How J.G. Ballard’s terrifying, prophetic vision of overheating cities and climate change is coming true

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.On 27 April, when weather-monitoring platform AQI reported that 97 of the world’s hottest cities are in India, it felt like a ringing validation of the way I have been feeling since I set foot in my hometown a week ago to vote in the assembly elections.With temperatures crossing 30 degrees Celsius, the heat and humidity in Kolkata has been unbearable this April. If you are lucky to have the option of working from home, you could avoid the worst of the heat.

Even a walk after sundown can leave you drenched and exhausted. The few days I had to go out in the morning or afternoon, my mind went back to Megha Majumdar’s novel, A Guardian and A Thief (2025), a powerful reimagining of the city as a near-future dystopia, under siege from excruciating heatwaves and their attendant calamities.Having read Majumdar’s novel just last year, I decided to pick up another work of fiction also set in an unstable world, where sea levels and temperatures are rising uncontrollably.

If the protagonists of A Guardian and A Thief are desperate to leave their simmering city for cooler pastures before it is too late, in J.G. Ballard’s The Drowned World (1962), the situation is much more peculiar and perverse.Set in a distant future (which, alarmingly, no longer feels distant for us), The Drowned World takes the reader to an earth where solar radiation has melted the polar ice caps, which has led to massive floods all over.

Except for Camp Byrd (“a city of ten thousand in Northern Greenland”), civilisation as we know it has been largely wiped out. The conditions that have precipitated this disaster are no longer the stuff of science fiction either.Around 60-70 years before his story begins, Ballard writes, “a