Dear readers, I am always impressed by survivalists, with their canned water stashes and elaborate exit plans, but I don’t need to be one of them. If apocalypse comes, please leave me to die in the road. (Not “The Road.”) My urge to face the end times like a fainting goat has been shaped, I’m sure, by a lifetime of dystopian novels and movies in which some plague, rogue wave or other unhinged geopolitical weather has made the world a ruined stranger to itself: scorched, smithereened, ruled by scarcity. As a wise scrivener once said, “I would prefer not to.” Even if both books here are ripe fodder for my sleep demons, though (and maybe yours?), I promise they do it with style. —Leah “The Drowned World,” by J.G. BallardFiction, 1962
A man stands on the balcony of his skyline suite at the Ritz, gazing out as the sun rises over “dense groves of giant gymnosperms,” and for at least the first few lines of “The Drowned World,” we might believe we are in mere weird-vacation territory. (A gymnosperm, if you’re not a botanist, is a flowerless plant.) In fact this man, Dr. Robert Kerans, is a biologist, and the hotel is halfway underwater because in the year 2145, catastrophic climate change has left everything but the furthest poles of the planet flooded and parboiled to the point of societal collapse. The ice caps are gone and London is a malarial hot zone overtaken by stone-faced iguanas and mosquitoes the size of dragonflies. Kerans, who is about to wrap up a job on a testing station there, is a lean 40-year-old loner with “a beard turned white by the radio-flourine in the water” and an implied romantic life in the form of a melancholic femme fatale named Beatrice Dahl. (How fortuitous that the only woman for miles around has the body of a goddess and a fully stocked bar.) More and more, though, strange dreams distance him from the obligations of waking life. Like the dinosaur foliage and vaporous lagoons around him, he is being pulled toward a murkier, more primal past. That’s the basic premise of Ballard’s spooky-prescient 1962 novel and also approximately half the plot. Dialogue is scant and the action often dissociative, and the book’s portrayal of female and nonwhite characters is, to put it kindly, probably a little too of its time. But as a sensory experience, “The Drowned World” feels like a true fugue state: a slow, disorienting descent into a heart of darkness draped in ropy vines and hissing albino alligators. Ballard was prolific pretty much until he died in 2009, and he found more mainstream success with novels like “Crash” and “Empire of the Sun,” both of which became well-known movies. (“Mainstream” with Ballard is relative; “Crash” is about a consuming sexual fetish for traffic accidents.) “The Drowned World,” though, remains an odd, woozy bird in his catalog — a book unusually attuned, as Martin Amis wrote for the 50th anniversary reissue, to “the ‘world hum’ of the ‘near-after.’” Read if you like: Machetes, water spiders, spending too long at the plant store. “Tilt,” by Emma PatteeFiction, 2025
“Tilt” opens in a place that is only some people’s idea of hell: Ikea. An office manager named Annie, 37 weeks pregnant and miserable about it to an almost metaphysical degree, is in the midst of having a minor nervous breakdown while chasing down an apparently out-of-stock crib mattress when the whole earth convulses, throttling her like a pinball between racks of moderately priced home goods. A young female employee on whom she unloaded some of her helpless rage just minutes before drags her out from “an ocean of dust and concrete” and into the parking lot. The sky is still serenely blue but large chunks of Portland, Ore., or at least the crushed metal and pancaked asphalt that’s left of it, look unrecognizable to Annie, who grew up there. Her phone and purse are lost somewhere in the rubble and the only thing that makes sense to her is to walk toward her husband, Dom, an underemployed actor who is miles away at the cafe where he works as a barista in between auditions. So “Tilt” becomes a vision quest across the wrecked, smoking city, interspersed with flashbacks to Annie’s failed attempt at art school in New York, her too-brief career as a playwright, her insolvent but mostly happy life with Dom and the open wound of losing her mother, who went to bed one night in the early days of Covid and never woke up. Pattee writes about the contours of a natural disaster in distressingly real minute-to-minute detail (she previously worked as a climate journalist). But the better part of the novel — which is entirely addressed to Annie’s fetus, whom she calls Bean — unrolls as an alternately tender and profane monologue about the choices that have led Annie to a life she both cherishes and resents. She’s like Odysseus in an ill-fitting lavender maternity romper, crossing great landscapes of hardship and memory with one holy, imperfect goal: getting home. Read if you like: Seismographs, Ali Wong, Rumaan Alam’s “Leave the World Behind.” We hope you’ve enjoyed this newsletter, which is made possible through subscriber support. Subscribe to The New York Times. Friendly reminder: Check your local library for books! Many libraries allow you to reserve copies online. Like this email? Sign-up here or forward it to your friends. Have a suggestion or two on how we can improve it? Let us know at books@nytimes.com. Plunge further into books at The New York Times or our reading recommendations.
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