J. G. Ballard’s The Drowned World: A Nonhuman Utopia

The paper explores J. G. Ballard’s visionary 1962 novel The Drowned World as an example of a nonhuman utopia. Although written well before the conceptualization of the notion of the nonhuman turn, the novel embodies the philosophical ideas of such a turn as it challenges anthropocentric hierarchy and represents humans as disempowered and reactive, rather than proactive beings. The Drowned World imagines a world regressing into a prehistoric, pre-human state due to the Sun’s extreme activity and radical warming in a process of entropy, as all human scientific and architectural achievements collapse in the face of the merciless sun and the advancing ocean. The urban space is turned into lagoons that resemble heterotopias, a space that accommodates the transitional phase in the process of imminent human extinction, which, paradoxically, is met with relief and embraced as utopian by the novel’s protagonist.