Hello America
An expedition crosses an abandoned, desertified America a century after its collapse, and finds what has grown there.
Ballard’s 1981 novel. A century after economic collapse and climate engineering emptied the continent, an expedition sails from Europe to a United States buried under desert and jungle, mapping the ruins from Manhattan to the West Coast. What they find is not emptiness but improvised tribes living inside the fragments of American myth, and, in Las Vegas, a self-declared President Manson with a nuclear arsenal. Ballard plays the whole thing as picaresque comedy, letting the imagery of twentieth-century America decay into a landscape his explorers can only read as a dream.
Recommended by 1 Person
John Gray
The ideas it puts forward are presented in the context of an adventure story, of a group of Europeans who explore this almost abandoned continent and come across various groups and tribes who live in the ruins or jungles. JG Ballard himself lived through what might be called an apocalypse – that is, the collapse of life in Shanghai under Japan [in the Second World War] and his subsequent internment in a camp.
Interview · March 2012
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