The Day of Creation

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The Day of Creation
Cover of first edition (hardcover)
Author	J. G. Ballard
Country	United Kingdom
Language	English
Genre(s)	Novel
Publisher	Victor Gollancz Ltd
Publication date	1987
Media type	Print (Hardcover & Paperback)
Pages	254 pp
ISBN	ISBN 0-575-04152-8

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

[edit] Plot summary

The main character of the novel is the World Health Organization doctor John Mallory who, six months after his arrival in Central Africa, finds that intense guerilla 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, 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 film-maker and two ruthless local chieftains trying to take advantage of the new prosperity brought by the water.

The conclusion of this feverish odyssey might be compared to Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness

[edit] External links

• The Terminal Collection: JG Ballard First Editions

v • d • e Works by J. G. Ballard Novels: 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) Short stories: "The Voices of Time" (1960) • "The Recognition" (1967) • "Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan" (1968) Short story collections: The Voices of Time and Other Stories (1962) • Billennium (1962) • Passport to Eternity (1963) • The Four-Dimensional Nightmare (1963) • The Terminal Beach (1964) • The Impossible Man (1966) • The Venus Hunters (1967) • 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) • 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 (2001) Essays & reviews A User's Guide to the Millennium (1996) • Miracles of Life (2008)