The Burning World (novel)

The Burning World is a 1964 science fiction novel by British writer J. G. Ballard. An expanded version, retitled The Drought, was published in 1965 by Jonathan Cape.

The novel depicts a global, human-caused drought in which industrial waste forms a thin film on the oceans, impeding evaporation and disrupting the water cycle, and follows Dr Charles Ransom as social order fragments and displaced communities reorganize around scarcity.

Critics and reference sources often discuss the book within Ballard's early catastrophe fiction and his 1960s "climate novels," emphasizing its focus on psychological disturbance, altered perception, and social isolation under environmental pressure.

Reception has described the novel in visionary or hallucinatory terms, while also noting that Ballard's catastrophe novels divided opinion.