The Drowned World

“Soon it would be too hot.”

The opening line of The Drowned World blends the macro and micro scales of the situation. Changes to the climate have wreaked havoc, and the planet has become fatally warm. Soon, Kerans knows, the heating planet will be too hot to accommodate human life. In this specific spot, too, he will soon find the environment heating too rapidly for comfort. Kerans and humanity are both caught in a rapidly escalating mortality in which everything, inevitably, will become “too hot” in every conceivable way.

“Perhaps the specialists at Camp Byrd were too tired even to laugh.”

Kerans and Bodkin feel as though their work is unappreciated. They have inserted deliberate absurdities into their reports, and no one noticed, proving that no one is reading these reports. Every institution in this rapidly deteriorating society is exhausted and broken, to the point where everyone is too tired even to laugh at the grim joke that society has become.

“Once again they were the dominant form of life.”

Kerans is a scientist, and he knows that many millions of years ago, reptiles were once the dominant form of life on Earth. Now, rising temperatures and the consequent decline of humanity have reasserted reptilian control of the world. In Kerans’s view, this is part of a very long cycle; one day, humans and mammals may be back on top, but Kerans will be long dead by that time.