J.G. Ballard, The Drowned World

Not what I expected from a novel about an Earth whose waters have risen catastrophically as a result of climate change, but if I'd thought more carefully about other 60s environmental SF (like Frank Herbert's The Green Brain, or Brian Aldiss' Hothouse), I would've been more prepared for J.G. Ballard's 1962 The Drowned World.

It's enthralling, this novel. The basic setup is that in 2145, the planet is down to about 5 million humans, all of them clustered around the poles, and the middle latitudes are being aggressively overgrown by gymnosperms (like 60-foot-tall horse-tails, not conifers), reptiles (particularly giant iguanas), and insects (also giant). This was all triggered by a series of violent solar storms in the late years of the 21st century, so the question is whether humans have a future.

Our characters are on a UN mission in London, at the end of a slow survey expedition that has covered several cities. The protagonist, Dr. Kerans, is nominally a scientist, but his sense of purpose has mostly faded. In London, he spends much of his time with one of the city's last holdouts, a woman named Beatrice who's a bit fin de siècle, in a classical sense. There's no romance plot, exactly, because it's the end of the world, and the novel's various rough-and-ready male characters let her live her life (more or less), and so you really do get a sense that the world's so far gone that humans are past all the standard pointlessness.

As climate fiction goes, this is more horror than dystopia, and in that it reminded me of On the Beach. For all his unspoken despair at the point of science and the chance of humanity's survival, Kerans has an intense sense of mission. It doesn't align with humanity's interests, or at least not the historic version of humanity and human culture that the destruction of the Van Allen belts has put on a path toward likely extinction, but... well, you'll just have to read it, won't you?