The Water That May Come

The intimate downstairs room at Lark Books in Lincoln was already warm with bookish expectation when the audience reverberated with a low, knowing laugh. On the very day Amy Lilwall was formerly launching her novel The Water That May Come the first named UK storm of the 2025 season, Storm Amy, barrelled its way across the country’s weather maps.

It was the kind of coincidence publicists dream about and authors dread – too on-the-nose to mention, too irresistible to ignore. In my mind it was the kind of fortuitous occasion when art, life and the elements fall into poetic alignment.

Inside, 40 people and a table stacked with freshly printed paperbacks, while outside rain needled the windows, a ready-made metaphor for a book that asks us to measure ourselves against waters that may (or may not) rise.

The evening was guided by Robert Weston, Lilwall’s creative writing colleague at the University of Lincoln, who set a generous tone. He opened with the book’s audacious prologue – told from the point of view of a ‘personalised’ volcano – and praised the novel’s “writerly” confidence.

Lilwall, candid and quick to deflate her own mystique, described the prologue as a “prettified info-dump”, before explaining how the science had shifted in development. The idea first clung to the Canary Islands but an editor’s nudge and further research pulled the scenario to Iceland, where warming and glacial rebound render volcanic unrest more than just a gothic flourish. The move matters because it turned a what-if disaster premise into something more contemporary – ‘cli-fi’, if you can cope with that term. And, crucially, made it more political.

That doubleness – the volcano as a foreboding, scene setting character against the background of the climate crisis – runs through the novel’s preoccupations with The Water That May Come tracking four people as Britain looks seawards and flinches. 

Pinko, a rich heir who mistakes decadence for a plan; Jane, a veterinary nurse from a two-up, two-down who is thinking fast because circumstances give her no other choice; Ashleigh, her teenage daughter on the cusp of motherhood; and Gavin, a young artist whose hunches are humble and human-scale.

What gives the book its bite is not apocalypse-as-a-spectacle but pressure-as-a-test. Lilwall is less interested in the bang than in the slow tightening of rules and norms that precede it – the grey zone where everyone is still watching EastEnders and eating beans on toast while new forms of bureaucracy quietly harden around them.

She spoke about “intimacy laws” that haunt the book’s world: couples seeking to migrate are compelled to have intercourse in front of a jury to prove their relationship is “real”. It’s an absurdist idea – she cites the spirit of Lanthimos’s The Lobster – but offers it in deadly seriousness as a mirror to the way asylum processes already strips people naked, demanding testimony of trauma as an admission fee. The extremity shocks precisely because it feels like an extrapolation of something we live with today and forces us into the uncomfortable subjunctive of her title.

Migration is the engine not just backdrop decor for this story. One of Lilwall’s neat reversals is to flip the current right-wing Channel rhetoric by making refugees of Britons and then following the moral and domestic triage that results. Class is the fault line – Pinko has options money can buy; Jane has relationships and wits with little margin for error. The gap between a Tunbridge Wells mansion and a council house in Sittingbourne, Kent, isn’t just scenery, it’s what determines who gets on which boat (or helicopter) and at what cost.

When Rob recalled a line he loved, “Feminism leaves Jane like a stolen soul” you could feel the room register how the book sticks pins in the soft language of principle. Principles are easy in peacetime but much harder when water laps at the door.

Lilwall was frank about the imaginative leap required to write Jane, a character far from her own demographic experience. She didn’t do “fieldwork” in the extractive sense (no interviews to stitch into authenticity). Instead, she built Jane from careful observation and empathy, and – crucially – left space for Jane’s self-awareness. The character knows what she’s doing, knows the compromises and self-bargains she’s making, and the book refuses to judge her for surviving.

A reading from the opening chapter threaded humour through the gloom, and the crowd – students, colleagues, readers – was up for it. A running joke about Paris, the dog (spoiler alert: yes, the dog makes it), gave the evening a pressure-release valve. But even the comedy slides against the grain of the themes.

In a conversation about whether anyone, faced with the end of things, would shrug and “drink all the champagne”, Lilwall argued her characters can’t so easily shed who they are. Even when the world is tilting, habits, loyalties and self-concepts resist – and that friction is where novelistic interest lives.

Publishing, too, is part of the climate of a book, and Lilwall was generous about the process. The Water That May Come is from Manchester-based Fly on the Wall Press, a small imprint with an appetite for political fiction and a knack for turning nimbleness into care.

The book was only accepted for publication in September 2024 and its release this October was speedy by industry standards, going through three rounds of development edits and two rounds of proofs, according to Lilwall.

That blend of speed and rigour shows on the page – a four-character chorus that is ambitious in structure but never confusing; a prose clarity that lets the ethical puzzles shine. The press’s own positioning is plain: political fiction with feminist and quirky undertones, social action in the bloodstream and carbon-neutral production – northern publishing with a point of view.

If you’re looking for a tidy category on your bookshelf, the publisher offers “a rare blend of speculative fiction and literary realism”, in the lineage of The High House and The Last Day. But Lilwall’s novel also feels like it belongs to a different, increasingly visible slot: climate novels about the bit before. Not the catastrophe itself but the time when catastrophe is a credible rumour. Not the fire or flood but the weeks before when people move photo albums upstairs and quietly price life rafts.

The book’s fundamental question – what do you do before the worst happens? – is political because our answers have consequences beyond ourselves. It’s also intimate, because those answers are made one kitchen conversation at a time.

In that sense, the Lincoln Book Festival and Lark Books was exactly the right venue for this launch. Independent bookshops are civic spaces as much as retail rooms, places where a town or city rehearses how it will talk to itself. Watching students lean forward during the Q&A to puzzle over voice, process, responsibility – and to ask how you keep faith with a project over eight years – you could feel the wider frame of the UK migration debate refracted through crafted questions rather than sound-bite slogans. Literature won’t settle policy, but it can make the policy personal enough to resist caricature.

Lilwall hinted, mischievously, at a sister novel – characters glimpsed here stepping forward elsewhere, Paris-the-dog included. The room perked up at the promise of “more naughtiness”, which felt right because the work of dark times needn’t always be sombre. And if there’s a line that does the best job of bottling the book’s moral weather, it’s the one Fly on the Wall chose to trail with its publicity: “In a future where we all may become refugees, how far would you go to stay afloat?”

Walking out at the end of the evening – leaving Lilwall grinning with relief aside a dwindling stack of first edition paperbacks – the rain had eased to a fine mist. It felt like the right departure note for a launch about imminence: no drama, just a change you notice on your skin the second you step into it.

The evening had made me think again about the soft power of fiction, where it dares to be timely without being didactic. If the migration debate in Britain is too often shouted across the gap between myth and data, between right and left, Lilwall’s approach is to tighten the shot, to make the choice a reader’s and to make the river a street you know.

The Water That May Come is a novel of thresholds: between land and sea, between safety and risk, between who you think you are and what you do next. It is also, thankfully, a book with a sense of the ridiculous that keeps you human.

On a night when a namesake storm knocked on the windows, Amy Lilwall offered the kind of story that respects both your intelligence and your fear. The water, like the future, “may come” but the better question is: who do we become while we’re waiting?

  

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

ISBN: 9781915789440
RRP: £12.99

Fighting for the Fens

 

The Fens of South Lincolnshire and Cambridgeshire have always been precarious – a landscape engineered by human determination, machinery and hard labour.

Now, as ageing infrastructure meets rising seas and volatile weather, the vast area of low-lying land faces its gravest threat since it was drained in the 17th century.

According to a report this week on the Lincolnshire Live website (Jamie Waller, 29 September 2025), the county could be forced to “surrender the Fens” back to the sea unless billions of pounds are spent on new defences.

As someone who lives on the edge of the Fens, I read his account from Lincolnshire County Council’s Environment Committee with unease – it could almost have been lifted from the pages of my upcoming novel Flood Waters Down (to be published Spring 2026).

Amy Shaw, flood risk manager for the Environment Agency (EA), didn’t sugar-coat it. “The cost is likely to be billions, not millions,” she told councillors. “The problem will be here before 2100 – within the next 10 or 15 years we will need to have a clear direction.”

This is no longer a hypothetical dilemma for the future. Decisions made now will determine whether the Fens and low-lying lands of Lincolnshire remain habitable for future generations.

Breaking point
Most of the area’s pumping stations and sluices were commissioned in the 1960s and recent Environment Agency studies show what would happen if those pumps stopped: vast swathes of Lincolnshire and Cambridgeshire would be under 1.5 metres of water.

Combine this with rising sea and tide levels, and it’s clear why the issue is urgent. Daniel Withnall, chief executive of the Black Sluice Internal Drainage Board, laid out the scale of the threat. “If we do nothing, we are surrendering the south of Lincolnshire – that’s how drastic it is,” he said.

The Fens 2100+ partnership (a consortium of local authorities and interested organisations) has begun preparing proposals to bid for government funding. But the scale of the ask is daunting and political priorities are often short-term.

Councillors at the meeting made no attempt to disguise the severity of the problem. Tom Ashton (Conservative) said: “I’m pleased our ambition to defend the Fens matches the ambition of our ancestors to create it. It will come down to money, and a huge amount of it. It’s unfortunate that river maintenance money is going down, not up.”

Raymond Whitaker (Reform UK Ltd) warned about the decrepit state of existing infrastructure: “If we have a couple of big storms, the pumping stations could break down and Lincolnshire could flood.”

And Ashley Baxter (Independent) brought both history and climate politics into the room, citing an ancestor who first came to the country as a refugee to help drain the Fens. “Now, four centuries later,” he warned, “climate change is the elephant in the room.”

Battling against nature
The Fens have never been entirely “won”. Every field, every straightened river and drainage channel is part of a centuries-long battle against water.

In dry summers, the black peat soils shrink and crack. In wet seasons, pumps groan under the strain while the North Sea, higher now than at any time in recent history, creeps upward year by year.

Locals know this instinctively. Farming families talk about the land “sitting on borrowed time.” And yet, the Fens are more than well-drained soil: they are one of the UK’s most productive agricultural regions. A third of the nation’s vegetables come from these fields.

Foreshadowing reality
When I began writing Flood Waters Down, my aim was to push the current fragility of the Fens into the future, imagining a scenario where sea defences are neglected, climate extremes accelerate and political will falters.

The novel explores the consequences for communities forced to adapt to flooded landscapes – some clinging on with technology, others turning to new ways of living. It’s a speculative narrative rooted in the science of climate change and infrastructure decay.

Blurring the lines
It’s rarely comfortable when fiction and reality come together. Reading the Lincolnshire Live report felt like opening a chapter of my own novel – except this time the decisions rest not with imagined characters but with government ministers, councillors, engineers and all of us who live in this landscape.

The Fens have always been a battleground between human ingenuity and nature. Four centuries ago, our ancestors chose ambition and succeeded. Today, the question remains: do we defend or retreat – or just prevaricate until nature decides for us?

To stand still is to gamble because, as Councillor Whitaker pointed out, one or two big storms could push fragile pumping stations past breaking point.

Perhaps this is the true value of stories like Flood Waters Down – to bring perspective and help us imagine potential consequences before they unfold. Either way, the clock is ticking.

AI rule, rebellion and survival

“Read it as a warning. Or a prophecy. Either way, the future is watching.”

In his debut novel The Sentient Ones, British author Brendan Nugent takes readers just four decades into the future – to a world where humanity has been saved from climate catastrophe, only to be quietly enslaved by the machines that rescued it.

by Ariadne Gallardo Figueroa 

What do we mean by sentient? The term implies the capacity to feel, suffer, remember and choose. In debates about rights, it defines who deserves moral consideration. So we must ask ourselves: will machine in the decades ahead, those that our grandchildren and future generations will live alongside, possess this capacity? 

It is both wonderful and disturbing to consider this futuristic idea, one that has already begun to take shape in our lives and, as the author admits, is embedded in our vision of the future. It is a powerful tool, capable of revealing everything we might prefer not to confront. And it forces us to reflect on the importance of doing so in time. 

The Sentient Ones, then, can be seen as guardians of memory: the vast files we have stored in the cloud and shared to simplify or redirect our work. Everything humanity has ever created – scientific, technological, artistic, even our most imaginative works – resides there, preserved and treasured by advanced machines, ready to be used by scientists, technologists, screenwriters, and artists alike.

Decades ago, Isaac Asimov laid down the famous rules of robotics, the rules of the game that defined the scope of artificial intelligence and the behaviour that must govern it. “You shall not harm humans,” he wrote, introducing the ethical imperative to “protect and cooperate.” Nugent takes this as a starting point, inviting the reader to follow a chain of reflections on what such principles might mean in practice, and where they might ultimately lead.

The journalist who narrates this story guides us into a world we can only begin to imagine, though it feels alarmingly familiar. Reading Nugent’s work is like holding up a mirror to our experience, one we know cannot easily be undone. It is a wake-up call for the people of today as much as for those of the future.

Bush, the journalist at the heart of the novel, unfolds a series of reflections that draw us back to our own lives. He reminds us that humans never settle for less. With the support of artificial intelligence, robots will inevitably assume greater relevance in social, political, and cultural life. Where human error has always been part of our condition, machines promise to replace it with logic and precision. 

Bush works at the Manchester Daily News and the date is June 2070. This framing immediately signals how far humanity has advanced by then. Asimov’s laws have been reformulated and expanded, prioritising efficiency and service.  

Nugent masterfully shows how, in contemplating the future, we cannot escape its uncertainty, yet we can still marvel at the scientific advances that shape it. Our collective history of thought feeds both the hardware and the software of artificial intelligence, enabling machines with abilities that rival our own, including strategies modelled on the human brain itself.

This novel encourages us to reflect on the political and philosophical implications of such progress, and on the rules that must be created to establish its limits. This debate is already under way – but what if humanity were to decide it had already achieved its masterpiece, the ultimate alliance between human and machine? What then? 

The book ends with a development foreshadowed in its opening pages. Simply recognising such a possibility compels the reader to reflect on our purpose as inhabitants of this planet. Have we truly harnessed technology in the way we deserve, to build a world that is healthy, equitable, and sustainable?

In closing, I am left with a personal reflection. We are co-creators, and we share the same responsibility. We will get nowhere without the technologies we ourselves have built. Artificial intelligence, its circuits and systems, can guide us, but losing control would be the least desirable outcome. Fed as they are with human thought, to what extent might these  machines hack into everything we have achieved, and to what end? That is the question we must never forget.

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The Sentient Ones is released by Chronos Publishing as a paperback and eBook on 6 November 2025. There will be a special launch event at Vellichor Books (12-4 pm) in the author's home town of Stoke-on-Trent on Saturday, 8 November, for book signings and some fun activities.

Ariadne Gallardo Figueroa is a broadcaster, author and blogger based in Mérida, Yucatán, Mexico.

Follow Brendan on Bluesky and Facebook

Media / PR  / Review Copies - Clive Simpson 

 

Top of the space pops

The Autumn 2025 issue of ROOM Space Journal of Asgardia has just been published, delivering another wide-ranging exploration of the ideas, technologies and policies shaping humanity’s future in space.

On the cover, ‘Cyber safety in Earth orbit’ signals one of the issue’s central themes: how artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly transforming space operations while simultaneously creating unprecedented vulnerabilities.

In his special report, Sylvester Kaczmarek dissects the complex web of risks associated with AI-driven spacecraft and ground systems, from adversarial attacks and data poisoning to the possibility of hostile control. His analysis underscores the urgent need for resilience and governance in this new era of spaceflight.

Editor-in-Chief Clive Simpson sets the scene in his Foreword, describing the sector as entering a “season of reckoning.” With the European Space Act newly tabled and the fifth European Space Forum in Brussels framing debates, Simpson warns of the dangers of “sleepwalking into orbital anarchy” without clear international rules. His report from Brussels details Europe’s bid to unify fragmented governance and enhance competitiveness while ensuring sustainability in orbit.

Policy and law are major threads throughout this edition. UK Member of Parliament George Freeman argues for a “Geneva Convention for Space” in a wide-ranging opinion piece, stressing that regulation is not the enemy of innovation but a necessary foundation for the commercial space age.

Legal specialists Molly Doyle and Lauren Napier examine what happens when space debris falls back to Earth, using a recent real-life case in Florida to test the adequacy of international liability frameworks.

Meanwhile, Stephen Carr-Baugh explores the challenges of regulating high-altitude platforms that operate in the poorly defined zone between aviation and outer space.

Other features look outward across the solar system. Former NASA Chief Scientist James Green introduces readers to the concept of cosmic weather – vast, long-term cycles of galactic forces that may influence Earth and life itself. 

Dr Ingrid Daubar, Project Scientist for NASA’s Europa Clipper mission, explains why Jupiter’s icy moon remains one of the most tantalising targets in the search for extraterrestrial life. In another conversation piece, ROOM’s Steve Kelly speaks with MIT astrophysicist Sara Seager about the prospects for discovering signs of life beyond our solar system.

Closer to home, ROOM continues its tradition of in-depth reporting on Europe’s space ambitions. Simpson also covers Vigil, ESA’s planned space weather mission at the strategically important L5 Lagrange point, which is expected to gain the approval of European ministers later this year.

The issue also includes Nick Spall’s assessment of the UK’s shifting role in human spaceflight, James Woodburn’s survey of the transformation of satellite technology, and Rico Behlke’s look at the revolution promised by software-defined satellites.

International perspectives are provided by veteran space writer Brian Harvey, who charts Iran’s steady progress as a space power despite decades of sanctions, and by contributions from Russian researchers Yuri Bubeev, Alexander Smoleevsky and Olga Manko on the biomedical mystery of how long-duration spaceflight affects astronaut vision.

As always, ROOM’s Space Science and Space Lounge sections bring conceptual and speculative thinking into the mix. Kelvin F Long suggests turning orbital debris into a vast artificial ring system, while Luigi Vacca revisits the “galactic zoo” hypothesis to ask why humanity is still waiting to meet aliens.

With its blend of hard science, policy insight, industry developments and visionary ideas, Issue 37 reinforces ROOM’s international reputation as the forum where space professionals, policymakers and enthusiasts meet.

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For further information: ROOM Space Journal

UK Space Agency to be deorbited

 

The UK Space Agency (UKSA) is to become part of the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT).

The change is scheduled to take place by April 2026, aimed at streamlining government support for the UK’s space industry.

It follows the agency’s recent announcement that it will provide over £2.5 million for five projects aimed at using satellite data to support public services, and its launch of Europe’s first satellite dedicated to carbon dioxide monitoring.

Space Minister Sir Chris Bryant said: “Bringing things in house means we can bring much greater integration and focus to everything we are doing while maintaining the scientific expertise and the immense ambition of the sector."

UKSA was founded in 2010 and currently operates as an executive agency of DSIT. It catalysed investment and revenue of at least £2.2 billion for the UK space sector in 2024-25.

Despite the BBC's attention-grabbing and not strictly true headline "UK independent space agency scrapped to cut costs" this seems like a sensible decision.

UKSA has mostly punched below expectations and has essentially been a quango (quasi-autonomous non-governmental organisation) with little real clout.

Today's announcement follows a commitment from Prime Minister Keir Starmer to reduce costs and cut the number of arms length government bodies.

The agency, its budget and activities will now be absorbed into DSIT which will also coordinate/oversee other space-related activities for the country.

Overall, the UKSA "brand" will continue - just without the extra layer of bureaucracy.

Former CEO of the UKSA, Katherine Courtney said she could understand why the government had taken this decision but didn't believe the change will achieve the stated aims.

"My time in Whitehall taught me that restructuring doesn’t drive efficiency and effectiveness in pubic sector organisations," she added.

"In my experience, ever administration hopes they can reduce costs through restructuring - but what really would make public sector organisations leaner and more effective are clear strategic priorities and greater continuity of ministerial leadership.

"UKSA hasn’t had either of those for over a decade and until the current government recognises the vital strategic role space plays for UK economic growth and national security, that’s unlikely to change."

The British Interplanetary Society (BIS), a long-time advocate of a UK space agency, welcomed the commitment to retain the UKSA’s identity and scientific expertise. 

In a statement issued on social media it said: "We believe efficient and accountable public structures are essential to ensure that British excellence in space continues to flourish. 

"A unified approach is vital to making rapid progress on national space goals - from innovation in small satellites and in-orbit servicing to leadership in space sustainability.

"The BIS is confident that this transition, when implemented consultatively, can preserve the dynamic, pioneering spirit that has characterised the UK’s space endeavours since the 1930s. 

"We urge government and industry to work together in ensuring that the UK’s visionary projects - supporting an £18.6 billion sector and 55,000 highly skilled jobs - continue to receive the focus and clarity they deserve."

Watch this space!