"Kerans could not remember how it had been before the violent solar storms shattered the ionosphere and turned the earth into a vast tropical heat zone, a seething world of jungle, swamp and fetid water...

In the drowned, lost cities, there was the eerie beauty of the lagoons, the towering sixty-foot-high plants, the once-proud buildings smothered in silt...

Above all, there was the colossal fireball in the sky, the giant solar disk that seemed to blind him with its rays, lulling him into a strange hypnotic state, seeming to lure him back to the dawn of the preconscious, to another age when Man was yet unborn and reptiles ruled the earth..."

• commentary from the back cover of the Berkeley Medallion edition

"Technically brilliant, dazzlingly inventive, Ballard uses fantasy to reflect the aberrations of contemporary society and to penetrate the labryinthine passages of the human psyche. THE DROWNED WORLD is at once a fast-paced narrative, a stunning evocation of a flooded, tropical London of the near future, and a speculative foray into the workings of the unconscious mind."

• commentary from the back cover of the Everyman Paperback edition