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.

When reality catches up with fiction

 

EVERY so often, reality catches up with fiction. Watching Europe endure another brutal heatwave this week, I found myself thinking back not to a scientific paper or a news report, but to a passage I wrote for Flood Waters Down several years ago.

It comes from the opening of Chapter 3, introducing one of the novel's principal characters at his Surfleet Seas End houseboat home.

It was barely nine o'clock in the morning, and already the outside temperature was edging towards thirty degrees centigrade as the sun climbed into a cloudless sky of menacing blue. Jack Craft had become accustomed to the energy-sapping heat of such days that now interspersed the frequent storms like a distorted form of meteorological punctuation.

The more temperate and predictable seasons of the past had never been part of his experience. He often wondered what it would have been like to live a life that was, in meteorological terms at least, almost carefree compared with the harsh realities of survival he now faced each day.

Reading those words today gives me no satisfaction. If anything, it is deeply unsettling because the novel is set 20 years or more in the future, whereas the conditions that inspired it are seemingly becoming steadily less fictional.

This June, temperatures across Europe climbed into territory once regarded as exceptional. Hospitals have come under pressure. Wildfires have flared. Roads have buckled. Railways have slowed. And before the continent has had time to recover, forecasters are already warning that another spell of intense heat may arrive within days.

It is tempting to dismiss each event as simply another extraordinary summer but that misses the point. Prof Sir Jim Skea, Chair of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, expressed it succinctly during an interview on BBC Radio.

"One heatwave by itself doesn't tell you that climate change is happening. But if it becomes a pattern, if they keep coming back, and if the long-term temperature records are an upward rise, it's a sure sign,” he stated

Such distinctions do matter because climate is measured over decades and centuries not afternoons or years. Yet patterns are becoming increasingly difficult to ignore. Records that once stood for generations are now broken frequently. Events described as "once in a century" seem to arrive with unsettling regularity.

Conversation is changing too. For years, much of the debate focused on preventing future warming. Now it is increasingly about adapting to the warming that is already here and locked in.  That is assuming we can adapt at large.

As Prof Skea observed, much of Britain's infrastructure was built for a different climate. Our homes, hospitals, railways and roads were designed for weather that is becoming part of history rather than everyday experience. He argues that even as temperatures continue to rise, we have not paid enough attention to adaptation.

The world’s oceans tell an equally worrying story. New figures released this week show that global ocean surface temperatures reached their highest June level on record. That’s relevant because the oceans are Earth's great heat reservoir, regulating weather, influencing rainfall, feeding storms and sustaining marine ecosystems.

Samantha Burgess, Deputy Director of the European climate service Copernicus, explained that warmer oceans affect almost everything: marine ecosystems come under stress, sea levels continue to rise through thermal expansion, storms gain energy and even fish populations begin to shift.

Perhaps most strikingly, she noted that changing ocean temperatures are already altering European weather patterns, making summer heatwaves “more intense, more frequent and more longer lasting than they were historically speaking”.

In other words, what we are experiencing is not simply bad luck. It is easy to become overwhelmed by statistics. Every few weeks seems to bring another record, another graph trending upwards, another headline declaring the "highest ever".

But climate change is not really experienced through graphs. It is experienced through cancelled train journeys, sleepless nights, reservoirs running low, rivers shrinking, forests burning and communities beginning to wonder whether the weather they once regarded as normal has quietly slipped into history.

When I began writing Flood Waters Down, I was interested not in predicting the future but in exploring where today's trends might eventually lead. As a space and environmental journalist, I had spent years reporting on climate science, flooding and changing landscapes. Fiction offered something journalism could not: the opportunity to imagine what it might actually feel like to live inside those changes.

The novel focuses on rising seas because it impacts the landscape of the Lincolnshire Fens that has always fascinated me. But flooding is only one chapter of the climate story. Heat, drought, wildfire, rising sea temperatures and more violent storms are all connected. They are different expressions of the same changing planet.

Science provides the evidence. Fiction asks a different question: what does it feel like to live there?

That was one of the issues I wanted to explore in Flood Waters Down. Looking across Europe today, it feels rather closer to home than when I first wrote the opening lines of that chapter.

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Editor's note: The picture at the head of this article is based on an original photo by the author from a shop window display during a visit to Manitou Springs, Colorado. The book title was added subsequently. 

Flood Waters Down (2026) is available now in paperback and ebook from bookshops and online.