J.G.Ballard's A Drowned World is one of my favourite books. Considering he wrote it back in 1962, it is scarily prophetic when it comes to the sweltering tropics of what used to be London, turned into a watery wasteland populated by reptiles and giant insects.
"Already many of the surrounding buildings had disappeared beneath the proliferating vegetation. Huge club mosses and calamites blotted out the white rectangular faces, shading the lizards in their window lairs. Beyond the lagoon, the endless tides of silt had begun to accumulate into enormous glittering banks, here and there overtopping the shoreline like the immense tippings of some distant goldmine."It both scares and humbles me to imagine that Ballard's vision may, one day, come true. Our current global climate change interventions had aimed at keeping global warming to a toasty 2C above pre-industrial levels. Only, the latest projections suggest we are on track for a 3.2C and that means a whole lot of water will be coming our way thanks to melting ice-caps. The areas at risk of flooding are currently home to 275 million people, most of them living in Asia.
Projections by Surging Seas show how the coastal regions of the world are likely to change. Large areas of London are among those at risk, in scenes reminiscent of A Drowned World.
A 3-degree increase in global temperature will see much of London flooded
A few years back, artists were asked to imagine what London could look like in 2100. Some of the scenarios they envisioned saw landmarks half-submerged, turning London into a city reminiscent of Venice.
There's more on the three-degree world in this Guardian article here.
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And here's some book recommendations featuring flooded cities. I will add to the list if anyone wants to comment below with their favourites.
The Drowned World by J.G.Ballard follows just a couple of characters as they regress through the aeons as nature reclaims an abandoned London. “The trouble with you people is that you've been here for thirty million years and your perspectives are all wrong. You miss so much of the transitory beauty of life,” says one of the characters.
New York 2140 by Kim Stanley Robinson features a flooded version of New York, so I had to include it on the list (even if the level of the sea level rise is a bit extreme). The bad guy here is capitalism and parts of Manhattan are nicknamed SuperVenice, which is brilliant.
Exodus by Julie Bertagna is the first YA on my list. Rising sea levels, a sky city and the Netherworld—a flooded Glasgow cast in shadow by the sky city overhead. My last novel featured a similar shadowy undercity, so finding this book was both exciting and distressing that there are no new ideas.
Floodland by Marcus Sedgwick is a middle grade novel set in a flooded version of England in which Norwich is now an island and the main character has misplaced their parents.
The Sea and Summer by George Turner has been compared to The Drowned World with its watery vision of the future. It was Sci-Fi back when it was written; now it feels more like a warning.
Odds Against Tomorrow by Nathaniel Rich has great cover art and a lot of maths, plus it manages to be funny in the face of a city's annihilation. (I'm in the process of reading this one, and love it so far).
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