raised laughter but the underlying point was serious. How prepared are we? 

There is an enormous difference between escaping an immediate disaster and coping with its aftermath. If flood water arrives tonight, the immediate question is how to get people somewhere safe. But suppose the water doesn't go away?  Where do those people live next week? Next year?

What happens to property, farmland, communities, schools and businesses? And what happens to the emotional connection people have to places where their families may have lived for generations?” These are no longer questions confined to novels.

The UK's Climate Change Committee warned earlier this year that heat, flooding and drought pose growing risks to the British way of life. Its assessment suggests that by mid-century peak river flows could be up to 45 per cent higher than now, while 92 per cent of existing homes could be at risk of overheating. Water-supply shortfalls in England could exceed five billion litres a day.

In July, the Government adopted a cross-government planning assumption of at least 2C of warming by 2050 – an acknowledgement that adaptation can no longer be treated as an optional add-on to emissions reduction.

There is something sobering about official government planning beginning to occupy territory once largely inhabited by speculative fiction.

Who gets to escape?
Another theme linking our books was inequality. Amy has a billionaire, Pinko, who can contemplate climate catastrophe from an entirely different position to Jane, a single mother with vastly fewer resources. While other people worry about evacuation, Pinko can move horses, throw parties and ultimately escape in a helicopter.

It led to an excellent audience question: how do you make a billionaire sympathetic in a novel about a crisis to which extreme wealth and consumption are hardly irrelevant?

Amy's answer was that she had deliberately shown him living outside the world of “mere mortals”. Yet she also resisted making him a caricature. 

In Flood Waters Down, Baroness Lydia Frampton occupies similar territory although she is a considerably darker character. She is fabulously wealthy, politically connected and intelligent. Her response to climate breakdown is essentially to construct an escape from it: an enclave near Spalding where the very wealthy can insulate themselves from the deteriorating world beyond.

The question behind both characters is increasingly pertinent. When things become difficult, who gets out? Who owns the helicopter? Who has the fortified house? Who can relocate? Who has access to water, energy and security? And who is left standing beside the rising river?

Climate change is environmental but its consequences are inseparable from wealth and power.

Can we simply leave Earth?
Towards the end of the session, Samantha brought my other journalistic life into the conversation. If the Earth becomes increasingly difficult to inhabit, she asked, can we simply colonise Mars? My one-word answer was “No”, which probably requires qualification.

Humans may eventually establish some kind of presence on Mars. But the popular idea that an alien planet provides an easy escape hatch from a damaged Earth bears little relationship to the physical realities involved.

Mars is lethally hostile. Radiation alone presents enormous challenges. Then there are questions of life support, food, human physiology, psychology, reproduction and simply keeping people alive millions of miles from Earth.

Putting somebody into a rocket and firing them towards Mars is the relatively straightforward part. Building another functioning world is not. The irony is hard to miss.

We already possess an extraordinarily sophisticated spacecraft with abundant water, breathable air, a functioning biosphere, magnetic shielding, tolerable gravity and an immensely complicated life-support system that has operated successfully for billions of years. It's called Earth. Looking after it remains considerably easier than terraforming Mars.

The empathy gap
Perhaps the phrase from Amy that stayed with me most was “the empathy gap”. Those of us living in Britain can still, for much of the time, experience climate change at a distance – punctuated by increasingly frequent reminders closer to home. 

We know it is happening. We see the pictures. We read the statistics. Then we make a cup of tea and continue with the day. Although even that comfortable separation is becoming harder to maintain after summers such as this one.

Amy argued that stories can bridge some of that gap because readers become emotionally invested in people rather than statistics – and I think she is right.

Nobody cries over a graph. We might, however, care deeply about an invented woman driving north through England with a baby, wondering whether she will ever see the Lake District again.

We might care about a Fenland man standing beside his father as water creeps over a bank. And having cared about them, perhaps the graph means something different.

That does not make fiction a substitute for science. Quite the opposite. The science provides the foundation. Fiction asks us to imagine living inside its implications.

Fiction – for now
At the end of the discussion, Samantha asked what we hoped readers would take from our books. My answer was straightforward. Don't ignore what is happening now because doing so stores up consequences for the future.

Flood Waters Down isn't intended as an exact prediction of life in Britain in the near future. I sincerely hope much of it remains fiction. But its world is not conjured from nowhere.

The heat, floods, storms, migration, technological disruption, inequality and political reluctance to confront uncomfortable realities all have roots in the present. That is why climate fiction feels increasingly relevant. It allows us to rehearse possibilities before we have to live them. It lets us ask what happens to ordinary people when systems begin to fail. Who adapts? Who profits? Who leaves? Who stays? Who helps somebody else – and who closes the gate behind them?

On an unsettled August bank holiday weekend in a small Lincolnshire village, those questions generated a lively, thoughtful and occasionally amusing hour of topical conversation. At the end, the audience applauded and everyone headed outside for coffee, books and the next festival session. The real world resumed. For now, at least.

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Editor's note:  Flood Waters Down is available through bookshops and online retailers in paperback and ebook editions. For author signings, talks or literary festivals please contact Clive Simpson direct. 

In Lincoln author signed copies can be purchased from Lindum Books and Lark Books, and in Sleaford and surrounding areas from The Travelling Bookshop.

Three Kings Organic is an elegant organic Wine Bar and Café in the picturesque Lincolnshire village of Threekingham. It serves top quality food and drink, with future plans to develop a flagship cookery school and shop on-site. A unique and enterprising venue with first class service and hospitality.