The Day of Creation

The Day of Creation is a 1987 novel by British writer J. G. Ballard.

The Day of Creation
Cover of first edition (hardcover)
AuthorJ. G. Ballard
CountryUnited Kingdom
LanguageEnglish
GenreThriller
PublisherVictor Gollancz Ltd
Publication date
1987
Media typePrint (Hardcover & Paperback)
Pages254 pp
ISBN0-575-04152-8
OCLC17918501
823/.914 19
LC ClassPR6052.A46 D38 1987

Plot summary

The main character of the novel is the World Health Organization doctor John Mallory[1] who, six months after his arrival in Central Africa, finds that intense guerrilla activity has left him without patients. He devotes himself, instead, to the task of bringing water to the region, with dreams of setting the Sahara in flower. When he accidentally manages to achieve his task by creating a river,[2] he becomes prey of an increasingly delirious spiral of fantasies, starting to identify himself with the new river that he has dubbed "Mallory". Obsessed, he decides to go up the river in order to "kill" its source, together with a teenaged African girl, whom he considers a sort of spirit of the waters, and other characters including a half-blind British documentary filmmaker and two ruthless local chieftains trying to take advantage of the new prosperity brought by the water.

gollark: There aren't that many alternatives.
gollark: Personally, my suggested climate-change-handling policies:- massively scale up nuclear fission power, it's just great in most ways- invest in better rail infrastructure - maglevs are extremely cool™ and fast™ and could maybe partly replace planes?- electric cars could be rented from a local "pool" for intra-city transport, which would save a lot of cost on batteries- increase grid interconnectivity so renewables might be less spotty- impose taxes on particularly badly polluting things- do research into geoengineering things which can keep the temperature from going up as much- increase standards for reparability; we lose so many resources to randomly throwing stuff away because they're designed with planned obsolecence- a very specific thing related to that bit above there - PoE/other low-voltage power grids in homes, since centralizing all the AC→DC conversion circuitry could improve efficiency, lower costs of end-user devices, and make LED lightbulbs less likely to fail (currently some of them include dirt-cheap PSUs which have all *kinds* of problems)
gollark: You can get AR-ish things which just display notifications or something.
gollark: You can get limited AR glasses (nice ones you may want to actually wear as everyday ones) now, but it's expensive and not popular.
gollark: Yes, that might be interesting.

References
  1. "JG Ballard Interviewed by Michelle Field about Day of Creation". www.jgballard.ca.
  2. "Authors : Ballard, J G : SFE : Science Fiction Encyclopedia". www.sf-encyclopedia.com.
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