“Soon it will be too hot” is a great opening line for a novel, especially one about global warming. As Martin Amis writes in his introduction for the anniversary edition of <em>The Drowned World</em>, prescience isn't everything, yet J.G. Ballard's 1962 novel is a good example of science fiction's remarkable if scattershot ability to foresee future concerns. In Ballard's account, solar flares trigger catastrophic climate change, resulting in a world receding into a prehistoric swamp where giant reptiles swim the lagoons encroaching upon once-great cities as sea levels rise. <em>The Drowned World</em> is a memorable imagining of the world ending not with a bang, but in slow motion.
