The cover of Hello America, showing buildings buried in sand

I’ve only ever known J.G. Ballard through Empire of the Sun - a brutal account of internment in a Japanese camp during WWII.

Hello America couldn’t be more different. 100 years in the future and the US has long been abandoned to climate change and oil depletion. Now a group of European-American explorers has reached, and is exploring the continent.

Naturally, the US isn’t as abandoned as every thought.

The reads like a later entry into the Fallout series of video games when played on survival difficulty - and that’s not a bad thing. It combines survival desperation with silliness, and the joy of discovering present-day relics in a new context. There are empty deserts, mad roboticists, tribal identities based on stockbrokers, gangsters, gays, pirates, and divorcees.

In addition to extreme desertification, climate change has brought about some very odd local climate phenomena, such as a verdant jungle surrounding Las Vegas.

There are some odd similarities with the real world in the 2020s. Most notable is that the 45th POTUS is a racist germaphobe whose obsession and professed goal is to “Make America Great Again.”

The book was published in 1981.