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.

The Water That May Come

The downstairs room at Lark Books in Lincoln was already warm with bookish expectation when the audience reverberated with a low, knowing laugh. On the very day Amy Lilwall was formerly launching her novel The Water That May Come the first named UK storm of the 2025 season, Storm Amy, barrelled its way across the country’s weather maps.

It was the kind of coincidence publicists dream about and authors dread – too on-the-nose to mention, too irresistible to ignore. In my mind it was the kind of fortuitous occasion when art, life and the elements fall into poetic alignment.

Inside, 40 people and a table stacked with freshly printed paperbacks, while outside rain needled the windows, a ready-made metaphor for a book that asks us to measure ourselves against waters that may (or may not) rise.

The evening was guided by Robert Weston, Lilwall’s creative writing colleague at the University of Lincoln, who set a generous tone. He opened with the book’s audacious prologue – told from the point of view of a ‘personified’ volcano – and praised the novel’s “writerly” confidence.

Lilwall, candid and quick to deflate her own mystique, described the prologue as a “prettified info-dump”, before explaining how the science had shifted in development. The idea first clung to the Canary Islands but an editor’s nudge and further research pulled the scenario to Iceland, where warming and glacial rebound render volcanic unrest more than just a gothic flourish. The move matters because it turned a what-if disaster premise into something more contemporary – ‘cli-fi’, if you can cope with that term. And, crucially, made it more political.

That doubleness – the volcano as a foreboding, scene setting character against the background of the climate crisis – runs through the novel’s preoccupations with The Water That May Come tracking four people as Britain looks seawards and flinches. 

Pinko, a rich heir who mistakes decadence for a plan; Jane, a veterinary nurse from a two-up, two-down who is thinking fast because circumstances give her no other choice; Ashleigh, her teenage daughter on the cusp of motherhood; and Gavin, a young artist whose hunches are humble and human-scale.

What gives the book its bite is not apocalypse-as-a-spectacle but pressure-as-a-test. Lilwall is less interested in the bang than in the slow tightening of rules and norms that precede it – the grey zone where everyone is still watching EastEnders and eating beans on toast while new forms of bureaucracy quietly harden around them.

She spoke about “intimacy laws” that haunt the book’s world: couples seeking to migrate are compelled to have intercourse in front of a jury to prove their relationship is “real”. It’s an absurdist idea – she cites the spirit of Lanthimos’s The Lobster – but offers it in deadly seriousness as a mirror to the way asylum processes already strips people naked, demanding testimony of trauma as an admission fee. The extremity shocks precisely because it feels like an extrapolation of something we live with today and forces us into the uncomfortable subjunctive of her title.

Migration is the engine not just backdrop decor for this story. One of Lilwall’s neat reversals is to flip the current right-wing Channel rhetoric by making refugees of Britons and then following the moral and domestic triage that results. Class is the fault line – Pinko has options money can buy; Jane has relationships and wits with little margin for error. The gap between a Tunbridge Wells mansion and a council house in Sittingbourne, Kent, isn’t just scenery, it’s what determines who gets on which boat (or helicopter) and at what cost.

When Rob recalled a line he loved, “Feminism leaves Jane like a stolen soul” you could feel the room register how the book sticks pins in the soft language of principle. Principles are easy in peacetime but much harder when water laps at the door.

Lilwall was frank about the imaginative leap required to write Jane, a character far from her own demographic experience. She didn’t do “fieldwork” in the extractive sense (no interviews to stitch into authenticity). Instead, she built Jane from careful observation and empathy, and – crucially – left space for Jane’s self-awareness. The character knows what she’s doing, knows the compromises and self-bargains she’s making, and the book refuses to judge her for surviving.

A reading from the opening chapter threaded humour through the gloom, and the crowd – students, colleagues, readers – was up for it. A running joke about Paris, the dog (spoiler alert: yes, the dog makes it), gave the evening a pressure-release valve. But even the comedy slides against the grain of the themes.

In a conversation about whether anyone, faced with the end of things, would shrug and “drink all the champagne”, Lilwall argued her characters can’t so easily shed who they are. Even when the world is tilting, habits, loyalties and self-concepts resist – and that friction is where novelistic interest lives.

Publishing, too, is part of the climate of a book, and Lilwall was generous about the process. The Water That May Come is from Manchester-based Fly on the Wall Press, a small imprint with an appetite for political fiction and a knack for turning nimbleness into care.

The book was only accepted for publication in September 2024 and its release this October was speedy by industry standards, going through three rounds of development edits and two rounds of proofs, according to Lilwall.

That blend of speed and rigour shows on the page – a four-character chorus that is ambitious in structure but never confusing; a prose clarity that lets the ethical puzzles shine. The press’s own positioning is plain: political fiction with feminist and quirky undertones, social action in the bloodstream and carbon-neutral production – northern publishing with a point of view.

If you’re looking for a tidy category on your bookshelf, the publisher offers “a rare blend of speculative fiction and literary realism”, in the lineage of The High House and The Last Day. But Lilwall’s novel also feels like it belongs to a different, increasingly visible slot: climate novels about the bit before. Not the catastrophe itself but the time when catastrophe is a credible rumour. Not the fire or flood but the weeks before when people move photo albums upstairs and quietly price life rafts.

The book’s fundamental question – what do you do before the worst happens? – is political because our answers have consequences beyond ourselves. It’s also intimate, because those answers are made one kitchen conversation at a time.

In that sense, the Lincoln Book Festival and Lark Books was exactly the right venue for this launch. Independent bookshops are civic spaces as much as retail rooms, places where a town or city rehearses how it will talk to itself. Watching students lean forward during the Q&A to puzzle over voice, process, responsibility – and to ask how you keep faith with a project over eight years – you could feel the wider frame of the UK migration debate refracted through crafted questions rather than sound-bite slogans. Literature won’t settle policy, but it can make the policy personal enough to resist caricature.

Lilwall hinted, mischievously, at a sister novel – characters glimpsed here stepping forward elsewhere, Paris-the-dog included. The room perked up at the promise of “more naughtiness”, which felt right because the work of dark times needn’t always be sombre. And if there’s a line that does the best job of bottling the book’s moral weather, it’s the one Fly on the Wall chose to trail with its publicity: “In a future where we all may become refugees, how far would you go to stay afloat?”

Walking out at the end of the evening – leaving Lilwall grinning with relief aside a dwindling stack of first edition paperbacks – the rain had eased to a fine mist. It felt like the right departure note for a launch about imminence: no drama, just a change you notice on your skin the second you step into it.

The evening had made me think again about the soft power of fiction, where it dares to be timely without being didactic. If the migration debate in Britain is too often shouted across the gap between myth and data, between right and left, Lilwall’s approach is to tighten the shot, to make the choice a reader’s and to make the river a street you know.

The Water That May Come is a novel of thresholds: between land and sea, between safety and risk, between who you think you are and what you do next. It is also, thankfully, a book with a sense of the ridiculous that keeps you human.

On a night when a namesake storm knocked on the windows, Amy Lilwall offered the kind of story that respects both your intelligence and your fear. The water, like the future, “may come” but the better question is: who do we become while we’re waiting?

  

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

ISBN: 9781915789440
RRP: £12.99