Melting speculative fiction

With all of the talk lately, I wondered about melting polar ice caps in Speculative Fiction. Sure, in Hollywood we had Waterworld -- the result of earth's glacial liquefaction making Mt. Everest a tropical island. But what about other stories?

Professor R.T. Pierrehumbert published this PDF document on the subject. The most intriguing lead to a speculative fiction piece featuring a melted-ice earth he mentions is J.G. Ballard's The Drowned World. Book reviewer Victoria Strauss published this in her thoughts on the novel:

"The Drowned World posits (presciently, as it turns out) that the world has been overwhelmed by a catastrophic greenhouse effect. It differs from our own impending disaster in that it's natural rather than man-made. In Ballard's scenario, violent solar storms have depleted the outer layers of Earth's ionosphere; as these vanish, temperature and solar radiation begin to climb, melting the polar ice-caps. This enormous outflow of water carries with it tons of topsoil, damming up the oceans and entirely changing the contours of the continents, drowning some parts of the world and landlocking others. At the same time, the increased radiation produces freak mutations in Earth's flora and fauna, initiating a new biological era reminiscent of the Triassic period, in which reptiles and giant tropical plants were the dominant forms of life."

I thank Ms. Strauss for the commentary...she makes Mr. Ballard's book sound like an interesting read. One comment: she mentions "our own impending disaster" and she wrote the review back in the year 2000 -- before hurricane Katrina and prior to the international majority opinion that global warming is a valid concern. Perhaps its Ms. Strauss who's a little prescient.

So, back to speculative fiction. One might say that there's not a large body of work centered around an earth scenario where the ice caps have melted. The worlds of robotics, space exploration, alien life forms and other futuristic technologies have gotten lots of attention by writers. Perhaps they're the most inspiring subjects to date. I'll venture a guess, however, that we'll start seeing more fiction featuring an earth facing an onslaught of meteorological mayhem and H2O in places where it's scarce today. As a matter of fact, I'm personally getting some good ideas for a story. Hmmm, time to get writing.