After the autobiographical candour of Empire of the Sun, J.G. Ballard returns to his familiar austere impersonality with The Day of Creation. Superficially, this latest terminal vision recalls the doomed worlds of the author's earlier Science Fiction, and at some points seems a close reworking of The Drought (1965). In that parched novel, the earth has ceased to produce rain because of radioactive waste and its waters are drying to produce a global dustbowl. In the last twenty years the inexorable advance of the Sahara has spared Ballard from having to invent his climatic catastrophe and gives his 1987 apocalyptic fable a more ominous edge of realism.

LRB 1 October 1987 | PDF Download