In its obituary for J. G. Ballard, the New Yorker uncorks the following line: “Ballard had already made a name for himself as a writer of science fiction that was short on technology—no robots, no spaceships—and so eerily prescient in its portrayal of global warming (floods, famines) that it can hardly be called fiction.”
Yes, floods and famines certainly are terrible these days, though I can’t remember exactly where, and I’m sure that they’re much worse now than ever, except that, in fact, they’re not, and despite the fact that, as Wikipedia notes, modern famines are uniformly the result of political decisions, not global warming. But the New Yorker never lets the truth get in the way of a moral.
