2025 Reading Challenge 14 The Drought
I picked this book because I knew I’d be running Cosmic Dark, the soon-to-be-released TTRPG from Graham Walmsley. Graham had mentioned that he’d been influenced in writing this scenario by reading a lot of J. G. Ballard. So I picked this off the shelf, a welcome Help the Aged purchase!
The story follows Doctor Charles Ransom, who is an archetypical “cool observer”, and the eyes with which you view what is happening to this outcome of Earth. In summary, a vast chemical spill into the oceans prevents evaporation, and therefore, rain no longer falls. Water is fast disappearing.
You follow Ransom as he performs his daily tasks and interacts with various characters: a bible bashing leader, his ex-wife, a mad old woman and her deformed son. Ransom is much a static figure of inaction, thinking and observing, only rarely being forced into doing something.
The book shows how desperate life has become, and eventually, Ransom, one of the last, decides to head to the coast. It’s a grim journey, showing how society is collapsing and turning on itself. I loved the descriptions of the oceans turned into massive salt flats, reminds me of Chott el Djerid in Tunisia, endless cracked surfaces of white salt crust, sometimes filled with shallow briny water.
After trying and failing to work with Quinn, a semi-cult leader, Ransom and a few others decide to head inland, looking for a new source of water as suggested by the Lions!
Like Graham Greene and George Orwell, I found myself taken by Ballard’s writing style. Very clean and matter-of-fact, but it describes weird and odd situations and phenomena in a way that cements them in your mind. It perfectly suits the dreamlike, heat haze of this new world, even if much of the characters are presented through the eyes and internal monologue of Ransom, rather than through their own words.
I rated it 8.5 out of 10.
TTRPG Thoughts:
Some memorable passages describe a post-apocalyptic world. For example, you could steal the desertification weirdness wholesale, e.g. sand taking over the towns, with cars becoming tombs, digging down to find a vehicle that is unpopulated, to then become the coffin for the recently deceased.
There was also this excellent line to describe the ocean disappearing further and further out from the land: “The drained sea glimmered with quartz-like deposits, the bones of fish and molluscs like jewelery scattered across the crust.”
Did it put me in the right frame of mind to run Cosmic Dark? I would say yes, the scenario I ran, Every Sunrise, requires a certain amount of suspension of disbelief, where the weird, wonderful and surreal become commonplace.
As a GM presenting the oddities the players see with a cool, observational and emotionally reserved tone a la Ballard, perhaps helps to cast doubt into their minds - is this normal? Am I overreacting?
There is a lot to be said for immersing yourself in the literature that can then set the tone for a TTRPG session.