The Day of Creation
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The Day of Creation is a 1987 novel by British writer J. G. Ballard.
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,[3] 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.
References
External links
- The Terminal Collection: JG Ballard First Editions, 1985-1990 (jgballard.ca)
- v
- t
- e
- The Wind from Nowhere (1961)
- The Drowned World (1962)
- The Burning World (1964)
- The Crystal World (1966)
- The Atrocity Exhibition (1969)
- Crash (1973)
- Concrete Island (1974)
- High-Rise (1975)
- The Unlimited Dream Company (1979)
- Hello America (1981)
- Empire of the Sun (1984)
- The Day of Creation (1987)
- Running Wild (1988)
- The Kindness of Women (1991)
- Rushing to Paradise (1994)
- Cocaine Nights (1996)
- Super-Cannes (2000)
- Millennium People (2003)
- Kingdom Come (2006)
- "Mobile" (1957)
- "The Concentration City" (1957)
- "Track 12" (1958)
- "Zone of Terror" (1960)
- "The Sound-Sweep" (1960)
- "The Voices of Time" (1960)
- "Chronopolis" (1960)
- "Studio 5, The Stars" (1961)
- "Deep End" (1961)
- "Mr F. is Mr F." (1961)
- "Billennium" (1962)
- "Minus One" (1963)
- "The Recognition" (1967)
- " The Day of Forever" (1967)
- "Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan" (1968)
- "Venus Smiles" (1971)
collections
- The Voices of Time and Other Stories (1962)
- Billennium (1962)
- Passport to Eternity (1963)
- The 4-Dimensional Nightmare (1963)
- The Terminal Beach (1964)
- The Impossible Man (1966)
- The Overloaded Man (1967)
- The Disaster Area (1967)
- The Day of Forever (1967)
- Vermilion Sands (1971)
- Chronopolis and Other Stories (1971)
- Low-Flying Aircraft and Other Stories (1976)
- The Best of J. G. Ballard (1977)
- The Best Short Stories of J. G. Ballard (1978)
- The Venus Hunters (1980)
- Myths of the Near Future (1982)
- The Voices of Time (1985)
- Memories of the Space Age (1988)
- War Fever (1990)
- The Complete Short Stories of J. G. Ballard: Volume 1 (2006)
- The Complete Short Stories of J. G. Ballard: Volume 2 (2006)
and interviews
- A User's Guide to the Millennium (1996)
- Extreme Metaphors (2012)
- Miracles of Life (2008)
- When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth (1970)
- Crash! (1971)
- Empire of the Sun (1987)
- Crash (1996)
- The Atrocity Exhibition (1998)
- Low-Flying Aircraft (2002)
- High-Rise (2015)