The Drowned World (1962), by J. G. Ballard, is a British science fiction novel that depicts a post-apocalyptic future in which global warming, caused by increased solar radiation, has rendered uninhabitable much of the surface of planet Earth.

The solar radiation bombarding the planet increased surface temperatures, raised the levels of the seas, and so established a tropical climate throughout most of the planet; with most of Earth no longer habitable by humans, the survivors migrate to the North Pole and to the South Pole, which the planetary tropical climate has rendered fit for human habitation.

In 2145, under the command of Colonel Riggs, Dr Robert Kerans is part of a scientific expedition sent to catalogue the flora and fauna of the lagoon that covers the city of London.

Amidst talk of the army and the scientists moving north, Lieutenant Hardman, the other officer in the expedition, flees the London lagoon and heads south; a search team sent to fetch him failed.

Ballard presents characters who take advantage of societal and civilisational collapse as opportunities to pursue new modes of perception, unconscious urges, and systems of meaning.

[5] In the Humanities Review, the writer Travis Eldborough said that literary works of Ballard in general, and The Drowned World in particular, allow the readers to "ask whether our sense of Self – and of the self as independent, sovereign, irrevocable – is, itself, a [social] construction, and a temporary one.

In 1966, the science fiction writer Algis Budrys mocked The Drowned World as "a run, hide, slither, grope and die book".