Friday, April 6, 2007

Addendum to 'Climate of Fear'

Rats! In my Ideas item about post-apocalyptic global warming novels, last Sunday, I should have included "The Drowned World," a 1963 novel by the great J. G. Ballard. I've read "Drowned World," years ago, but left it off the list because I thought Ballard's book placed the blame for global warming on pollution/greenhouse gases, and the point of the Ideas item was to locate sci-fi novels in which the climate heats up on its own (or because of aliens, or an approaching asteroid).

But LA-based writer Geoff Manaugh, whose Ballard-inspired BLDGBLOG concerns itself with architectural conjecture, urban speculation, and landscape futures, informs me that I've misremembered "Drowned World." He writes:

Ballard: "A series of violent and prolonged solar storms lasting several years caused by a sudden instability in the Sun had enlarged the Van Allen belts and diminished the Earth's gravitational hold upon the outer layers of the ionosphere. As these vanished into space, depleting the Earth's barrier against the full impact of solar radiation, temperatures began to climb steadily, the heated atmosphere expanding outwards into the ionosphere where the cycle was completed." The result is "a nightmare world of competing organic forms returning rapidly to their Paleozoic past."

Meanwhile, fellow Brainiac blogger and Ideas writer Jan Freeman nominates "One in Three Hundred" (1954) by J. T. McIntosh -- in which only a few humans can survive the sun's nova to escape to Mars. "I remember I read most of it standing up in the library: Not just un-put-downable but un-sit-downable!" raves Jan.

Thanks, Geoff and Jan!

Posted by Joshua Glenn at 12:17 PM

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