Hello America is a science fiction novel by J. G. Ballard, first published in 1981. The plot follows an expedition to a North America rendered uninhabitable by an ecological disaster. Ballard's 9th novel is set in the year 2114 AD, several generations after an ecological collapse has rendered North America virtually unlivable. Most of the population was evacuated to Europe and Asia. The bulk of the novel takes place when a European steamship, the SS Apollo, sails to America to try to discover the cause of increased radioactive fallout in England. In typical Ballardian fashion, each of the... crew members has a secret agenda, and is basically a pawn of their own psychological yearnings, whether for destruction or glory. Most of the Apollo's crew are descended from expatriate Americans - the protagonist is a young man who grew up in the American Ghetto in Dublin, for instance - and have become mostly assimilated into European society, but still feel some vague draw to the abandoned continent to the west. In the novel, the Soviet Union dammed the Bering Strait in the 1990s, thus changing global weather patterns by reversing the normally clockwise currents in the Pacific Ocean.
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| Author: | J. G. Ballard |
| Genre: | Dystopia, Science Fiction, Speculative fiction |
| Year published: | 1981 |
| Number of editions: | 6 |