Ballard's Drowned World

[chava]

Ballard is a prophet of the fatalist pro-climate change mindset

 

[mvuent]

Reenacting Heart of Darkness. The jungle of the unconscious. The waters of the unconscious. The unconscious as the animal, the pre-enlightened. Shadow and light. The vine which crowds out sun. Freud's notion of buried layers, the sands of time, the sands of memory. Metal and towers that protect us and towers that take us closer to heaven.

i do think the book flips around colonial “civilized christian society shining its light into the dark, primitive jungles” type rhetoric, the perspective that would’ve been taken for granted in the adventure stories alluded to by amis. here it's the curtains of air conditioned skyscrapers that block out the sun's light, rather than vines. but it’s very much not envisioning some solarpunk decolonial future either. (and some of the reviews i’ve read seem to assume that if it’s not doing that, then it must be old school british empire propaganda.) it's trying to get somewhere much weirder.

 

[mvuent]

It's another I actually found quite moving, despite the criticism of flat characters and storytelling usually thrown at him. The bit at the end where Kerans finds Hardman and his eyes are so fucked all he can see is the sun is really sad, also Kerans scrawling the note about everything going well before he hobbles off into the jungle, probably to die.

agreed, the "all is well" message is moving in a similar way to that last photo of chris mccandless